Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
The Neural Archive is a repository of publications collected by us during the years. Browse our collection here.
Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.
Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.
YesNo by Timo Kahlen feels like “traditional” net art, a well crafted stuck webpage for the user’s aural and clickable enjoyment.
The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”
Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400
GoPro ancestors in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly sport and movie persons like F1 driver Jackie Stewart, Bob Sinclair and Steve McQueen.
CD – Leaf
Murcof, aka Fernando Corona, returns to his debut label – the Leaf – for the first time in thirteen years, after The Versailles Sessions, the latest album in a full-bodied series of five extended format releases in the period from 2002 to 2008. In The Alias Sessions, the Mexican electronic composer combines many of the distinctive elements of his previous releases: a meticulous sound design, an incisive use of rhythm, the use of orchestral samples, and measured textures. All of these elements give life to suspended atmospheres, often enlivened by the mixture of classical and electronic sounds, drawing on the repertoire of the new minimalist tradition. It should be emphasised that this release springs from particular collaborations with the choreographer Guilherme Botelho, leader of the Geneva-based dance company Alias. Together they developed the choreographic project Contre-Mondes, which constitutes the first half of the album. The second half features work for Normal, a contemporary dance piece from 2018. Decisive electronic rhythms, synths and drones, are blended with orchestral sounds from violas, pianos, flutes, violins and harpsichords, favouring a cinematic narrative that complements the visionary scenography The latter is extremely detailed in terms of its use of bodies, illuminated and reduced to pure sections, sequences in motion, transfigured and acted out as essential formal suggestions. The lighting illuminates small fragments of the scene while the sounds follow, evoking shadows and suggestive spaces, harmonic suspensions and ethereal moments, with non-tonal elements often central to the composition. Organic and inorganic materials are balanced alongside acoustic and electronic elements. All these things together come to express the communicative power of the album. “I’m always looking for new, unheard-of sounds”, says Murcof, “to create strange associations and contrasts between sounds of a different nature”. The Alias Sessions are the demonstration that this research has precise aesthetic effects and that contemporary music can also be expressed without too many conceptual mediations, in the lyrical form of a direct beauty.
Murcof – The Alias Sessions
