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.
2CD – Editions Mego
How is it possible to decipher the most important auditory characteristics of a sound emission? During his career as a composer, Hecker has carried out several research projects. For this reason, in the past he used computer generated voices that mimicked the narrator’s voice, some synthetic voices that used deep neural networks, and also performed many synthetic articulations of the relationships between the textual content and the music. In Synopsis Seriation, he took his attention to sound a step further and reworked four multi-channel pieces from 2015. These pieces were analysed, decomposed and reconstructed using information geometry, a sub-genre of mathematics that includes subjects such as statistics and differential geometry. Here we must highlight the research of Vincent Lostanlen, a specialist in artificial intelligence to whom Hecker also refers in this project. A non-human brain-ear should therefore be the one to breathe life into the extensive corpus, a total of 2 CDs with more than 141 minutes of listening time. The release also includes a booklet where we can find some graphic representations of the analysis and manipulations of the sound during the composition process. It is difficult to say how much of this is due to the aesthetic inclinations of the author. At the same time, it is difficult to understand how certain parameters were set to achieve certain effects, or, to put it more directly, it is difficult to discern the boundary between what the “machine” did and what is the result of human application. How much does the analysis affect the audio content? Is it really possible, thanks to voice recognition techniques, to revise existing data automatically and produce new music? “Our auditory system is highly complex,” Lostanlen reminds us, “which requires the development of scientific protocols at different levels of abstraction: from closed physical models of sound synthesis to qualitative studies of musical interactions involving both humans and machines.” Synopsis Seriation, with its cuts, abstractions and basic glitch set, takes us back and forth between detailed audio samples, drones, distorted passages and cybernetic ideal worlds. It is the power of a transitional age like ours that once again tells us about the future and how much, for better or worse, what awaits us is surprisingly different from what we know today.
Hecker – Synopsis Seriation (Excerpt)
