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.
Book + CD – 901 Editions
Gradual Small Fires (And A Bowl Of Resonant Milk) features five separate pieces by Steve Roden. The work was commissioned by the New Media School in the University of Hong Kong. The institute invited several artists to create site specific pieces for the opening of a new building designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind. The sounds Roden used were those of fires he recorded in both Denmark and California several years ago, combined with other audio samples such as bells, rocks, a guitar and various other unrecognisable elements – ambient noise, small electronic devices and other instruments. Everything has been well calibrated and manipulated – mostly using analogue guitar pedals. A sixth piece has also been added, the result of the same techniques, which will be used in the exhibition “Sound Art. Sound as a Medium Of Art” at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. Each of the compositions prepared for the new building in Hong Kong had been artfully associated with a specific coloured plexiglass structure. These sculptures were meticulously positioned in so as to occupy particularly discreet spaces of the building, evidently in order to heighten the visitor’s perception, provoking an immersive listening experience, making them participate in a physical, intellectual and perhaps even spiritual and communicative experience. The circular flow of sounds gives life to an exotic enchantment, a sort of dimensionless sphere in which sacredness and immaterial repetitions coexist, not exempt from a certain sense of disquiet, although for the most part they gentle coalesce to pervade the entire project. Alongside the CD there is also a 60-page A5 colour booklet, designed by Mote Studio in Berlin. The a publication features texts by Daniela Cascella, Michael Ned Holte and Roden himself, who is also responsible for a selection of drawings, the central theme of the book itself. Refined reverberations, ethereal modulations, faded crackles capture listening, modulating slow but effective combustions, which give life to dreamlike “places of fire”, in a gradual compositional process that owes a lot to the theories of Steve Reich and the tradition of North American minimalism.
Steve Roden – Gradual Small Fires (And A Bowl Of Resonant Milk)
