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 – Crónica
David Lee Myers, the composer of Reduced To A Geometrical Point, is quick to point out that he is not really a fan of “music for meditation”, although he has noticed that some audio constructions seem to encourage a position of staying in the moment. It is the simple truth of being “reduced to a geometric point in front of God”, a quote that harks back to the ideas of Frithjof Schuon, who in turn does not refer to a particular Judeo-Christian vision of a supreme being, but rather to any creative force of the universe, energy – in another word – which must necessarily exist. The sound and visual artist, resident in New York for many years, presents four pieces here, ranging in length from 12 to 18 minutes. He is an experienced experimentalist, with more than thirty releases to his name for labels such as Crónica, Starkland, Generator, ReR, Line, Silent, Pogus, RRRecords and Staalplaat, to name but a few. The overall effect of Myers’ hypnotic plots hark back to the tradition of North American repetitive minimalism, to that search for a pure sound that does not include a “before” and an “after” and that shuns overly rigid musical structures. The author thus clearly focuses on the “here and now”, on the simple event modelled in execution, on the essential vibrations and frequencies which, even if grandiose in some passages, never give the feeling of searching for deliberate elegiac models. It is a mass of sounds that moves slowly and the references to non-Western music are unavoidable, as in “GEO 1 Laurentia”, a special undulating and hoarse rāga, or in “GEO 2 Pannotia”, a spiritual track that seems to loop on itself. “GEO 3 Gondwana” is the darkest, most astral and at the same time most introverted track, before ending with “GEO 4 Pangaea”, again in the apotheosis of feedback, oscillator sets and multiprocessing. David Lee Myers once worked under the name Arcane Device and played as a guitarist in a rock band in the sixties. Later he was fascinated by feedback techniques, Frippertronics and the ambient music of Brian Eno. Here its application has reached an extreme rarefaction, marrying elegant minimalism with a contemplative approach.
David Lee Myers – Reduced To A Geometrical Point
