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.
LP – BEMIS
In Languages as Art: Documentary History of Broadcasting: 1920-1950 Juanjosé Rivas uses techniques of appropriation, remixing and sampling to extrapolate the sounds and textual sources that form a new critical and auditory construct on the theme of language and power. Roland Barthes defined the “discourse of power” as “any discourse that gives rise to a sense of guilt”, and specified that the object in which “the power of every human eternity is inscribed is: language, or to be more precise, its obligatory expression: the tongue”. The art of language, Juanjosé Rivas emphasizes, could be a pleonasm or an aphorism that seeks to hide and embellish the powerful artifice of the word. “Language, speech and dialect tend to be seen as inferior: the mother tongue, a babble; native language; indigenous dialects. They all come before the fight, before the conquest, before the clash with power.” It is still an artifice of language that makes Rivas say that “this album does not correspond to any musical work, not even in its most experimental sense”, thus emphasizing an antagonistic, deconstructionist, playful and even combinatorial approach, which requires the listener to make contact physical with the work. There is a whole tradition, however, that reminds us how much this technique can be called musical in its own right: this is the ‘plunderphonics’ school founded by John Oswald, which makes sound editing the backbone of a musical project , without worrying that the sources used are recognisable. Language has always been one of the great ideological and governmental forces of every dictatorial regime, and the ability to unhinge every relationship that language creates expresses the possibility of a new and different way of observing, reworking and structuring things, what, in other words, we might call “our vision of the world”. In GROAR, Juanjosé Rivas displays great skill destroying, grasping for and playing with words, filling the pre-existing linguistic order with new connections, manipulating what can’t be erased: silences, spaces, whispers and rhythm, together with the sounds that he reformulates without disengaging from improvisation as the main resource.
Juanjosé Rivas – GROAR
