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 + booklet – 901 Editions
Leaving is the third collaboration between New York-based artists Ben Vida and Marina Rosenfeld, following on from Feel Anything (iDEAL Recordings) and Vertice (Fridman Gallery). This time the duo has conceived a generative four-loudspeaker composition for the annual Skaņu Mežs festival in Riga, Latvia. Skaņu Mežs has helped to increase the already interesting catalogue of 901 Editions, the Italian label run by Fabio Perletta. 901 Editions focuses on the hybridization of experimental music with contemporary art, providing a perfect partner for the generative poetics and creativity of the two New Yorkers. Leaving is a meditation on absence and presence, and the fragmentation and drift of our present reality – a reflection born in New York City during the hot summer of the Covid-19 lockdown. It is permeated by improvised, electroacoustic musical elaborations informed by the duo’s shared memories. Complexity can be found in its dense and hypnotic tonal movements. These movements, which include gasps, drones, rustling and other inscrutable audio elements, demand our attention. Viva and Rosenfeld incorporate improvisation into a structure that uses four loudspeakers as a conceptual foundation. Although Leaving feels melancholic and estranged, its sequences are jarring and focus the mind with their obvious tension, while alien melodies invoke dreamscapes and a sort of retro-future exoticism. The packaging of the release shares the same beauty and power of the sounds. The glass-mastered CD comes in a 6-panel digi-sleeve and is accompanied by an 8-page booklet with texts by Evan Calder Williams. The elements performed within this project follow a continuous evolution and vocabulary. This can be traced back through previous performances, installations and experimental practices from the two artists, culminating in this abstract sound conversation that is both imaginative and inspired.
Ben Vida + Marina Rosenfeld – Leaving
