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 – Die Schachtel
After six years of silence, Claudio Rocchetti is back with a new album on Die Schachtel, marking the fifth release from the label’s ‘Decay Music’ series. The composer, performer and publisher from Bolzano (Italy) but currently based in Berlin, is a founder and curator, along with Alice Winkler, of Black Letter Press, a small publishing house specialising in ancient and rare books with a specific focus on the history of science, poetry and occult philosophy. For this project, he has worked with the Parma Lenz Foundation, a research collective focused on contemporary theatre and who create performance projects that are later developed into musical and theatre productions. It took four years to complete Labirinto Vertical. Inspired by the works of Hölderlin and Calderon de la Barca, it is a deeply spiritual work, almost alchemic in the way it brings together experimental sounds and chamber music through sound design and the outcomes of a series of interdisciplinary workshops. The opening track ‘Non Essere Freddo’, introduces us to various occult and ecclesiastical arias, the culmination of multiple performances between 2018 and 2021. ‘Emblemata’ has a more intangible, deconstructed and gently chaotic orchestration. It is followed by ‘La Malattia’ a drone piece that lasts for just over a minute. Otherworldly voices mark ‘Questa Debole Forza’, where the dualisms of absence and presence, matter and incorporeality, contemporaneity and memory appear to guide the musician’s research and experimentation. Voices are once again at the center of the action in ‘Molto Sono Teso’, where they are overlapped to produce a dark and indecipherable state of reflection. The final, titular track is a 15-minute suite where the dichotomy between orchestral music and sound design is even more pronounced. The layers of sounds on this album clearly influence Rocchetti’s approach to composition, a continuous mix of tones and passages created through skilled craftsmanship. Sometimes the sky and the earth reverse, and the labyrinth pushes us into dark and abstract places, untouchable ghostly fragments that are disturbingly melancholic.
Claudio Rocchetti – Decay Music n.5: Labirinto Verticale
