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 – Fylkingen
The last work by Lisa Stenberg, a Swedish artist born in Luleå, a town in the north of the country, but based in Stockholm, is released by the label Fylkingen under the form of an elegant transparent red 140 g vinyl with an internal poly-lined pocket wrapped in heat shrink film or as a very sophisticated CD. Her music, usually displaced with slow passages and long durations, is modulated in some stratified electroacoustics sequences and tangled evolutions, generally amplified in site-specific live sets, where it’s possible to engage the audience into some very intense listening situations, thanks to the structure of the locations. Monument, a project divided into 5 different compositions, originates from some recordings with some ultra rare Synthi 100 and 200, some enormous synths, mostly studio ones, built from 1974 by Electronic Music Studios by Peter Zinovieff. Today only a few of these machines, who were actually produced in a short amount of time of dozens of, are still working. The 200 Stenber used is owned by the university of Osnabrück (Germany), the other one by the Athens KSYME-CMRC, an institution founded by Iannis Xenakis, who contributed to this project the festival Documenta in 2017 commissioned. The synthesizer in Greece was not working from more than twenty years and it was an honor for all the people involved to be able to set it up again. The result is a drone-suite, where the idea of “monument” embodies an intense sensitivity, a vulnerable density embracing our interior depths, also hinting at the majesty of the machine and the beauty of the electricity flowing under the action of the musician, transforming the tension and the power into chords no plug-in ever might be able to give life to (it might sound weird, but no emulator software of these machines does exist). The sound is being displayed as “clinic”, definitely minimalist and clearly it’s necessary to experiment a lot, to study and being able to well syntonize with such complex instrument, actually very sensitive to the changes of temperatures and always in need to be continuously tuned. Robert Moog used to say, “I was never worried that synthesizers would replace musicians. First of all, you have to be a musician in order to make music with a synthesizer”. This case confirms the premonition, because the sounds of Lisa Stenberg are highly emotional, vital, and engaging. After fifty years from the release of these machines, the music made in an “unnatural” way cannot anymore be defined as the opposite of the warm human music. The avantgarde movements, and the machines, in this case won very largely, and for once the future was imagined, as it turned out to be.
Lisa Stenberg – Monument
