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.
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.
Rapper Prince Harvey, after his computer crashed and his external drive was stolen, managed to record an entire album in Apple Store SoHo in four months, befriending employees, hiding files and using USB sticks and mail. as support. Abbie Hoffman would have been proud.
2CD – Col Legno
Quadrat:sch are a chamber music ensemble that includes Barbara Romen, Christof Dienz, Gunter Schneider, Alexandra Dienz, Zeena Parkins, Herbert Pirker and Kassian Erhart. The band plays many instruments; some →
CD – Line
Inspired by the work of James Tenney, Gyögy Ligeti, Charlemagne Palestine, and Conlon Nancarrow, these eight studies for piano by Seth Horvitz use some simple computer-assisted composition processes. The →
CD – Zeitkratze
Recorded live at the Philharmonie Luxembourg in October 2009 and edited in the summer of the following year in Germany (GreenHouseStudios), these five new compositions by Alvin Lucier resonate →
CD – Serein
This is the debut album by the Alex and Svitlana Samoylenko Smalley duo, aka Olan Mill – two rather cultured and refined audioartists who propose elegiac instrumental sequences with →
CD – Entr’acte
This very interesting collection, published by Entr’acte, opens with the tense and grinding drones of Greek experimenter Yiorgis Sakellariou. The metallic, sustained sounds are presented in the guise of iterated →
CD – Mort Aux Vaches
In Ignatz, floating guitar sequences merge with an exotic, repetitive score, creating melancholic and sensitive environments. Simultaneously lo-fi and yet of an unusually high technical caliber, this work →
CD – Hinterzimmer
Oblique, hollow melodies, horror-movie-style audio samples, suspended atmospheres, elegant iterations, intermezzo organ, voice experiments, and – unmistakably – a taste for a certain pure mental automatism, which pierces →
CD – Mosz
Behind the moniker Kapital Band 1 there’s a duo formed by Martin Brandlmayr and Nicholas Bussman (also known as ‘The Golden Boys’ and ‘Hair’), two musician very →
CD – Cold Blue Music
With microtonal assonances reminiscent of the American minimalist tradition, Charlemagne Palestine excites us again with ‘A Sweet Quasimodo…’, playing on two different Yamaha pianos at the same →
CD – Cold Blue
Complex assonant vocalism exercises, mindful of ‘polite’ inspirations, mediaeval interlacings, reworked in new acoustic research contexts. The work of Daniel Lentz can be placed with the above unusual →
