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.
.emusic
14.02.03 Sonic Light 03, sound, light and space.
On February 13th opens in Amsterdam the ninth edition of the ‘Sonic Light 2003, composed light, articulated space‘ festival. It will be equally divided between the historical club Paradiso and the theatre De Balie, very close to each other. The programme, one week long, is packed with interesting features related to this edition’s theme, that is, the fascination artists feel for the creative possibilities of the musical form modelled with light and space. These two perceptive dimensions are explored from a historical perspective, looking at the experiments which used the different technologies available at the moment. The film program, for instance, is focused on three main themes: the first experiments with electronic images in the so-called ‘experimental television’, an exhibition of abstract productions of the last fifty years and the relation between films and kinetics art. A selection of rare films which range from the first decades of the twentieth century to the seventies, and which wonderfully portraits the history of the ideas in the field of making images collide with sounds.Moreover, on the ceiling of the De Balie, four videos by Bainbridge, Casady, Lia and Scroggins will be screened in a loop (from sunset to midnight). The conferences schedule is centered on the analysis of the fundamental themes of the festival, with a preference for the presentation of software and projects. There will also be eminent guests such as Peter Luining, Chris Casady and Golan Levin, just to mention the latest, or Earl Reiback and his ‘3d-lumia’, a machine which produces ‘real’ optically refined images which look like they are floating in space. At the Paradiso, on the other hand, there will be the ‘Sonic Light Box’, a space specially designed by Robin Deirkauf, which divides the hall in two halves, emitting all of the light necessary for illumination. Among the many artists, all of them of a very good level, there are COH, Richard Devine, Dino Felipe, Hecker, Francisco Lopez, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Numb, pxp, Yasunao Tone and Venetian Snares.
