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.
It seems far away the time when video directors were perfect strangers, anonymous journeyman in the service of the big stars of music. Do clip was considered a fad, a diversion ennobled by authors such as Antonioni Scorsese or whose sexual favors some divertissement. Today 'clippers' are no longer ashamed to shoot a music video and do not look to cinema as a popular destination to reach. Among the emerging talents of this new generation, led by Cunningham, Jonze and Gondry, stands the British Dougal Wilson, director of the video ' Tribulations 'for LCD Soundsystem, made for the production company Colonel Blimp. The protagonist is James Murphy, former Mr. DFA (Death From Above), shrewd producer of NY that with the LCD project has embraced the punk-funk. The 'troubles' of the title and the associated agitation for which the song invites redemption ('get your payment from the nation / for your trials and tribulations') are described as an incessant wanderings of Murphy from a variety of environments that alternate between projections 8 mm and real sets. The first shot is a trolley to precede with the camera framing detail in the shoes of a character, Murphy, walking in the street. The image is grainy, the quality is amateur. The framework widens up to reveal that what is taken up a screen, and that the action is in projection. Murphy continues its path in a circular fashion, moving from one screen to another and at the same time interacting with the real set, which reconstructs the road and all environments through, until you return to the starting point. Shot in such a way as to look like a single sequence, Tribulations impresses for the use of back projections and the continuous camera movement. However, today, every video made in one shot, real or simulated, is labeled as an exercise in 'gondryish art'. The stylistic similarities between the work of Gondry (take for example 'Come into my World' by K. Minogue, 'Sugar Water' of Cibo Matto or 'Protection' by Massive Attack) and Wilson's catch our eye: both designed from the basic rhythm, pervaded by a spirit of Dada and characterized by a taste for repetition, are complex projects that require detailed storyboard and hard work mixed with post-production tricks of stagecraft. Tribulations is original in the use of screens, projection tools and at the same time subject to recovery by the will of Mr. retro LCD, fond of the idea dell'8mm, towels are white, but could have been Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD ) for further commissioning abyss of reality in fiction.
