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.
In Mediaterrae the smart idea of the behind the Interferenze festival was to bring a group of international electronic artists (visual artists and musicians) on the very peculiar Montemarano carnival, during the top celebrations of the fat Tuesday. The entire town celebrated all day long with unstoppable ‘tarantella’ music, and everybody was enjoining his masks and some wine. The artists lived for one week together, experiencing collectively the preparation for this ‘foreign’ social and aesthetic experience, and then the re-interpreting process, materialized in live and studio performances. The Rechenzentrum couple seems to have better reformulated not only the carnival identity game through their filmic sensibility, but also to have been deeply touched by a mourning subtle but always present feeling integrated in both visual and sound. An extensive parade of state of minds flowing in a pacesetting scan, without breaks nor uncertainties. The continuous fluctuation of colors and the recurring flow of rhythms during the carnival seems to have impressed Deadbeat and Jeffers Egan. The former was able to play electronic gears and laptop for a huge amount of time, with rhythmic waves that kept the audience attention. The latter created amazing animated visuals, optically amusing, that mutated during the entire set. The third live act (Burnt Friedman and Jaki Liebezeit) was acoustically compelling, but even more visually attracting. The alternate currents of instrumental sessions in fact were coupled with an independently running stream of cinematic visuals by Anders Weberg and Robert Willim. How many other festival crews are able to organize such events overstimulating your senses, with free local fresh and delicious food (the caciocavalli cooking and tasting live session was a hit) coupled with new audio/visual interpretations? The intertwining of local specific culture and natural roots with the infinite narrative possibilities of electronic has been once again been exploited in this beautiful and peripheral land.
