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.
dvd – Line – Line_030
In ‘sonoluminescence’ the actual emphasis on science and art convergence meets the urge to give sound a visual dimension that has pervaded the listening space in the last decade, in vjing practices as well as generative art or live coding performances. Sonoluminescence means to transform high frequency sound waves into emissions of light irradiated in a gas infused liquid. The Camera Lucida installation by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand is implementing these concepts in a spectacular environment, and it has been exhibited extensively in the last years. Now the two authors have involved a first quality roster to contribute with original tracks (Alva Noto, Carter Tutti, Coh, Taylor Deupree + Richard Chartier, Alexander Kaline, Kenneth Kirschner, Matmos and Asmus Tietchens), and this dvd collects the Camera Lucida outcome. Apart from the amazement and hypnosis generated by the slowly changing small sparkles of liquid light, the first question that arises is: could it be considered an ‘objective’ type of music visualization? The answer might be yes. The chemical reaction, in fact is coherent with the input data, so respecting strict physical and natural laws. The tracks then can be considered as acoustic environments, eager to trigger chemical elements and sparkle some liquid light in the dark. So far form a mere ‘special effect’, here the connection between light and sound is consequential and so logically constructed. The music structure is then moving along with light and its harmonic results seem to be as fascinating as beautiful flower colors observed closely.
