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 – Errant Bodies
These two projects by CM Von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad, an electronic music maker specialized in field recordings and drone music and a creative filmmaker specialized in short films and video installations, follow the communication strategies used traditionally by Errant Bodies, a label dedicated to the interactions of sounds and spaces, particularly regarding architecture themes, such as the urban landscape, and ‘site-specific’ themes, on the border between documentarism and audio-video experiment.
In ‘Hashima, Japan 2002’, the subject of research is the island bearing the same name, an ex mining zone in front of Nagasaki, which, in the last century, was the object of an ‘industrial colonization’ project by Mitsubishi corporation. The island of Hashima, one of the most densely populated zones on the planet in the Fifties (835 people per hectare), was completely abandoned in the Seventies, due to the mines being closed. It’s an extreme non-place, mostly uninhabitable, a dystopic proof of the theorem stating that future society has already enacted its processes in the present time. It’s a memorial to the retreat of capitalism, with no residual people left behind, collapsed due to profit implosion, with no worries or guilt feelings for these people’s lives and destinies.
This investigation is articulated in two different versions, one more documentary, commented by one of the original residents who goes back to the places of his youth, the other abstract and denser, also in the music, which is ethereal and experimental. The other work by this duo is also remarkably interesting (though less powerful): it’s centered on the ancient oasis of ‘Al Qasr’, in Egypt, another leftover space, equally uninhabitable and desolate, a reality emerging out of particular architectural morphologies due to the presence there of a primary raw material (coal or water). In this work, the soundtrack, is permeated by subtle exoticisms, with flavors and voices taken from the local tradition.
