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.
CD – Bruit Clair
The debut album of Emmanuelle Gibello, a Parisian artist accustomed to the union of visual and electronica, reveals a skillful manipulator of field recordings that have been extrapolated from both natural and urban contexts. The work utilizes electronic instruments, the Internet, video cameras, microphones (some modified), arranging many kinds of sounds into stinging synthetic sequences. Organized by layers, the tracks dispense archive sound clips and occasional recordings, combining literary inspirations and short textual elements that are used just like the other materials: as functional, vivid particles that interact in the context of a complex concatenation of fascinations and codes. For this discographical debut, Gibello joins together recordings derived from different projects: “Cry Bamboo” was recorded in 2010 for “Impronet”, a selection of “Cadavre Exquis” started by Anton Mobin for Radio Arte. “Crashtest # 10” is a live performance the artist executed for the “Manifesto Festival” in July 2002. “Pour faire peur aux enfants dans le noir” was produced in the “Locked Out” project edited by Jean-Philippe Renoult and Dinah Bird and was initially broadcast in May 2009 for the Journée de la Création Radiophonique. “Errata Corrige Random” was recorded live at Le Chat Noir in December 2009. The whole release is dedicated to “Erratum musical” by Marcel Duchamp, which is underpinned by surrealist combinatorial randomness. For the last two tracks, the Book of Changes is used as a tool for composition: procedures already used by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs in their proto-electronic beat investigations.
