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 – Room40
Chihei Hatakeyama, the Japanese investigator, is remembered for his debut album inspired by the philosophic works of Theodor W. Adorno. “Minima Moralia” was published by Kranky Records in 2006: from then on, Hatakeyama’s research has centered on very dilated sequences that are constantly reprocessed in a mix of drones, atmospheric patterns and quietist passages, which remain very vivid and participatory, rich in splendor and captured ambiance. Refined lyrical atmospheres are predominant in “Mirror” and are completed by constant references, sound reverberations and thick elaborations that seem to flow in equal measure from specific philosophical reflections: in this case from the very spiritual meditations of the Kofun era (Japan in the period between 250 and 538 AD). In that period the concept of “reflection” was thoroughly examined, not only as a metaphor for the sun, but also for its intrinsic ability to move and transmit light from one place to another. In the same way, the composer now records his scores in instrumental passages that modulate by layers and reverberations, recording the resulting material and “bouncing” the effects to another spatial position. A very particular and evolving sound is gently agitated in the seven tracks of this album: the inspiration never falls prey to hesitations in the threads, drawing scenes of melancholic passion and torment that are never stressed or inconsistent in defining the whole structure. This is an interesting release which confirms the quality of the multidisciplinary artistic explorations undertaken by Room40.
