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 – Nur/Nicht/Nur
This piano solo music project was realized by Florian Wittenburg between 2000 and 2009. “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” is a clear and respectful homage to Morton Feldman (a North American experimenter appreciated for his instrumental compositions), and contains sweetly separated dilated sounds and subtle dynamics. “Three Drones” follows along the same inspiring lines, with the addition of an Ebow resonator close to the strings – a tool that generates an electromagnetic field with a very consistent sustain – on different versions of tracks 5, 8 and 10, which were left to the free interpretation of Nico Huijbregts (5) and Daan Vanderwalle (“Sol Meets John” and “Chors in Slow Motion”, tracks 8-10) respectively. Florian Wittenburg has been fond of establishing different partnerships throughout his career, exploring multidisciplinary artistic fields: video, sculpture, web and technology. So, it is no surprise that there is a sense of exaggerated abstraction, especially when the audio evolutions are left so aerial, vibrant, evocative and rarefied. There is an overriding coherence and purity to the sequences, which maintain focus amid a combination of classical, contemporary and electronic influences. However, the trend is quite contemplative; the symmetry and the balance between the parts and the harmony concatenations make the conditions for a kind of estrangement: the reiterations assume the rhythms of a refined lullaby, delicate and persuasive like a mantra, sympathetic and eccentric. Aurelio Cianciotta
Florian Wittenburg – Ceci n’est pas ma voix
