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 – Touch
Bruce Gilbert’s name is not new to those lovers of the punk-rock sounds that emanated from the English suburbs at the end of the 70s. It is impossible to forget Wire, one of the most surly and quasi-intellectual bands of that scene. Gilbert, guitarist and main protagonist, was a student at the Watford Art Academy where the band took its first steps. Now, after a considerable period of time, the former punk is re-engaged in the form of an experimental composer. In this work for Touch he is joined by Beaconsfield ArtWorks (David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin), a combo he worked with in 2012, focusing on themes such as geological dynamics, climate change and global warming. This Diluvial is an elegant metaphor of a sound landscape in continuous evolution, an image of the world before, during and after the next great flood. Field recordings captured in Suffolk and London deliver an inner universe of dystopian threads. The only space that really speaks about ourselves is the inner world: “the object of fruitful explorations”, as Ballard said. The “new waver” of the contemporary also submitted that “the only planet really alien is the Earth”, the scene of our existence, where all human vicissitudes take place. To care about the state of health of our planet, even only ideally, means to care about ourselves and to imagine new possible lands and futures. Environmental concerns, however, apparently do not overcome the conceptual need for “new landing places”, the authoritative right to maintain a sadly beautiful and contaminated nature.
Bruce Gilbert and BAW – The Void [Touch]
