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 – LINE
Behind the moniker of Pinkcourtesyphone there is Richard Chartier, whose name is well known in the scene of digital electronic reduction. This author has a history of experimenting with the interconnections between the spatial nature of sound, silence, attention, perception and the act of listening. He is also a graphic designer and the founder of the label LINE: in both roles he follows the same neo-modernist and minimal approach. This new album, A Ravishment of Mirror, is published by Dragon’s Eye Recordings, a record company run by another sound-artist, Yann Novak, and is focused on drone music, field recordings and microsound. The inspiration behind this project is covertly urban and apparently refers to Los Angeles, the city where the explorations of Pinkcourtesyphone take form: a place of visions, mirrors, glittering lights, noir stories and secrets. All these influences are developed in a dreamy and bucolic way: the result is a certain ecstatic enchantment, which is also narcotic, full of absences and melancholia. Defective synapses blend ambient fascinations that are worked into four tracks of different lengths (26, 7, 5 and 11 minutes respectively), interspersing sequences that are variously surreal, reflective, faint, dark and seductive. The titles of the elaborations are deliberate quotes (Peg Entwistle and Tab Hunter are just some of the names mentioned) and they enlarge the experience of the listener in sensitive and substantial ways. The atmospheres are misty and mellifluous, somehow kinematic: winces, lyrical passages and deceptive shadows are suspended between unreal melodies and repeated passages, transformed into granular blends and inner elaborations.
Pinkcourtesyphone – 62,000 Valentines (for T. Hunter)
