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 – Melange Edition
This five-track record has an immediate and powerful impact. Code of Silence opens with “jiwa jiwa”, whose unhurried tonal development is coldly resonant, super-synthetic, rarefied and industrial. The author has indicated that she is exploring the Japanese notions of “phenomime” and “psycomime”. The former concerns words/phrases that mimic certain physical forms, while the latter are depictions of psychological states, emotions or feelings. Ryoko Akama usually works in a number of artistic fields (sound, visual arts and composition) and is adept at maintaining tension. She plays with minimal elements, spatializations and absences, and although her works are developed with different levels of detail they are always incredibly dense and dronal, full of crackles and hums, startling electronic iterations and loops. The Japanese experimenter was previously a member of the combo Lappetites (with Kaffe Matthews, AGF and Eliane Radigue) but the sound of this album is more cohesive and electronic than her former work. The approach is tonal and intense, and although structurally uncomplicated the sounds produced seem to move in and out of the contemplative space of the listener, creating the impression of being in some limbo of perception. The sounds evoked by the title are manifested by an abstract minimalism, careful control over volumes and drops, by the immanent static nature of the loops and by the dilated, circling textures. There are also moments of “fullness” where the listener is driven to majestic impressions and images: these are elements of ethereal environments, stylised, futuristic and permeated by frequencies. This is a highly recommended album; a happy mix of project coherence, a pleasant listening experience and formal results.
Ryoko Akama – Code of Silence – jiwa jiwa (clip)
