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 + booklet – Viaindustriae
The subtitle provides a good explanation of this work: “10 hypotheses based on 10 preliminary theses concerning activism and sound”. This hybrid-publishing project is the result of a series of workshops about new radios and is presented in the form of a manifesto by the American collective Ultra-red. There is a booklet and a CD that detail proposals developed by various young artists. This project was the final act of a workshop called “MEDIA azioni / azioni RADIO” (MEDIA actions / actions RADIO), which began with a basic theoretical text and lasted six months, during which time a database of sound fields and texts/tracks was created. The release also includes the first Italian translation of the main source text (by Dont Rhine and Robert Sember) – an “upgraded” translation, which presents translations/interpretations by several researchers who share the aims of the manifesto. The manifesto is based on 10 necessary points for investigating sound landscapes, activism-related social research, field recordings and the creation of theories of silence, environmental and sociological recordings, politics, pop music and the role of the popular songs in civil protest (here are just some of the most basic research topics. The tone and form of the manifesto is dogmatic and reveals an activist approach, but the manifesto clearly raises some theoretical questions. It claims that sound is at the same time both the object and the subject of activist investigation; no matter if analogue or digital. It also claims that the experience of listening constitutes a method for interpreting the contemporary. Similarly, silence is the object-cause of the desire for listening. As you can see, the themes are numberless, and political rather than artistic perspectives underpin the project. Some may have doubts about adopting such an approach, but we aren’t taking this work for granted.
