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.
The MIT Press, ISBN13: 9780262028080, English, 208 pages, 2014, USA
Dyson tries to interpret spiralling global economic debt and environmental crises through an updated philosophy of music in her new book The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology. The author expands her previous work on “Sounding New Media,” focusing here on the economies of noise, tone and voices. This analysis involves a few steps. The first is understanding the consequences of Pythagoras defining harmony as a mathematical interval between sounds, positioning an understanding of the universe in mathematical terms, with an “order” reminiscent of the current “digitalisation of everything.” From here she dissects Christian Trinitarianism and its use of acclamations and songs of praise to consolidate the governmental apparatus (here the famous “Listening Post” installation is interpreted as a liturgical chant.) Then there’s an analysis of noise and its negative positioning and inclusion/exclusion from Western culture. Subsequently the voice is examined in its new role in constant computation and remote digital connections. Most of the above are then used to re-read the crisis of “eco” (both economy and ecology), helped along by Michel Serres’ writings, which the author defines as the “general states of anechoica.” Finally, financial noise is put under theoretical scrutiny, including aspects like (eco) guiltiness and the condition of debt. In the end, the understanding of present abstract spaces is literally expanded through listening, theory and interpretation of sound artworks, with a structured and inspired path.
