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.
LP+ Flexi Records45t – WARM
WARM, a new French label of experimental music, debuts with Wave 91,6. This debut release also turns the spotlight on Julien Mérieau, aka Quartz Locked, a Nantes musician who is inspired by the sound archive accumulated for more than ten years at Radio Mulot, an FM pirate broadcaster with a history of industrial culture, Situationism and a more artistic and sophisticated approach than the average broadcaster. Financed via a crowdfunding campaign, there are six tracks presented – a total of just over 43 minutes of recordings – unraveled in a sensitive sound bricolage in which the iterated patterns are interposed by musical elements of improvisation and poetry. These are pure sound inventions that spring from an approach to composition reminiscent of intermedia. Quartz Locked, combining many expressive forms, mixes a Köhn track whose title is literally “opinions are like assholes, the Internet is full of them”. More noise and extremist episodes crammed with metal and glitch, Dadaism and citationist aesthetics. This track is presented in a white flexi disc attached to vinyl. The idea of a hypothetical experimental radio program allows for an enormous compositional freedom. It enables creative impulses that might sound very psychedelic, but it encourages cohesion of free form sequences and jazz, hypnotic drones and declamatory passages, melodies and spatial effects. The metamorphic inspiration is continuous and there are electroacoustic enchantments, moments of sound poetry, plunderphonics and mash-ups, flows of sounds that are difficult to classify and evocative atmospheres, as well as casual conversations, phone calls, various field recordings, suggestions of sounds from faulty cassette players and corrupted hard discs. Experimental “radio drama” is not a genre for everyone, but at Warm they have a passion for this enterprise and, so too, they manage to involve the listeners in their enthusiasm.
Quartz Locked – Wave 91,6
WARM | Quartz Locked vs Köhn – Opinions are like assholes, the internet is full of them
