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.
3“CDR – 1000füssler
Roshambo (trio) consists of one track of 23 minutes and 16 seconds recorded in Santiago, Chile, in December 2014, at the Madre Selva studio. Recorded by Alfonso Pérez its hypnotic and meditative tones continues to resonate, triggered by calibrated drones, silences and sudden quiet restarts. This elegant, immersive symphony draws the listener into an enchantment that is difficult to describe. Diatribes is a duo based in Geneva comprised of Cyril Bondi (percussion, objects) and D’engraved (laptop). On this occasion they are joined by the tonal nuances of Chilean Christian Alvear on guitar. Together they skillfully produce rarefied and inspired atmospheres, producing tracks that are also a bit unsettling, incomplete and delicate. 1000füssler are accustomed to this kind of sonic experiment. Even the CD 3″ format helps to immediately identify an unconventional approach, one imbued with so many suggestions and dilated sequences, breaths and hums, obtained by Alvear carefully manipulating, vibrating, brushing or tapping surfaces. The composition was previously released in duo version on the “A new castle” album. It is not immediately apparent if there are field recordings in this work. What seems more certain, however, is that the present release is a kind of enhanced version with the contributions of Alvear to produce a more feverish and acoustic impression. ‘Recombination’ is the term that best describes this remarkable process, imbued with different aesthetics and musical wisdoms, which are shared but are also very intimate and sensitive, in a stylistic path that is defined by sound choices, in a very responsive and always complicit union. Embracing an approach that is also free form, each of the musicians adds subtle textures that become sedimented between silences and stylized acoustic-electronic treatments, evanescent and abstract, which are structured in progressive waves in ethereal and somewhat sidereal flows, beatific but still not entirely pacified.
1000fussler | Diatribes & Cristián Alvear – Roshambo Excerpt
