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.
10″ + booklet – Artkillart
When the first works of Joseph Kosuth appeared in the mid-sixties it was immediately clear for many that the idea of art would never be the same again. Conceptual art has had many antecedents in other artistic movements; however, the systematic study of the relationship between idea, execution and work only came to be recognized as a specific genre in the seventies. Conceptual art emphasized the theme of linguistic research and freed artistic practice from its more technical, aesthetic and formal features. This new conceptual approach to the work developed in tandem with other disciplines at the time, such as the American school of minimalist music. Conceptual art was end point of a long process that permeated modern avant-gardes movements. But at the same time it never completely depleted, even when new movements returned to painting and other more tangible artistic products. Those tensions are found in this extremely refined release from Artkillart, a label created to promote experimental audiovisual and sound art. Artkillart refocuses attention on objects and musical supports: in this case a vinyl record containing 12 tracks of pure silence, cut on each side by Yann Leguay and overlaid upon each other in the DK Mastering studio. Then the vinyl is inserted into an unmarked black paper inner sleeve to which an asymmetrical and stapled booklet is glued. The thin but stylized brochure are includes technical drawings of a turntable with three arms and a theoretical text by Samon Takahashi, a short essay that explores various aspects of silence in music, ranging from John Cage to Sonic Youth and from David Tudor to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. This is yet another “phonotopia” without any recorded sound source.
Yann Leguay
