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 + book – Hornschaft
Alessandro Incorvaia’s Check Out is a project where sounds, images and short verses move following three distinct states, which the author defines as “granularity”. Excess, exposition, death: these are the feelings of the author, but it would be better to call them “mental dispositions”. The sounds played by Incorvaia are beatific and meditative. The images of Giordano Simoncini keep the same 10” vinyl form but create a contrast with the sounds, providing the user with some sharp and ambiguous gaps and some feelings of anxiety, which leave a stronger mark on the user’s perception. The dilated timings of the perception remind you of interruption and loneliness. This feeling leaves you quite unclear about the environment which is the inspiration for the work. The subject of reference, rather than being a physical place, is a place of soul, something related to deepest feelings. The excess becomes a functional event to enlarge time and gaze and it allows the silence to pull back its space. What keeps your attention? Objects, numbers and recurring forms? Swaying branches? The images on a screen? The exposition places the subject “outside” and is a form of complex indulgence. A long irradiance can cause death, even if the sounds and the images somehow confirm existence. Which asymmetries between sounds and photos do we pay attention to? It’s not easy to answer these questions, it also makes no sense to try to develop a comprehensive explanation. A readymade exposition of sounds and images won’t save the world. These simple sounds on guitar were recorded in just one night set in the corridors of a school located in Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland) and won’t seem like a great work to many listeners. But thanks to these fragments of interpretation, our emotions for music and photography perception are moved. These are moments of absolute rarefaction, which are possible thanks to the different lives crossing: Alessandro lives in Birmingham and Giordano in Berlin. Hornschaft was the common link between the two artists. Quietly, but not too much, on both vinyl sides the musical flux is continuous. Listening to this flux and meditating on the photos provokes an emotional and inspired
Alessandro Incorvaia – Check Out
