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.
CD + DVD + book – Unsounds
Anne-James Chaton, Thurston Moore and Andy Moor have worked together for this release, whose artwork cannot remain indifferent. On the cover is printed the title of the project, Heretics. While opening the hardback, the fingers discover that the colored bottom is made of an abrasive material. We imagine behind this is an aim to remind us that any kind of heterodox and visionary artwork is always incendiary. While leafing through the pages of the attached booklet, we also discover many references to stories of the past, to dark utopias, to epic places, to some cities where unforgettable events took place. The album combo is undoubtedly eccentric: Anne-James Chaton is a French poet and sound artist who has already released many albums; Thurston Moore, no need to tell you, gave life to the epic rise of the Sonic Youth; Andy Moor is the guitarist of The Ex and the founder of the label Unsounds. At first listening, we clearly realize this work follows a theatrical and narrative inspiration: we immediately think of the avant-rock themes of Thurston Moore and to the maudit acting tradition with the background music (impossible not to think of some ballads of Serge Gainsburg). After the debut at Théâtre Scène Nationale de Saint-Nazaire, the combo thought to record a studio album. Benoît Bourreau was called to make a video-record of the event: the result is a wonderful DVD (Journal D’Hérésie/Making Heretics), also included in the precious album package. The DVD presents some dark shots (in the style of Caravaggio paintings) of the music sets and provides a frame for the entire work, not entirely perceptible only on listening. We don’t want to make some easy comparisons, but we really think this work shows an idea of “total music”, following the examples of Anthony Braxton or John Stevens (from free jazz to spontaneous music). The heroes mentioned in the works are great characters too, the writers William Burroughs, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and also the Marquis de Sade and Johnny Rotten. The work is a narration of extreme and passionate heresies.
