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 – Denovali
Elysian Park is the third album of Franz Kirmann, a French producer based in London, and is also his second release with the record company Denovali. The work includes fourteen tracks and follows “Hyper Trophies”, an installation project made by the Berliner art studio Zeitguised, which asked Kirmann to make a soundtrack for the event. This first exhibition was a crossover between art and fashion and had three loop videos as the main element: the music softens in and out, weaving and disappearing without apparently any traditional pattern. The feeling of space and emptiness are the basic elements of the sequences and force the listener to focus on the physicality of the sounds, though there are no real melodies, harmonies and rhythms. Apparently the sounds don’t strictly follow a temporary line. The waves are very hypnotic: they are articulated in an abstract and immanent way and create some suspended and emotional settings. Kirmann openly mentioned another fundamental source of inspiration for the development of Elysian Park: “The Possibility Of An Island”, a novel of Michel Houellebecq. Parallel narrations, futuristic landscapes and dystopian fantasies fill the text and, in the work, the feeling of slippage between the structural plans is deep. In addition, the almost complete disappearance of feelings and emotions pervades the poetry of the novel with many drifts, jumps and semantic fields. We are poised listening: from quiet moments to strident and urban visions, the sounds go on until reaching a dense and dark beauty, rich with suggestions, some exotic, in between synthetic turmoils and some delicate moments of stylized alienation. Franz Kirmann uses many third party plug-ins and soft synths, which have the function of articulating some granular and synthesis samples. Despite a lot of electronic scenes being ruled by the return of the analogue, here is someone who has no problem being inspired by digital processing: in this work many sounds are manipulated with iPad apps and later re-recorded with some hardware sets. It’s a simple and direct procedure, which is very effective in its final expression.
