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 – D’Autres Cordes
Electronics, electroacoustics, noise and contemporary music: this is the special mix created by Franck Vigroux in Rapport Sur Le Désordre. This production includes four tracks per side and is an ideal prosecution of Centaure, an audio-visual performance Vigroux made with Kurt D’Haeseleer, a video producer and the founder of Werktank (an avant-garde creative factory focused on new media art). Centaure e Rapport sur le Désordre are the final chapters of a long series about the dystopian universes. Apparently this many-sided artist (composer, musician and performer at the same time) is wedded to this theme, which was central in many other releases (on the whole the French artist has made sixteen releases, solo projects and different nature projects too). In the past Vigroux also worked with Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic) and Matthew Bourne (a piano player and composer who shares the same passion for the analog and the rarefied atmospheres). These futuristic pieces have an unusual balance, full of ups and downs but at the same time coherent and very intense. The artist develops the album’s effects into some suggestive and uncommon weaves. These weaves’ complexities are a nice surprise for the listener and create a vivid tension, full of audio impulses and with a large narrative imagination. The cinematic inclination and the search for a climax can be felt in this disorder, which is only apparent: the syntonization is started thanks to the use of tones, which are more “apocalyptic” than “integrated”. Some metropolitan feeling is mixed with an exclusive and unpredictable approach, which seems to care about the details but at the same time is not flirty or looking for easy approvals. Rapport Sur Le Désordre was meant to be full of contradictions and nuances at the same time and confirms the goals of DAC Records (D’Autres Cordes), the house of production. The album proves the validity and the passion for the mix between different styles and “trans-disciplinary” elements.
