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 – Mego
Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Arto Lindsay, Joe Talia, Ricardo Villalobos and Keith Fullerton Whitman create a special and unconventional collaboration, pervaded by repetitive rhythms. In our opinion, Villalobos may be the rhythm connector: a Chilean maverick, a minimal and microhouse guru, an original artist running electronic dance sets, famous for his controversial performances, loved or hated according to the audience. The Hubris sequence includes different elements: krautrock influences and blues schizoid flashes, and also free form variations, apparently induced by the no wave ex-guitarist of DNA. The sounds are skillfully run into two long pieces, “Hubris, Pt. 1” and “Hubris, Pt. 3”. In between we find a two minutes interlude, a lullaby with vocal fragments of a casual conversation. The whole work connects and balances different energies: traditional minimalism, jazz, rock and electronic music. Not surprisingly Oren Ambarchi, a Jew musician of Iraqi origin born in Australia, is a multi-instrumentalist, a drummer only recently switched to guitar. His performance approach seems to develop a collaborative strategy that reminds the listener of hypnotic mantras (do you remember Steve Reich or La Monte Young?), a kind of spaced out music for the new generations, full of rhythmic overlapping melodic cells, lyrical passages and contemplative atmospheres. The album is made of two long suites. In our opinion, the first one is more cerebral and rigorous, while the second one is more “musical” and diversified. This is borderland to be explored, between improvisation and serialism, drone and space music. Peter Rehberg’s Mego people are used to these genres mixtures, so we should not be surprised that the krautrock minimalism is married to disco-funk driven rhythms and layers of bass guitar, close to fuzzy and psychedelia: here everything may happen. In the end it’s beautiful to get lost in the listening experience: forget the theories and let’s follow the joyful experimental spirit raised from this unusual ensemble.
