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 + 24 pages booklet – Immediata
This is a project achieved in 2014 for the 40th Anniversary of Synergy Percussion, the oldest and most acclaimed Australian ensemble of Contemporary Music of Western Tradition. For this event, the two electroacoustic musicians and composers Jerome Noetinger and Anthony Pateras have joined. They enjoyed such a similar and meaningful artistic collaboration, based on 1 hour live, rich in electric styles and over one hundred percussive instruments, including the well-known 17’’ tuning microtonal metallophone by Xenakis. It was the same used in the Pleiadis, multi-faceted composition dating back to 1978 which is still a major point of reference in contemporary music composition dedicated to music ensemble made by percussionists only. Even in the given composition, the movements designed by Pateras are fourfold and the complexity of the plots can be perceived also by those who are not used to such rhythmic structures. However, the vibrating transitions, the ruling psychoacoustic features, the virtuous and multi-rhythmic evolutions are formal entities, thus every experienced listener can grasp their beauty and flawless execution. The History and Culture of Music Education constantly works to explore and popularize new organised models of Sound Phenomena. It is not by chance that the title is an explicit quotation from ‘Dance of the Signs’ by Sylvère Lotringer, an essay published by Semiotext(e), whose author, together with Jerome Noetinger has been interviewed by Pateras. The short summary (the interview was by mail) has been published in the extremely interesting 24-page booklet included which is an original commentary on Technology, Culture, Ethic and Media. “Beauty is never predetermined, it’s always surprising, unexpected, and ultimately unexplainable.” According to some, the research of a new code and at the same time the nostalgia for a non-standardized, creative, multidisciplinary approach are maybe not so opposed. Discussing it stating from such a strict academic planning is finally absolutely surprising and stimulating.
Jérôme Noetinger, Anthony Pateras, Synergy Percussion – Beauty Will Be Amnesiac Or Will Not Be At All
