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.
six sound cards – not on label
The “substance” of this release is not just metaphorical: the package of Vingt is as big as some deluxe collection boxes. All the six paper boxes are differently colored and apparently include at least one CD each. At a more careful glance, we notice that every box contains a different package, where there is a sound card. Every card can be started when every single module is opened as a book and can be disabled when the packages are symmetrically closed. Every music consumer experienced with the epochal transformations of the last two decades can immediately refer to the sound loop concept and to the making of an autonomous composition due to the combination and mixing of these “syntactic elements”. Actually all the DAW samples and the groove machines share this standard, which crosses extra-musical fields too, like the visual arts and the vjing. But this preliminary background is not strictly necessary for the listening experience: today even a child, being a digital native accustomed to interacting with modular structures, may intuitively acknowledge the project concept. It’s a clear invitation to use with no mediation all the sounds set by the “authors”, the members of the collective martiensgohome (necessarily written in small letters). The artists are all experienced in field recordings, free form improvisations and circuit bending contraptions (all techniques used in an FM radio program in Bruxelles, one of the world capitals of this kind of sound research). Vingt was originally created for an installation which celebrated the twenty year career of this unconventional and eclectic ensamble. Some listeners may have the feeling of a funny sound divertissement, but few minutes of “syntony” are enough to be swallowed into a vortex of sound plays and manipulations. The listener will be nicely surprised to open and close the different “menù”, all characterized by obscure and often incomprehensible sounds. However, the sounds are a hymn to some kind of electronic craftsmanship and suggest some atypical sound archives, which the listener can discover almost magically, without any wire or connection.
martiensgohome – Vingt
