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 – Dewfall
The Japanese sound-artist Mokumedori writes and plays music using toys and household tools. In addition, Mokumedori makes her own the tools and the masks she uses in her live performances, in the clubs, at festivals and in general for all her performance locations. This is her first album. The immediate feeling we get at first listening is a sense of nostalgia, due to some experimental treatments mixed in the passages with others more musical, harmonic and melancholic. Between the lines, the author includes some emphatic and circus quotes from the chanson française and some faint references to the Italian schools with regard to the “cinematic” composers of the 60s and 70s (some passages remind us of the most undecided scenes from some Kung-Fu movies). This involving and magic kind of avant-pop includes some classical echoes too: like in an estranging and hypnotic soundtrack portraying tableaux vivants, Mokudori defines her suggestions as a “picture story book in motion”, whose overall effect is unsettling, enchanting and psychedelic. The electronic music parts and the samples are never emphasized. This creates a dimension which apparently seems more naive and playful, whereas the experimentations apparently characterize the live performances. This dimension provides the “instrumental actions” with some basis. All the elements together guarantee a perfect operation, as should always happen when an artist embraces tout court a performance and conceptual-spectacular expressive dimension. Dewfall Records, an independent label based in Tokyo, can be happy with Mokudori’s first album, which marks her debut in the performing-art scene, day by day even more full of talents. Finally, we would like to remember that this mix of genres and styles (graphics, music, sound effects, theatre) can be connected to a broad but coherent tradition, whose artists such as Roman Kachanov, Jan Švankmajer and Jean-Pierre Jeunet are great inspirations.
