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 – Sounds Art Series/Gruenrekorder
Patrick McGinley, better known as Murmer in the enclave of experimental and sound-art, made the release of this album possible in harmony with Gruenrekorder and thanks to crowdfunding on Kickstarter, involving friends and a big part of the Estonian art community: a passionate and careful group of followers that makes ongoing musical explorations very intense at those latitudes. We remember Murmer as a radio-artist on Resonance 104.4 FM in London, leader of a programme run by Framework, of which he was also the co-founder and activist, focusing on field recording and on a definitely non-academic creation of audio-archives. Now, after moving to Estonia with his family, he’s trying to support the local artistic scene with this project and the results seems to be very interesting, starting from the rough but elegant artwork, designed by the Armenian illustrator Vahram Muradyan and created with totally recycled paper used in that region. McGinely, who’s a devoted supporter of site-specific sound culture, seems naturally attracted by trying to combine sounds, compositions and sensations coming from specific spaces or activities, in order to create proactive connections between a potential group of interested people and a realistic context. “Songs For Forgetting” is Murmer’s first big release since 2012’s “What Are The Roots That Clutch”, for Helen Scarsdale Agency. In the meantime, his creativity has never misfired, he displays it in a more controlled and mature way, that evokes elliptical breaks, measured energies and shudders, little auditory emergencies made of ticking sounds, dull vibrations, suctions, chimes, beneficial breezes. “I work very slowly” said Murmer, recalling that the first element of this work was recorded in Köln in August 2007, while other field recordings were captured near water leaks coming from Soviet’s drainpipes in the small Estonian village of Toravere, as well as others captured in Spain (Valenza), France (Ētretat) and near the Andelle river in Normandy. In conclusion, even though the connection between rurality and sound-art is not new, if we consider the plots and places of capture, and the result is a very accurate work, Murmer is a fantastic exegete.
