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.
Cassette – ACR
This latest performance by Ondrej Zajac, Slovakian experimenter, guitarist and free form musician living in Prague and founder of hecho honcho of Meteore (which is a personal handmade micro label), is an unconventional artwork mixing a red coloured music tape and an inner plasticized black paper box. In the following developed sequences nothing is just split hairs “don’t expect soft melodies” the author himself states. Acoustics get impressed as irregular, multifaceted and scratching, especially because it is extremely digital and rashed with futuristic and metallic landscapes. Ondrej Zajac goes on exploring the guitar as a medium that produces noise and aesthetic dissonances but the attitude is wholesome and goes beyond the mere instrumental knowledge, succeeding in involving people in an abstract and total listening. The compositions are six in total, three for each side of the tape. Crucified Serpent, the first track on the tape, carries the listener with the perspective of an emotional involvement thanks to its magnificent and impressive sounds. It nourishes a climax which is always kept high also in the other recordings, following evocative but apparently raw perspectives and creating a deeply intense reaction which could be painful and gloomy for the artist himself. Ondrej Zajac had already made his peculiar and special audience used to a radical and avant-garde approach, a stronghold in technical rigidity and unconventional extemporizing attitudes. Even the choices made on his label witness a strong coherence, focussing on what he considers fundamental: a direct, honest, no-frills approach which can easily cope with the strongest and harsh expressions of one own’s innate existence. Before recording Ondrej Zajac underwent an extraordinary surgery and this project somehow evocates the story of this experience. One could say that this is the recording of that grief, of the biophysics and biochemistry of a precise event, a mnemonic track that has been impressed in the nervous system. It is a neural net or a fragment of memory spread in sensuous areas which the artist has currently decodified effectively without any sort of mediation or doctrine.
Ondrej Zajac – ICU
ACR003: Ondrej Zajac – ICU (SAMPLER)
