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 – Sofa
The Sofa Music of Ingar Zach and Ivar Grydeland is a Norwegian experimental label active since the 2000’s, which over the years has produced some extreme projects with artists from different backgrounds. We remember the free forms by Mural and the contamination between electronics, field recordings and acoustic drums, by the head honcho (the first mentioned) and Miguel Angel Tolosa. We can’t forget the folk-digital collages by Kim Myhr and the meta-instrumental research by Jim Denley, often focused on site-specific projects. To begin with the title, A Pond In My Living Room by Philippe Lauzier evokes two things: the suggestion of a classic science-fiction (a space-time window opening on our daily life) and the inappropriate fantasy of any home-studio producer and sound-maverick (drawing some water from an enchanting pond in his own spaces).The Canadian Philippe Lauzier, from Montreal, Québec, started his research as saxophonist and clarinetist. Later he studied composition and between 2005 and 2010 participating in six collective releases with different ensemble. Eventually in 2013 he made his solo album, Transparence. Now his style evolution seems to be maturing, thanks to some refined and cured mixes, whose tone is solemn and ingenious. The mixes are full of overlaps and improvisations, all driven into a wise score organization. The music background is clear in its use of modern classical echoes and some jazz influences, however the main elements are the very dilated atmospheres, the abstract polyphony and the hypnotic drones. The flux of sounds is continuous and imaginative, the listener is relentlessly captured. The album presents four suites, with a passage from the shadows to the insisting sinuosity of the water, from an enchanting window to a kaleidoscopic garden, in between its own life and some suspended enchantments. When the grace vibes between the cuts, as in this case, all the style fences drop down, the potentialities of the work become infinite and the audio involvement is total.
SOFA ! Philippe Lauzier – On the window side
