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 – Aufabwegen
An interesting collaborative project comes at last, designed by Perletta himself, as an elegant coloured digipack. Asmus Tieschens is partner of Perletta the first experimenter from Roseto degli Abruzzi – now living in Berlin and owner of Farmacia 901. Tieschens was known by the audience as an experimental and electroacustic composer from Hamburg. As opposed to others in his group, he is an author who, in his issues, never gets lost in technical reports and methodological narrations, but in this situation underlines how his research deals with the instability and physical decay of sounds, with a lack of tones and subtle perceptions. The album is produced by Aufabwegen, a label that is not new to inventive music excursions, including in its catalogue names such as Marc Berhens, Francisco Lopez, Simon Whetman and Konrad Kratz. The main aim is to investigate empty spaces leading to the unlistened, and to silence with a meticolous action on evanescent harmony and residual structures. From the hardly distinguishable sound pads, muffled hisses and breaths emerge together with a multitude of immaterial and weak details produced by a subliminal and abstract microcosm. This kind of works always offer samples for a sensory modelling for the listeners which also occurs when contrasting volumes are explored, but with Deflections limiting the sound underneath, a certain threshold is not necessarily an example of minimalism. The unprecedented duo doesn’t seem interested in cold formalisms or aesthetic peaceful interpretations. The time has come to scan the sequences, the proportions among the parts and the succession of grainy sound emergencies. The thinned-out emissions are likely to emerge from the empty space but they have punctual accents and careful deviations that seem to work as vague and dilated compositions. They are unplanned sets built up on evanescent chains, ambiguous and weak resonances but are still able to move everyone who lets himself go against the dictatorship of volume.
Fabio Perletta + Asmus Tietchens – Deflections
