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.
2CD + 44 pages cover booklet – Unsounds
Subvoice is a collection of nine recent works by Yannis Kyriakides. He is a sound-artist and composer of contemporary classical music, who explores new forms and hybrids of media. Words and Song Without Words, Paramyth, Toponymy, Music for Viola, Circadian Surveillance, Der Komponist, Testudo, Politicus, Oneiricon suggest a specific research on the concepts of voice and language. The music is built on traces of voices and texts that seem to speak or sing in an intimate form of dialogue, either as text that is directly encoded into music, or in traces of voice that are embedded and dissolved into the musical fabric. In the compositions where the text is encoded, this cipher music tends to highlight the similarities with the cryptographic tradition. “The words hide inside another medium, undecipherable to the ear,” Kyriakides says, “but with a score and the decryption cipher, the text can be uncovered and re-assembled.” We might object that every text can be transformed in music, but not necessarily. The music hides in the scores with the processing of formal structures and the information of predetermined data classes. The booklet notes by Yannis Kyriakides on the compositions are precious for understanding. The booklet also includes some drawings, pictures, collages and strange anarebus. These elements are more than a pretext to question the language functions and their syntactic structure, which sometimes depend on waves with their own sense and don’t need any “music didactic” supports. The last season tendencies show the attempts to fully enhance every audio expression deriving from a conceptual approach: we don’t find this attitude deplorable, but if we force our interpretation to more complicated and subtle levels, the results might be both an extreme poetry but also a fall of the artistic aims. Yannis Kyriakides works behind the scenes of our immediate perception, which actually does not need too many supports to be started: as usual, the quality of the research and the music implementations play the game and make the listening experience attractive.
Yannis Kyriakides – Subvoice
