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 – Kvitnu
Transmutatsia is the latest work of Zavoloka, produced as usual by Kvitnu. It’s an industrial and noise sound tour, a six minute composition full of space atmospheres and dreamy digressions with tones now suggestive and praising, now ambient and elliptical. Different from former works of Zavolaka, an experimenter who loves the mixture between tradition and modern electronic technologies, the images played in this EP are not quiet and reassuring. The approach here is more cybernetic and dystopian, whirling and technoid, but this is still part of the broad background of this sound manipulator, free-form musician and performer. Under Cluster Lizard alias the remix is raw and vibrating sound-design, with science fiction and techno developments, more dark, evocative and cinematic. As usual for the productions by Zavoloka, who is also a talented graphic designer, the album artwork is elegantly made. The impressive scarlet cardboard package is an additional reference to the hypnotic and concentric sound inspirations. Mutations and accumulation, the creation of new forms of expression, shimmering treatments and swallows, closed harmonies and lo-fi accents: the title refers to a continuous evolution but we don’t know if this is a new beginning for the Ukrainian experimenter based in Vienna or just a temporary passage, a casual return to the inspiration of the initial career. The result is interesting: the distortions and the irritating frequencies create some new hybrid musical evolution, in between some unconventional rhythmic structures and a high voltage travel, full of shocks. The analog plots remind of a mental and refined approach. Either productions are available on free download. The label also released the CD version and a very limited 10” vinyl with tshirt and sticker of Kvitnu (the purchase provided a special 95% discount on the entire label production valid for all 2017).
Zavoloka – Transmutatsia
