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.
LP – Unsounds
For years in Amsterdam, Anne La Berge is a recognized free-improvisation composer and flute player, open at the same time to other genres and styles, thanks to her constant activism in different academies, collectives and musical institutions. In 1999, in the Dutch capital, she did some live performances, Kraakgeluiden, with Steve Heather and Cor Fuhler, where they explored the combinations of personal computers and acoustic and electronic instruments with the use of real time systems developed for the interactive shows. This experience lasted until 2006 and was probably crucial to enlarging her musical horizons and moving her to a new broader vision; not only instrumental but a new methodology which may include samples, synthesized sounds and the use of spoken texts, hyper-vivid in the meticulous electronic processing. Since then, Anne La Berge has continued to work in this research field, putting in relation film sequences, narrative vocal samples and music, until the creation of a new project, an open work written for the ensemble MAZE, of whom La Berge is also a founder member. The work puts together fragmented gestures and bare dialogues and is based on a Max patch. La Berge projected the patch to generate random combinations and shared it with all the musicians involved, who could interact and continuously re-modulate the score thanks to the use of tablets as “animated” scores. Released by Unsounds in two parts, 20 and 10 minutes long, RAW is the result of different unexpected combinations, made in real time by the musicians through random choices in the software. The combinations of the ensemble, the music to play, the samples and the pre-recorded parts to overdub are all elements run by the software. As a result, despite the imprinting of good musicians, the work will be always be different. Dario Calderone on the double bass, Reinier van Houdt on the piano, Gareth Davis on the bass clarinet, Wiek Hijmans on the electric guitar and Yannis Kyriakides on the electronics are an assurance of quality and talent, moving in a land where the structure of the sounds and the focus on the articulations of the parts are definitely essential.
Anne La Berge / Maze – RAW
