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 – Crónica
Graeme Truslove from Glasgow, is in the spotlight for his Crónica Electrónica and his album Intuited Architectures, which is divided into six different mainly electronic and electroacoustic tracks. The limits and the fusion between these two different approaches is at the very basis of the author’s research. He is prone to audio-visual compositions and uses his laptop to take part in collaborative projects and participations. All the presented compositions display a double performative-algorithmic action together with a constant attention to the succession of sounds and synthetic timbres which are integrated in complex and well-supported time passages. What is important, apart from the tonal scales are also the intervals, the time gaps, the grainy mellowness of a lot of treatments, the contractions, the restarts, the ruckus and the concise angularities. All the electroacoustic equipment is thus included, together with digital sound pads and ultra-contemporary lyricism and spaces. The tendency is dynamic and the use of different sound sources makes the range of the presented compositions pleasant and airy. These should not be new to his followers from contests, cultural exhibitions and experimental festivals. The dissonances the organic and electronic sounds, the scraping modulations and the whole original manipulative processes have given birth to a range of expressive possibilities and unmeant combinations. At the same time the meticulous positioning of single sound impulses is altogether part of continues sequences, active settings and coherent plots. Intuited Architectures represents for Truslove a kind of closing up, the chasing of two extremes that in “Strata”, which is the final and longest track in the album, add delicate and nervous guitar chords. The guitar is the instrument of which Truslove is the master and its sounds are free from mobile and liquid sequences that don’t lack energetic passion and well codified correspondent features and performative style.
Graeme Truslove – Intuited Architectures
