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 – Gruenrekorder
Today it seems to be commonly accepted that every city owns a sound DNA apart from exclusive sound experimental enclaves, which sometimes haven’t brilliantly expressed or made popular peculiar contents. However, for a field recordist, the concept of urban audio-genoma can be modulated in different ways. It is the artist’s sensibility, addressed from a peculiar starting approach, to give coherence and quality to the research, transforming it into a work of art as the final result of a complex and sophisticated sensuous experience with psycho-geographic and documentary traits. In 2014 Katharina Klement spent nine weeks in Belgrade collecting auditory catches in different areas of the city and interviewing people on the setting of those places. What made Klement more enthusiastic are the various outskirts of the Serbian city, limited areas whose borders can benefit from sudden sound transitions. Noises and feedback with their sensuous poetic chains give birth to meaningful interactions with traffic, human presences and the perception of time which seems itself to follow circular geometries and plots. Starting from the artist’s own apartment, the city is divided into eight concentric circles and every ring has its own seminal layered score. Then the raw and elaborated selected recordings are all mixed with eight sound channels, each connected to a loudspeaker, in order to restore a sort of metropolitan density to all the carefully selected materials. On the CD it is of course possible to listen to a stereo version of this complex sound happening, even though Katherina Klement , who is also an appreciated free form pianist, did not lose the opportunity to present an wholly live version in Vienna, in December 2016 at the Alte Schmiede Kunstverein in Schoenlaterngasse 9.
Gruenrekorder – peripheries | Katharina Klement
