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 – BAU / Sussidiaria
Two main tracks of 20 min 34 seconds and 20 min 11 seconds give birth to the latest performance of Forbici di Manitù (Manitu Rossi, Vittore Baroni and Gabriella Marconi) entitled “GPS”, that is Gigantic Paradigm Shift, and “Gaps”, or Global Art Participation Systems. The edition is included in the planned annual art issues of the Cultural Association BAU in Viareggio, which since 2004 has collected signed, numbered multiples by national and international artists. The originating idea of this publication is a “system of global participation”, a positioning plant that leads towards utopic destinations and thus ideally drags up from an international underground net, experiences of the last century from the Patafisica to Fluxus and from the Mail Art to the Luther Blisset Poject. Forbici di Manitù are not new to a “tactile” approach to their productions and in this case they feel at ease when introducing the transparent vinyl record with a circular cover, illustrated by Emanuela Biancuzzi and with a graphic layout by Elisa Landini and Virna Zampolini. BAU has published 180 copies in its issue 14 whereas the other 120 are singularly available or issued in a digital version on Bandcamp of Sussidiaria, a well-known label of Reggio Emilia.
The trip gets us ready for “a huge paradigm shift”, even if musically it still lies in a quite melodic and wrenching exotic space, coming from the epics of the 90s when the passion for vintage brought to light mannerist musicalities and the dawn of electronic music. If the claim is “Don’t change the rules, just change the game” maybe it could have been more reasonable to expect much more vicious, contemporary and unpredictable mixes. However, with Forbici di Manitù it is much better to get lost in small robotic and sidereal refrains of the second quoted track which maintain a prog ecumenical taste, consisting of texts, modal interactions and finally involving synthetic pop.
Le Forbici di Manitù – GPS / GaPSt
