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 – Errant Bodies
This release by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec is the result of two different sound projects, a live performance in 2010, Outline , and an installation from two years later, e Caressing the Studio. Both projects shared the same guideline: a recording device used as a source of sound. The author claims that the touch, the presence, the proximity, the movement and the matter are all founding elements of these projects too. However, these perceptions can be intensely stimulated and experimented, similar to any mediated listening experience. For a long time, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, native of Ljubljana, has been interested in sound forms near the limit of perception and in the definition of sensitive spaces, on the research of the constant wavering limit between transience and continuous flux. The idea to live in the spaces in the audio ways is often present in his works, with a focus on different elements: the temporary dimension typical of any architecture, the relation between the inside and the outside spaces, the dynamics between the uncertain and the constructed, the constant changing of the circulation of unstable events. This project, released by Errant Bodies, is a compendium of all the above-mentioned practices. The interdisciplinary approach, sound inventions and electroacoustic influences are constantly played and based on a concrete correspondence between the sound artist and the places of the recordings, modulated with different volumes and with a fluctuating and unplanned density and frequency. The sounds ideally and physically describe an imaginary place and are made with the “rubbing” of a recording device between the empty and the full spaces, the surfaces and the objects, following a chosen trajectory and sometimes immediately re-played after the act. Except the first, all the tracks of Outlines are recorded after a rigorous process of preliminary investigation and preparation with the use of a non-performative setting. When a recorder physically produces a sound and at the same time records it, what it keeps doesn’t physically leave the source. It needs a speaker to do so. The result is just one of the infinite iterations started by this kind of correspondence.
