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 – Midira
Under the alias of Tegh, in Downfall, the Iranian electronic sound artist Shahin Entezami sets together some elements of noise and repetitive, charming, melodious ambient loops. It would be hard to imagine without prior research, but the metropolis where the musician is based, Teheran, has an artistic background very open to these experimentations. It’s probably the result of a “history”, which starts with phonography, as the live musical accompaniment or the distribution of recordings with documentaries and films from the beginning of 20th century to finally arrive until now, under the many and complex sound contaminations. For a long time in countries like Iran interest in Western culture and the local music tradition have produced some special artistic mutations (for example, the sound sculptures by Mo H. Zareei or the local underground and electronic music scene). Sometimes it’s hard to define these experiments as mainstream or classicist. These works may be exotic and sometimes aestheticising, but extremely contemporary too. We remember Tegh featuring Kamyar Tavakoli in a work full of developed guitars, synths, added processes and field recordings: if in “Through The Winter Woods” the caesura were dilated, harmonious and evocative. Here in “Downfall I” we find Tegh in solo version, very comfortable in setting the sound overlaps with quiet symphonies, just enhanced by some screeching and buzzing hum, an element present under different forms and modulations in the other compositions too. Maybe the ambient-drone textures here produced for Midira Records are not an epochal hit for the evolution of this music background, already solid and based in any metropolis in the world. However, the release is an authentic cultural-artistic expression and is based on a combination of accurate qualities and characters. This background reminds us to pay attention to the details, to the rigorous organization of the different parts and to the hypnotic overlaps of sound layers and tonal gradations.
