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 – Denovali
Mei Zhiyong & Dave Philips first met in Pechino in July 2014. The first couldn’t speak a word in English and the other couldn’t say a word in Chinese. The chance was a first tour together in 18 oriental cities which was then exchanged by David Philips with a planned tour in 20 European cities. During these live concerts a lot of sounds were recorded as the main work by Mei Zhiyong. These sequences were then used by Philips as a source work and the best ones were chosen, distilled and manipulated to create a mix of two uncommon and different styles for both the artists. The so called audio abuse by Mei Zhiyong and her sound ecstasies met – with no room given for confusion – the most structured techniques by Dave Phillips, who is a musician accustomed to immersive and cathartic settings and considers sound as a primary and direct type of communication. The result is that of a decisively amazing album, irritating but finally led back to sound variations that include pauses and restarts, full moments and silences, distortions and accidental recordings, packed noises and finally volume adjustments. The main feeling is that the fluxes are more persistent and blurred in others without forced marked discontinuities, in the name of industrial and boring plots. This last approach is immediately recognizable to the non-specialists of such complex experimentations. According to Urbsounds Collective, an experimental crew that since 2016 has become a distributive platform which published this project “Music is an intrinsic political force of change, expressed in a vinyl LP and digital issues”. As never before this project, the result is cohesive and tangible, with no frills, and raw, but in some ways “intelligent” and extremely radical and difficult, forged to vibrate and strike a chord.
Mei Zhiyong & Dave Phillips – Mei Zhiyong & Dave Phillips
