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 – Kota
For the catalogue of Kota Records, an album designed as a “musical maritime trip” is already on the shelves in the ambient, experimental and sound collage sections. It is divided into 4 compositions which are the fruit of Vlad Dobrovolski’s gentle mastery. He is a sound artist born in Russia in 1974 who then moved to Japan where he directly experienced their musical tradition, particularly inspired by the ceremony and culture based on the Sun Worship of the Far East.
The project, which is abstract and refined, refers to a research field for which the musicality is central if supported by used concepts and linguistic structures with a stressed aestheticism and beatific syntonies. The art aims to keep together the refined and extremely widened exoticisms and electroacoustic sound emergencies. This is also provided by the beautiful cover by Dmitriy Gorbas, which keeps this coy and vintage ambiguity connected to photography
and painting dealt with in neither a naturalistic nor concise and abstract way. Among the grooves of these elegant scores there are space influences and sidereal plots as well as the dreamy plots with no jumps making the listening extremely pleasant. This also gives back warmth to all those places which were elected by the author as inspired by the absence of people and in which this gap can create a purely contemplative and disquieting silence. It is not by chance that Dobrovolski states “there is a sort of continuity in all my works. In the sound and even in the cover design with boats, sea, people, there is the warm light sounds of the sun.” However, TThe Drums of the Fore and Aft is absolutely involving in its hesitations, shyness and melodic winks, based on a strong background including naturalistic and organic settings aiming for the sound itself to transmit intuitions, awareness and the idea of the artist as a sensitive and passionate human being.
Vlad Dobrovolski – The Drums Of The Fore And Aft
