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 – Elli
After playing the guitar in some dark black and doom metal bands in the nineties and working on different electronic music idm projects, fifteen years ago Alessio Santini started his own research on the granular processing of sound and interaction audio-video. In the meantime, he also found a music software company, K-Devices, mainly focused in applications for Max For Live. In Kenter an electric guitar and some acoustic drums are subject to some meticulous manipulations. The treatment is made in a conceptual, rough and digitally distorted way, dense in its constructions, which are full of solids, drones and consistent riffs. The drums in particular are micro-articulated with the use of specific software and also subjected to some granular re-elaborated versions. The process still keeps the warmth and the feeling of a real drum, but the sounds move into lands which are more synthetic and experimental. According to Santini, Kenter is a post-song experiment: echoes of choirs and voices resound in the four tracks, “Ffar”, “Sul Mare Nero”, “Sndaz Majorii” and “Destroy Destroyers”. Over the cuts, there is a bitter tension. The attention moves focus from the environment waves to the insisted noises, and the immediate audio emergencies keep hyper-vivid and beating the climax. This release by Elli Records, the house label founded with Emanuele Battisti, had in its masterplan the goal not to exceed with the multi-instrumentalism. The previous experiences are moderated, due to an abstract application. The work prefers the sound landscapes, the electroacoustic tensions and the qualities of the sounds. Contrary to the most common trend nowadays, the consistence and the length of the sounds are not necessarily dilated. In our opinion, this is a clear style choice, as a result of the desire to surprise the listener and hook his perception. Despite this the listener experiences does not seem short, the whole length of the four tracks is just 15 minutes and 35 seconds, and someone who is used to these works may feel staggered. Santini is a musician who creates his own instruments and this is always exciting, we also hope his work as a software developer may be followed step by step by his new musical proposals. If these are the premises, soon a lot of new material my come.
Alessio Santini – Kenter
