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.
Cassette – Crónica
The Waste Land by Luca Forcucci has been issued in digital recording and audio cassette by Cronica Elettronica and has its origins in a 20 minute soundtrack for a documentary movie. The Italian-Swiss composer and sound artist always mentions the first impulse on this work but is also reserved and doesn’t spread any other details about it. Such an attitude is reinforced by the fact that the six minute field recording, given by the musician himself, doesn’t include any comments or further notes. However, it works as an exceptional amplifier of auditory perceptions and stimulates a kind of precise narration with visual paintings that lead to an “intellectual movie”. We then move to the second composition “Voices from the Coal Mine” and all we know about it is that it is inspired by a coal mine and among the ghosts evoked by the artists we ideally find Alvin Lucier the USA composer who dignified sound installations. Forcucci is an expert in these types of approaches and is careful with the relationships between sound and space, especially in those contexts related to precise typifications. This probably doesn’t push him to express these relationships directly, evolving the site specific methodologies more than documentary aspects and linguistic features also connected to the research work. The limit among these works is extremely weakened and softened with layered, resounding, unstable and grainy sounds which are marked by intriguing and dark sequences. In “My Extra Personal Space”, the flaneurs’ urban drifts and the Baudelarian intimacy work are guidelines which give birth to the modern taste in art or metropolitan matrix – that nowadays is called soundwalking – which can be shaped in sound fields and capturing natural sounds, too (the Coast in Normandy in this). In this we face sound explorations that involve the listener in interesting and amazing sensory reportages.
