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 – Sub Rosa
Sub Rosa’s staff well knows how the field recording history is rich in its different approaches, and definitely in those experimental enclaves, and is aware of how such techniques have been developed starting from original scientific-documentary stylemes, often then crossing more conceptual interests or serving utilitaristically – au contraire – as raw audio material, highly evocative, for example with film soundtracks. In the label’s poetic ranges it is completely in line, to collect these selected soundworks of the independent director and Thai producer Apichatpong Weerasethakul, author of feature films, short films and installations that in the last decades have won much approval and international awards (Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2001, the Prix du Jury or the Palme d’Or still in Cannes, in 2004 and in 2010, and also the Leone d’Oro nomination of Venice in 2006, to name just the most institutional references related to cultural events with higher resonance). Since 2003 the eclectic author has cooperated with the same sound designers, reminding his audience how much the post-production work is preparatory of manipulations in real time, and drawing attention to the physicality and fragility of the audio and its equipment, in accordance with an asymptomatic union between natural capture audios, soundwalking and more musical and evocative cinematic treatments. There is a curatorial habit – in our opinion – for putting together completely environmental recordings and free of further treatment, alternating arrangements more kinematic (for example “Straight” in Tropical Malady or “The Anthem”), just like recordings related to different backgrounds, deeper and in guitar style (“Intimacy”) or of a serial and dreaming nature (“Memory of the Future”). Even if an authorial movie work has its coherence in these cases it is really difficult to determine if everything is accidental or deeply thoughtful and finally the result of an artistic naiveté or of persistent reflections on musical structures. In itself this is also a possible and very interesting option to understand similar practices and experimental skills.
Various – Metaphors: Selected Soundworks from the Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
