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.
LP – Auf Abwegen
Tropic is presented by O Yuki Conjugate – a post-industrial/ambient group founded in Nottingham in 1982 – a collection of forgotten tracks, partially unreleased and incomplete, recorded in London during the period 1994-95. The processing and post-rationalising of these contents was only made by Andrew Hulme and Roger Horberry, actual effective members of combo, who are back in business after many variations through the line-up. Finally – within two years 2015-16 – they have been updating these contents, working especially on the most atmospheric and ambient plots. Since the beginning the group has always operated a seminal mixture between electronic and classical tools, following an approach which, even though full of post-punk spirit, always declined toward more kind and environmental treatments, intentionally unclear, partly “synthetic” and partly “organic”. It’s been years in which few really showed interest in such experimentation: today, instead, the whole range of proposal dedicated to soundscapes is constantly growing and Till Kniola’s Auf Abwegen worked particularly well, wanting this release and promoting a tour that brought the project again onto the stages of some of the major European cities (London, Munich, Dusseldorf, Amsterdam, Nijmegen and Antwerp). “The Fate of Less Valuable Animals”, a long suite of 24′ and 37″, immediately convinces us of the consistency of the inspiration, maintained suspended, dreamlike, gloomily seesawing, nearly to underline a state of discomfort in retracing particular trajectories. It couldn’t have been easy to come back to these exact organic shadinesses, too quiet atmospheres and resonances that were forgotten. For example, recordings of tropical rains to which were added delicate percussive elements, gong, synth and other micro-emergencies auditory. Even “Darkness Was Here Yesterday” – that has approximately the same duration as the previous track – is likewise mysterious, unstable, catted through iterated bells, but it is even richer in variations, with very trembling elements and very long pauses, almost silent. So, the release is very suggestive and also the ethnic connotations – never too insistent though consistent – are well placed for a listening free of particularly conceptual elaborations.
O Yuki Conjugate – Tropic
