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 – Kontrans
Produced by Kontrans, Tomomi Adachi and Jaap Blonk are extraordinary improvisation experimenters, two real specialists in the interaction between voice and electronics. In a video released in 2013, the Japanese artist shows his actions with the simple and naive question: How can you find meaning in sound? The answer is somehow implicit: there is none. Also the discussion about who might have the best instrumental technique isn’t very interesting for Adachi. “The voice is my own thing,” he explains, “using the voice I can discover new sounds and work with history at the same time.” There is also a clear reference to the tradition of sound poetry. The two performing artists began to work together in 2004. They played in different locations between Tokyo and Amsterdam. In their performances, they use many elements: words, fragments of sounds, whistles, clicks, scrapings, gongs and other sound manipulations, which become in their live shows a hypervivid mix of voices and special instruments. The voice can be provoking or aggressive, can tend to a didactic hilarity or towards moaning. Elements of some sounds, onomatopeia, words and noises lacking of any significance remind us of the Dada movements and the Grammelot culture, and also of gibberish, a dynamic meditation process used to free the mind with the surrender to a transcendental dimension. Asemic Dialogues has only two tracks. We find that the reciprocal relationship between the instruments and the guttural sounds is very insistent and liberating especially in the second piece. However, both can be defined as two very good examples of non-semantic poetry. The unexpected goals, born unawares during the creative process, are also due to a mediation, a crossing which is definitely not too much codified but it’s a mix of heterodox virtuosity skillfully managed in the final interpretation. Despite their long experience together on many experimental stages here and there, this is the first album from the duo. We are sure it won’t be the last one, because the power of expression of this combo is immediately clear to the lovers and also to the beginners of the genre.
Tomomi Adachi & Jaap Blonk – Asemic Dialogues
