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 – Spekk
The third album by Andrey Kiritchenko on Spekk immediately engages the listener thanks to its grace, attention to details and little harmonies full of acoustics treatments and orchestral characters. “I let the music be the weathervane of my personality, free from cliché, monosyllables and literalness.” The artist discloses the secret of his new formula. Despite the abstraction, the absence of emotions, the chaos and the minimalism leading the weaves, sometimes the winning factor remains open to any occurrence, freeing the sounds from rigid structures and giving space to a more honest and emotional approach. Overt is mainly made of sensitive phrasing, but with the obvious presence of electronics, mixed with some impulses typical of contemporary classic music. This production is very different from Kiritchenko’s last ones, a rigorous experimenter and the founder of Nexsound Records. In the past the musician has always alternated sudden changes, moving from rock to electronics, from indie-pop to electroacoustics, from free-improvisation to techno. Moreover, the Ukrainian master is the current director of the international festival Next Sound for advanced music and the digital arts. This manifold disposition creates some engaging hybrids: it’s hard to collocate these tracks, made by different elements such as old-fashioned consonances, chamber knowledge and eclectic counterpoints. The transgression of some rules has almost moved Kiritchenko to a more aware and fluid state of knowledge, a sort of reverse process that is productive and bright, with an authentic musical imagination built on episodes but at the same time made with cohesive and communicative structures. Nothing seems left to chance: the entire project resounds with a reassuring complexity that shows a serene narration, with a mix of rhythms and melodies, repetitions and breaks. All the sound elements engage the listener in a complicit and immediate way. With a sound palette so broad, the work is open to different states of soul, with various tones and an unusual charm.
Andrey Kiritchenko – OVERT (Album Preview)
