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.
2CD – Gruenrekorder
Christina Kubisch and Annea Lockwood met each other in a different age. It was around 1975 and the New York experimental music scene wasn’t as internationally recognized, but both artists already had solid backgrounds. Christina Kubisch had attended the Milan Conservatory and was developing some fundamental multimedia research with the Italian artist Fabrizio Plessi. Annea Lockwood was a teacher at the Hunter College in Manhattan and was already working with field recordings, focusing especially on the environment, often in partnership with different choreographers, sound poets and visual artists. Their first partnership dated to 1979, a festival in Como, Italy. Together they performed “World Rhythms”, a piece by Annea Lockwood. Since that time, the two artists have not many opportunities to meet again, so when this happened at the beginning of 2017 in Berlin, the idea to work together again was a natural consequence; the result of a mutual respect and understanding. The core point was attention to the inaudible, a powerful fascination for both the experimenters, the key that influences our lives and our perception of the world. Kubisch and Lockwood took a determined and unusual decision: they exchanged their own audio files and let each other mutually choose and mix the audio sources individually developed into a new composition. The two suites originating from this exchange definitely seem different, but at the same time also similar. Lockwood sent her colleague some recordings including VLF chorus waves, solar oscillations, gas vents and earthquakes. Kubisch had to modulate these ultrasonic and infrasonic events to make them audible. The other sources followed a different direction, because they were analog: audio captures taken live and from different cities, following a scheme that may seem more traditional, but at the same time also effective enough and respectful of the qualities of the weaves. However, apparently nothing can be taken for granted. The two composers always keep the listener’s attention high, but at the same time set the imagination free. The psychoacoustics they play are slightly doctrinaire, however they are conceptual and heart breaking.
Gruenrekorder | The secret life of the inaudible | Christina Kubisch & Annea Lockwood | CD1
Gruenrekorder | The secret life of the inaudible | Christina Kubisch & Annea Lockwood | CD2
