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 + booklet – RVNG Intl
Theory and poetic sound can combine with the goal of contemplating their seminal nucleus. In Anticlines, Lucrecia Dalt seems to marry this ambivalence, giving life to a sound space made of speculative synthesis and spoken words. Following artists such as Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley and Annea Lockwood, the work shows a high language, however is always accessible to different audiences, from experts to the general public who are maybe unaccustomed to some unconventional sounds. Our listening started with “Edge”: here the lyrics are inspired by the legend of El Boraro, a humanoid creature of Colombian folklore, not very different from the Amazonian monster from the award-winning movie by Guillermo Del Toro, The Shape of Water. Then “Tar”, indirectly questions the condition of the planet, singing of some earth lands where you won’t breathe air but tar. The voice of the experimenter is far and nocturnal and tells about a meeting under the forms of “a touch of atmospheres”. Released by RVNG Intl, the project LP/CD version also includes a booklet, whose texts cover the work Dalt made with Regina de Miguel and Henry Andersen. The back shows that a part of the sales will be given to Tierra Digna, a NGO focusing on the safety of Colombian communities damaged by economical politics which violate human rights and devastate the environment. The alien relics found on Antarctica, the meteorite ALH84001 and the possible forms of life evoked by this discovery inspired the track “Analogue Mountains”. “Concentric Nothings” shows some dense, dark and effective lyrical exercises: here the artist’s touch is “indistinct and impulsive”, as an uninterrupted configuration, an out of reality lesson which aims to “gestures which create some tension with not-existing objects”. Lucrecia Dalt makes her work with the shape of some introverted and conceptualized surrealism. The approach is inspired and multi-sided, the narrations is free between different extremes, releasing a great amount of sensitivity and vital energy.
Lucrecia Dalt – Tar
Lucrecia Dalt – Anticlines
