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 – Black Chrysalis
Dangerous Vision is produced by Black Chrysalis Archives, an independent label born in 2017 focusing on techno and is the last work of the Bolognese Matter, an alias of Fabrizio Matrone, also known as Heidseck. Always familiar with some rhythmic, dark and analog electronics, in the past his works were released by Kvitnu, Le Petit Machiniste and Soviet Media Control. Matrone skillfully makes piercing and machinery sequences: see for example the first track, “Colony”, with its enduring sense of anxiety and its loops, purposfully not solved into a cathartic ending, but still full of a simple purist vital energy. In “Null-O” the evolution is invasive, cut by special effects, gongs and full of weaves and synthetic colors; spatial and hypnotic at the same time, a result of great mastering work by Giovanni “Blob” Roma (from L’Arte Dei Rumori Studio). The first track on the B side clearly shows the references of this first work of the series Imago. Featured with Retina.it, Ruhig and PRG/M, all together known by the name r²π Incursion, “The Preserving Machine” shows a minimalist and essential approach, with a clubbing flavour that would be okay even in the most insubordinate and restless clubs, thanks to an unconventional and beating style. This track has also an interesting black and white video, made by Sebastian Kökow, a DJ, filmmaker and producer based in Berlin. The last track is the title track, the only one in the work where we can find vocal elements and insisting industrial quotes. The work is millimetrically made: powerful rhythmic elements and threatening weaves make this track hyper-vivid. Here the art of consolle and the abstract and beating pulses together make a great mix. This work is a sound exploration we might compare to something blocked in a transitory membrane, a black chrysalis, a temporary inactive ancestral archive, a genetic planning code which is always the same all over the different states of metamorphosis.
Matter – The Preserving Machine (r²π Incursion) [Black Chrysalis Archives]
Matter – Dangerous Vision
