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 – Denovali
A cryptic female voice says something in Korean. The narration develops theatrically, following some embracing, warm and disturbing ways. The background electronics is accurately unraveled, with insisting and anxious atmospheres. The multimedia artist Orson Hentschel enjoys musical structures accurately dramatized, where the audio and textual elements together define multi-sided settings and characters. The border between an authentic experimental composition and a contemporary but cinematic project is always uncertain: the first facade has some fascinating, cyber and metropolitan connotations, typical of oneiric introspection and stream of consciousness. The setting is made with no attempt to save anything about futurism and it shows a ritual and cathartic evolution, with a large space given to the synthetic sounds, that are not a mere complement of the non-sense dialogue in an obscure language, if we also consider that the lyrics don’t follow a plot or a specific meaning. The word here has the same value as any other musical element, it’s just a part of many which reflects the development of the work. The idea of this new Denovali release was born when Hentschel was facing a serious state of creative block. So, writing about nothing seemed the only honest way to express himself, with a measured rhythm and with the electronics to complement the spoken performance by Danhee Joe, who made the translation. The contrast between the lyrics and the music should have started some main mechanisms, providing the right support to a creativity mainly audio-visual and combinatiorics. However, the energy is physically palpable and thrills at listening with its more clear melodic forms and in the hidden spaces, in the pauses of declamation and in what it is said, but not understood. Despite being less abstract than former releases, this work is still focused on formal elements and on the language: something becomes something else, repetitive and minimal electronic sounds layers overlap each other and the listener is on a constant edge between illusion and allusion.
Orson Hentschel – Facades
