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 – Amorfon
Yoshio Machida is a prolific experimenter and a recognized artist in the free form enclave. Constantin Papageorgiadis is a Belgian musician and sound engineer in love with vintage analogue instruments. Together they present an interesting project made with the SYNTHI 100 owned by the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music of Ghent University. The synthesizer is part of a series designed and made in the Electronic Music Studios Ltd. (EMS) from 1974, a production of just 30 units. These valuable consoles were employed by some giants of contemporary composition, as for example Karlheinz Stockhausen (in Sirius), Eduard Artemyev (he used this model in the soundtrack of Stalker, a visionary and dystopian movie by Andrej Tarkovskij), or for the BBC in different sci-fi shows (Doctor Who, Blake’s 7 and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and by some postmodern technoheads, such as the Aphex Twin and Jack Dangers by Meat Beat Manifesto. So now it’s the two specialists’ time to experience the joy and the pain of such a massive piece of equipment (the modules are over two meters long). The album doesn’t have any further modification or editing. But the SYNTHI 100 permits infinite modulations, thanks to its many parameters, including 12 oscillators and 8 filters. Under the brief and conceptual forms performed by the duo, the synthesizer’s parameters release their full potential in synthetic, space and generative weaves. What we get is a hypnotic alien testing, full of the charm created by a meticulous application and by some sidereal iterations. But the work owns a very strong musical soul, enriched by an oblique poetical narration, that goes beyond extreme sound manipulation and excessive looping repetition. The sequences don’t work according to some abstract audio-abuse logics or to some retro-future exoticism trend. Here the focus is on a complete and independent use. Any track shines from its own single elements and intuitions, shocks and analysis. The work can be almost considered the work of a playwright, fragmented and elusive, but the principle of its own intelligibility can be found nowhere else but in itself.
Yoshio Machida + Constantin Papageorgiadis – Music from the SYNTHI 100
