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 – Warm
After Sans Cesse in 2016 and Cluzel in 2018, Mathias Delplanque and Guillaume Ollendorff release a new album under the name Ply, as the last one produced by the label Warm. Listening to the first of the album six tracks, “Le roi gouré”, we immediately perceive an author’s approach, textual and dramaturgical, including some poetical loops full of romanticism, bohemian atmospheres and elegiac songs. A Gainsbourgh-style voice lies behind the sound waves, that are very accurate and sometimes violently conquer the scene (see for example the title track “Rends-toi”). In other passages an elegant and downtempo electronics lead the stylized narration across a double path. From one side, there is a delicate and melodic pleasure, thanks to the presence of electroacoustics elements, as in previous works; on the other side, a contrast, with experimental and gently noises arrangements. A composer, performer and music critic, Delplanque has in the past made releases with labels such as Low Impedance, Cronica e Baskaru. Here he keeps the tension constantly high, with the use of some western style aria, on the edge of post-rock, or with very indirect references to a specific orchestral classic tradition. Following Ravel’s Bolero, in “Rappelle-moi” Ply develop a sort of “composition for orchestra without music”, where the insisting sound choreography leads the weave movement. Maybe their previous experience as “spectral music” musicians influence some passages. The authors focus on analysing the sound’s physical phenomena that occur to create the atmospheres. They also reconsider the importance of the time factor, with their work on the pauses and the reprises, the geometrical caesura and the dilated spaces. Better known as Tsé, Guillaume Ollendorff is always on point. His voice is always searching for a balance between the different parts, a balance that might be erotic too. His attitude is very experimental, but also very chanson française. There are many different influences in the duo and the results are eclectic: elegant, enjoyable from different sides and also coherent and abstract.
Ply – Rends-Toi
