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 – SVS
This release is produced by SVS, a label found in 2013 by Benedikt Brachtel & Daniel Hermann-Collini, a project focused on artistic residences and on a platform created for the participants. Zoë McPherson, a half French and half Northern Irish experimenter, currently based in Brussels, presents an album highly characterized by transmediality, thanks to a partnership with the video-maker Alessandra Leone. The rarefied and harsh obsession is a meeting of fascinations between the organic and the electronic, some ethnic traditions and some digital derivations. In this work the contribution by Leone can’t be just limited to an engaging visual complement. The combination of the sound sequences, the songs, the cat’s cradle hand gestures, the fingers and the bodily gestures, and the weaves originating from threads in an abstract and conceptualized bondage, clearly show the inspiring ideas of the work. McPherson imagined “a native of the future”, with a mix of elements such as generative animation, motion capture, dance and performing art, with the mutual partnership of choreographers, dancers, costumers and 3D technicians, plus the musicians and the sound engineers who worked on the live shows. Alessandra Leone followed this vision and well managed to add images and movements to create a complex art project that otherwise would have been only audio-virtual. The seven tracks of this dreamy journey are full of inspiration and compose an ethno-musical puzzle on the edge on eclectic mixes, world music and strong rhythm. The sound scores are full of dense space suggestions and mechanized cadences, effective vocals and conceptualized shocks. “Tell me the story”, the author viciously whispers on spoken words in the first track, “i. Sabotage Story (unknot opening)” and the narration shines as holy, hypnotic, multiform and trippy, or otherwise as unhealthily noisy and rhythmical in “Komusar (moving)”, where the primitivism is stressed. In other passages the electronic experimentation seems predominant, but it’s still soaked with a strong lyricism and an archaic musicality.
Zoë Mc Pherson – i. Sabotage Story (unknot opening)
Zoë Mc Pherson – String Figures
