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 – Staalplaat
This album is a precious release, a document of the historical installations of the Staalplaat SoundSystem, a sound artists’ collective whose main members are Carlo Crovato, Radboud Mens, Jens Alexander Ewald and Geert-Jan Hobijn. The selected projects in Sound Installations are four for every vinyl side: “Floating Islands” (2004), “Station to Station” (2008), “Een, Twee and Drie” from the series Compositions, (2013) and “Plan C”, “Composition Deux” and “Composition Trois” (2014). It’s easy to get lost with these sonic activists; they can give new life to everyday items and make unique, ephemeral creations that only last for the length of a specific exhibition. They are the ideal artists to follow the happenings that took place in the sixties, just in a more specific and structured way than in the past. The album is a limited release of just 300 editions, but it shows an experimental and poetic vision that cannot be limited just to the insiders’ circle. This unconventional approach is already moving from audio art niches to more mainstreams lands. Now these combinatorial practices are everywhere and are influencing some imaginary worlds that were once far removed from this kind of taste and sensitivity. This is a very important element, which proves how the multidisciplinary, the evanescent and the ephemeral have moved to other cultural forms. This is not just a trivial matter, because if you work in these landscapes, you need a working compass to decode the quality of the poetics you inhabit, going beyond a simply functional analysis. For example, in “Station To Station”, the noises from passing trains and from the situations these passages cause are amplified in real time, but at the same time it’s easy to be conquered by a bike parking spot, thanks to the sounds originating from different small bells. Any metropolitan space has its own poetics, as many know. For example, in Rome during the post-avant-garde years, a square, a beach or a subterranean parking spot could become a location for artistic practices. Looking back at the age of early performance art, we can’t forget the clientele of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich or particular New York performances of the sixties, which were located inside warehouses or other industrial spaces not intended for such activities.
