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 – Transacoustic Research
Imagine for a moment that every musician, before the performance, has also to make their own instrument. This is exactly what happens to the members of The Vegetable Orchestra, an experimental and free form combo that, since 1998, has been performing their own music only with vegetable instruments they design and made. The Vegetable Orchestra was already remixed in 2008 by great techno producers such as Luciano, Ricardo Villalobos, Anja Schneider and Sian and over twenty years has made three long format releases. For this fourth release, Green Album, they launched a crowdfunding campaign on Startnext, placing hope in the good hearts of their fans and platform lovers. Even now these seminal versions show some unconventional sounds, often beating and exotic but always with a touch of experimentalism and taste for improvisation. These eclectic musicians and performers not only duplicate their preexisting instruments, but also invent new ones, sometimes led by the features of the vegetables, sometimes searching for some special timbre or acoustic emission. This is their first studio album and includes 14 different compositions. It’s a world of sounds made by odd wind instruments and different kinds of drums, sometimes crackling and low, sometimes more slippery or tickling and soft. The listening experience goes is involving and hardly predictable. Lopsided synthonizations, hisses, winces, gongs and unconventional frictions: sometimes it seems that some treatments were made with analogue equipment, but this is not the case. Beyond its own essence, which makes it extremely communicative also in the live performances, the vegetable music has its own qualities, its own original sounds and weaves, due to the operational choices made in a technological setting. Making an instrument is a technological fact, even more if you need to make all of them and you have to use some unusual and easily perishable materials. To fill the frame of the many options the love of bio are inspired by, the idea of a really “organic” music could not be missed, a music played and performed by a collective without chiefs or orchestra directors, and where all choices are taken together.
The Vegetable Orchestra – Green Album
