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 – Setola Di Maiale
Cahier De Petits Coquillages Vol. IV/V is presented in a elegant folding glazed paperboard with photos on both sides. The artwork is due to Erin McKinney. The project is an important addition to the catalogue of Setola di Maiale, an independent label, focusing since 1993 on the promotion and diffusion of unconventional music. The release is due to the partnerships between Alberto Novello, multimedia artist, programmer and digital sound-artist, and Tom Arthurs, composer and trumpet player. Since the beginning, the soul of this music confrontation is easily decodable, based on scratchy concatenations of wind instruments. The many dense and moody passages make the atmosphere very intriguing. This is not enough: the sound sources are numberless and also harsh, full of creaks, snorts, continuous pulses, hisses, trills, tickings, backwashes and thousands of other elements the Italian experimenter, also knows as JesterN in the audio-art circle, has in his personal broad background. Nobody would be surprised if the more open-minded lovers of improvisational music or new jazz might have found the duo worthy of interest. The recordings are the last stop of a summer residence organized by ArtOMI in Ghent and New York. The aim of the event was the creation of relationship between style methods and international music experiences. The electronics on play seems analogue. In the second recording the substance undergoes a nervous condensation, full of glitches and trumpet interventions, first limited and later mixed with accuracy. Everything becomes cinematic and alien, the atmosphere makes you feel like you are in some kind of futuristic noir film. The different interventions of the two artists are so intense and decisive as they are moving parallel on the same way, never having an open contrast of timbres, rhythms and phrasings. The single parts come together raw and sophisticated: abstractions and harsh audio emergencies, repetitions and variations, moments of urban lyricism and scattered schizoid equipment. If some vintage free form style is performed with awareness, the goal is still the confrontation with new different styles, given that an unconventional approach requires a deep knowledge of what the history of music has made so far.
Tom Arthurs & Alberto Novello – Cahier De Petits Coquillages Vol. IV/V
