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 + book – Audiolab
Harkaitz Cano, Jose Luis Espejo, Yannick Dauby, Xabier Erkizia, Mikel R. Nieto, Luca Rullo, Alex Mendizabal and Asier Gogortza are the sound artists who summarized the work of two seminars which happened in 2008 and 2013 in the ARTELEKU centre, later unfortunately dismissed, in Donostia, San Sebastián. The first workshop was coordinated by Yannick Dauby, the latter one by Jose Luis Espejo and Mikel R. Nieto. Both had the goal of analyzing the sound landscape and highlighting the sounds which were significant in the specific geographical, cultural and social context for their abundance or for their absence. This took several years. All the selected material was later collected and set together in this CD. The release is accompanied by a 32 page, dense book of texts and images in Basque and Spanish. The booklet and the twenty selected tracks openly show the multidisciplinary attitude, more related to the “anthropological” aspects of audio research through field recordings and with small space for the aesthetic sides. It is possible to listen to the voices of a public announcement, the recordings of some popular music or a football game, the voices of citizens meeting in some public spaces, and also political slogans, the noises of fireworks during some village fairs and claps, whistles and even the Gymnopédie No.1 by Erik Satie. It’s not relevant now to discuss if this is music or not, such as attempt is not even intellectually constructive, for who believes the field recordings are absolutely something else. More poetic is trying to decide if these “documents” have some musicality or significant listening moments, that might tell us something about the genius loci of a specific environment. Some researchers think the respect for a place, the decoding of its more intimate and also superficial nature, being integrated with it, means listening to the voices, the noises and catching their essence. Obviously today, in an always more media-related reality, this kind of analysis is not easy. What makes a rural or urban area distinctive today? Has this some relationship with the everyday life of the people? Can we be not scared to highlight the quality of some specific identity in a historical moment where on these themes a very dangerous game is played for the contemporaneity? The attempt to question all of this is already a success for this kind of release, based on the paradoxes of different theoretical settings.
