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 – Gruenrekorder
Kuhzunft-slotmachine is the brainchild of Achim Zepezauer, a musician, composer and organiser of events. It originated as a website project, focused on an image of a child-like slot machine, painted with pastel colours. Clicking on the start button elicits combinations of pre-recordings, each one lasting exactly 45 seconds and placed into three distinct slots. Instead of we the usual images of fruits, stars and bells, we have photos of the artists and the titles of tracks. This vinyl document, released by Gruenrekorder, includes only a selection of the possible recordings related to the different artists. In the online project, new contributions are added with some regularity, making a total of 225 recording and 11.390.625 possible configurations (in February 2019). Despite every single proposal being unique, the result is interesting because it brings us to a common free improvisatory approach. A careful listening approach makes it possible to perceive the connection of different elements and free structures within every specific sound particle, deriving from an inspiration oriented by additional crossings and relations. It’s not the first time Achim Zepezauer makes experiments with unconventional formats; for example, in the past he has worked with radio shows using aleatory characteristics and multidisciplinary contents. Thanks also to an artistic study background, this work can be considered versatile, because it shows his many-sided talents, his passion for drawing, his free form music work, his teenage compulsion as a sound collector and his stochastic conceptualism. Due to the large amount of contributions, the range of stylistic influences are very broad, from free jazz to ambient, from spacey electronics to krautrock, to mention only the more recurrent and recognizable approaches. When we look up the list of the artists engaged with the project, we find some well known names: Jaap Blonk, with his inimitable voice; then Simon Whetham, a field recordings specialist; Jérôme Noetinger from Metamkine; the radio waves experimenter Marta Zapparoli; and John Chantler, here with his synths and refined contemporary lyricism. The substance is great and the listening combinations are extremely varied.
Achim Zepezauer + Guest – Kuhzunft | Slotmachine
