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 – Elli
In all its many different connotations, silence has always been a theme that is deeply engaging to avant-garde musicians both in the development of theories and artistic approaches. To some of them, silence seems to be an intrinsic component of sound. Others understand silence as a powerful activator of perception, or understand silence according to its rhythmic, structural or spatial functions. With regard to the latter, the contribution neuroscience has offered has been original and unexpected, explaining how an interruption between two sounds might stimulate the brain more than absolute silence. In this album Violent Grains Of Silence for the Elli label, Julien Bayle seems convinced of the impossibility of silence, even inside an anechoic chamber, in this case in the LMA-CNRS (France). The artist chose to isolate himself throughout the summer of 2016, hosted in an artistic residence where he recorded at 17dB, with zero echoes and with audio reflections physically absorbed by the repeated and geometrical structure of the walls. Different reactive and hypnotic structures emerge from the capture of physical electronic noises from the recording system, which were later cut and amplified, working as both basic sound sources and source modulations that could influence preexisting recordings the artist live performed. The compositions are rough and pulsing – rumbles with metal sounds, echoes in between the organic and the synthetic, some audio emergencies which give life to a complex and engaging listening experiences. The work shows no special complacency about the aesthetic result and no exaggeration to make extreme contrasts. Julien Bayle uses the recorded sources as abstract and unconventional field recordings, thanks to the special properties of the anechoic chamber. The lack of #heat# provides sounds that are ghostly in character and that go beyond the usual work on software or modular systems. The result is definitely not silent and we consider this to be cause for reflection on the volume of the audio sources and how the amplification and the manipulation of these might create new, charming audio sequences.
Julien Bayle – Violent Grains Of Silence
