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 – Swarming
The hyperrealistic artwork with a twelve page elegant booklet immediately grabs our attention. Friche: Transition is the first collaborative project of Eamon Sprod and Eric La Casa.. Sprod is an Australian sound artist working for almost two decades; La Casa is an experienced French experimenter and field recorder. In Spring 2015, they spent a week making recordings in areas in the northeast of Paris and over the canal Ourcq. These are areas that are mostly full of garbage, spaces of waste located within the city. They can be considered as alien outposts where it’s possible to listen to the wheezes of a contemporary metropolis regurgitating its own development. Behind a continuous hiss, the weave of the first “transition” is basically made of small buzzes; dogs barking; and piercing audio emergencies; noise made by small movements and by the wind; whistles and crackles. In the following section, the alternation between silence and sound sets a different perception of the space, with a larger presence of machinic elements. But this is just a fleeting impression, because the nature of this indistinct rummage consists of moving inside an enormous variety of dull and dark sounds. In our imagination, the artists are guides walking over a slow and deep, cathartic travel in some difficult lands. There are also rolls, liquid sounds or sounds produced by materials burning, metallic or glass resonances. It’s possible to obtain a list of audio recordings from the garbage, a sum of vibrating data, which is given a certain development (we don’t know if it’s the result of some post-production work or just the raw recordings). The final result is outstanding; the duo is able to transform something from everyday life belonging to a still and depressing environment into an engaging, mysterious and unforgettable experience. We are next to the border of a huge city: its undifferentiated whispers talk about what is just residual, functionless, just deaf sounds and putrid substance. Is this still music? Is it art? Is it social commentary under poetic forms? A clear answer is not possible, or, actually is not convenient: in some cases the vagueness offers more resources and shows us all the ambiguity of everyday life, which cannot simply be reduced to formulas, discourses and rational analysis.
Eric La Casa + Eamon Sprod – Friche : Transition
