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 – Kvitnu
After Big Space Adventure, a double LP published in 2018 for Private Persons, the sound artist Dmitriy Avksentiev, aka Voin Oruwu, now releases ten new futuristic tracks for the label Kvitnu by Dmytro Fedorenko and Kateryna Zavoloka. Native from Kiev, the musician has also performed under the monikers of Koloah and Tropical Echobird. Here he shows some mystical and emphatic, melancholic and emotional atmospheres. As often happens in productions by Kvitnu, the border between experimentalism, dystopian imaginary worlds and trend-driven electronics with techno shades is very soft. Since the first cuts of “Titan”, the dreamy settings suggest some strain and synthetic developments, soon following with “Blur Planet”, a spacey and rarefied track, and then with “Source”, where the sequences are more complex and cinematic, disturbing and reminiscent of chamber music. We need to wait for “Decay Instability” to have some sustained and fractured rhythms, almost similar to an industrial dance floor. The following “Even Mind” begins almost silently, but then shows a spectacularly symbolic reprise, a kind of cosmic, sidereal and machinic lullaby. Between the tracks, there is almost no break. “Limulus” presents some scattered passages and adrenaline beats, playing on the contrast between quiet and chaos, a technique typical of this style. Voin Oruwu doesn’t hide his fascination with sci-fi and we are on an interstellar journey. This is particularly evident in “Escape Mission” and “Ceremony” both of which are elegiac and very musical. The ability to perform several expressions is the factor that will engage the most experienced listeners, who immediately realise what it takes to be invested by several styles. The work “Conceptual Plant” includes the most diversified influences and at the same time some experiments and melodies, ambient and tense passages. Voin Oruwu is good at setting the scene. Even in his less radical performances, he always keeps this double identity, divided between ethereal patterns and hypnotic rhythms, shaded passages and vibrating intensity. Studies From A Starship deserves to be fully enjoyed. Let yourself be completely engaged and charmed by its visionary and sinuous flux.
Voin Oruwu – Etudes From A Starship
