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 – PNL
Since 2002 Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Ken Vandermark on reeds have published seven albums of improvisational music. In addition, they have often worked with other great colleagues such as Peter Brötzmann, Terrie Hessels, Andy Moor and Ab Baars. Screen off on PNL Records is their tenth album, originating with the desire for a retrospective on their career. They had the idea to reconvert some old live performances (luckily retained thanks to You Tube and some nonofficial videos uploads). Understandably many of the clips were incomplete recordings with poor video quality. The idea to “embrace the limits of the format” and create a collage with the material found on the net wasn’t the easiest process. Assisted by Lasse Marhaug, a Norwegian producer with wide experience in noise, jazz-rock and extreme metal, the two musicians tried to find inspiration in experimental cinema, namely directors as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Tony Conrad, the generation of structural cinema of the 1960’s, whose experiments had interesting developments in the following decade in the United Kingdom. The audio elements came only from the basic recordings found on the web platform. Every clip is a 60 second edit: this has often originated some radical cuts, edited according to the feeling of the authors and without following a chronological order. From a strictly musical point of view, there is often a jump of several years in the improvisation process and this should have been very funny and satisfying for Nilssen-Love e Vandermark. Thanks to their original stylisation, they created a celebratory, vital and enjoyable document, very engaging in its abstraction. If Lasse Marhaug is on control, we can be sure we will receive some surprises. He goes beyond all the clichés about the lack of “conceptualism” in the metal-noise improvisation world, since he is a musician who trespasses in other fields, in theatre, dance, cinema, installations and videos. This is a direct and original album that deserves a full appreciation, free from frills and perfectly structured.
Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark – Screen Off
