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 – Touch
Bana Haffar was born in the 1980s in Saudi Arabia, but has lived in North Carolina since early childhood. After years of study as a classical violinist she switched to the electric bass and in 2014 to modular electronic synthesizers. Some may see this journey as a planned “deprogramming” of traditional classical systems. Others find it to be a natural, if adventurous, progression. The five suites of Genera, released by Touch, should be taken as an exploration of imaginative zones. These pieces were captured at a live event in May 2019 by the head of the record label, Mark Harding.
Haffar uses many modular synthetizers for her performances and in this show, as usual, gave space to exotisms, oriental harmonies and melodic passages. The composition’s structure is very instinctive, not far from her experimentations at NAMM on a new Moog synthesizer. The musician spends the right amount of time on low and deaf frequencies, tries different sequences of chords and modulations and experiments with the functions and the limits of her musical instruments. Genera overall lasts only 32 minutes. The first section includes some field recordings from traditional Arabic music, mixed with other elements such as synthetic audio emergencies, metallic drops and different deconstructions. As in an unstable radio syntony, these melodies come from afar, seemingly from another world. It seems like a variegated totality of elements might yet find the right place: something vanishes, the atmospheres can, all of a sudden, become ethereal and abstract, with ambient passages; at other times, distant and cerebral. Liquid constructions, whirlpools, whispered drones – it’s hard to understand if everything comes from the synthesizers or if anything is produced by software. But this doesn’t really matter. We preferred to let ourselves go with the music; probably the musician wished this too.
Bana Haffar – Genera
