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.
LP – Persistence Of Sound
The Eccentric Press by Iain Chambers is a project commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln and ABC Radio National/Australia. The former is a local public radio broadcaster of the German Land North-Rhine Westphalia, the latter is a digital platform, well known for its specialized arts and cultural content, its exploration of key themes from science and technology and for its attention to Aboriginal issues and culture. The album is carefully structured from field recordings made in these geographical areas. The mix of audio recordings is inspired by a critical and poetical point of view. The choice to overlap the atmospheric sounds of Wuppertaler Schwebebahn station with the frenetic pace of sewing machines and the sharp sound of mechanical clocks is not exactly a site-specific operation. The aim seems to be about a “field of interests”. The topics are alienating labour, the factory, time spent on a specific task, technologies and life stolen. The two tracks, “The Eccentric Press / Die Exzenterpresse” and “Maudslay Engine”, are both wonderful, using found and sampled sounds. They start with the idea of telling two specific stories – or at least this is our feeling while listening. The author chooses an emotion and makes a link with what he is inspired by; for example, linotypical machines and old IBM computers. The result is some surprisingly lyrical passages. Is an age of industrialization under investigation or maybe is the repelling, mechanical and abrasive nature of labour under capitalism being questioned? Obviously nothing can be taken as granted or referred to specifically. Better to get lost in the charm of infinite loops, the liturgy of the melodic sequences, mixed in the two symphonies with industrial beats and full of slightly dark and menacing field recordings. It is impossible to be indifferent to Chambers ability to build a narrative flux: Persistence Of Sound must be proud of this release, a work that brings together experimentalism and formal results. The stylized and abstract album artwork by designer Matthew Young is also very professional and effective.
Iain Chambers – The Eccentric Press
