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 – Le Cabanon
Written, produced and mixed in the Northeast of Madagascar by Clovis Lemée, a musician and co-director of Cabanon Records, aka Horla, this LP is a tribute to the savage nature, animism and mysterious essence of this charming land, where phantasmagorical visions, strange rituals and magical primitivism are a poetic constant. The making of Fantômes took about two years. The composition’s style follows rarefied and cutting-edge free jazz, where we can find strong local and tribal elements, full of different crossings, rhythms and harmonies. “Opium quartet” starts with a repeated trumpet note and dissonant, granular sounds, but is also hypnotic, dense and swinging. The following “Bois-Pierre” is more nervous and rhythmically variegated and has a dreamy cadence that engages the listener in a blast of drums and obscure sequences. “Jumbo score” is once again a rhythmic and slightly tribal composition: full with animal sounds, dark and lost in space, deaf echoes. “Haschich jazz” takes a polyphonic approach and includes a lot of sound sources, highlighted by crossed recordings of evocative church choirs. Horla often makes use of random strategies, which he sets up with a certain number of prearranged variables, with the result that the microphone recordings, the acoustic instruments and the synths are basically impossible to distinguish. The editing of each track is accurate and challenging, as in, for example, “The coconut fall”, a polished score that is harmonic, elegiac and slightly melancholic. “Qui sont ces fantômes” is also quiet, based on the repetition of a simple chord, this time with a harpsichord. “Palissandre spleen” is the shortest track of the album, slightly longer than two minutes, a mix of acoustic recordings and synths from a stylized xylophone. The following “Veillée pour les morts” softens with a double contraposition, with swing and softened treatments on one side, and lopsided rhythms on the other. “Frame-Océan” is the final track, and here also we find melodic constructs and improvisational rhythms, including tonal scrapings and background noises
Horla – Fantômes
