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 – Protagoniste
The clarinetists Xavier Charles and Jacques Di Donato had already worked together in the nineties, releasing also an album, “Du Slavon Glagol”, published in 1996 by Khôkhôt. Now they are back for Protagoniste with fourteen new compositions, where they demonstrate some improvisational passages that capture the listener’s imagination with their delicacy and gentle, sonorous atmospheres. The tracks also present some silences, refined syncs and meditation twists, a result of the musician’s perfect technical control of their instruments. The recordings were made in Mhère, Burgundy (May 2014) and maybe are slightly influenced by the quiet French countryside, because of the lack of artifices and the emphasis on the almost pastoral measured progressions, simple knowledge and modulated introspection. The food the duo presents is home made, but tasty: even when they use some extra-musical instrumentations (hélicoptere, tondeuse à gazon), there are no marks left of sophistication, everything is well amalgamated. Xavier Charles took his first steps in studying the clarinet thanks to Di Donato, who was his teacher, and surely this meeting after many years must have been beautiful (the Protagoniste label is managed by the two artists too). It’s necessary to highlight that unlike some free form music standards, in ILEX, apart from a few exceptions, the single tracks are quite short and seem to be almost some independent developments that explore time after time a specific timbre. In this case we prefer to listen free from conceptualisms, leaving apart the most analytic aspect of this research and focusing instead on the sincere music of the duet, who lead us in a sensitive and timeless dimension, with precise textiles, micro-tonalities and measured movements. The approach of the two composers is never shy or totally focused on technical ability, but at the same time it is very expressive, now more urgent, now more sober, but always in search of a balance between the parts. The mix is so well studied that it’s hard to understand who is exactly doing what. After all, the most important thing is the overall effect.
Xavier Charles, Jacques Di Donato – ILEX
