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.
Vinyl – Weather
The name of the duo doesn’t refer to the track’s duration. 11 is the moniker of Jiyeon Kim, a sound artist and pianist collaborating here with the drummer Sangyong Min, another talented musician. The sounds of Snow imprint themselves on the listener, thanks to their improvisational character, full of jazzy veins and delicate harmonies. Together they give life to some airy but controlled sequences, where no instrument in particular rules over the others. The whole flux of the different passages gives the sound a distinctive character, thanks to a cooperative work, which is “vintage” and free form at the same time, based on the assonance and syntony of the rhythms and on the relationship and the encounter of converging styles. The atmospheres are always gentle and muffled; the duo is not searching for any contrast or formal opposition. With no fuss they instill in the music grace and measure, and within their own language they can reabsorb all the virtuosity of the most ethereal and symbiotic free form schools. In the past Jiyeon performed some creative experiments and practices with field recordings, but not much is known about Sangyong Min apart from that he is a sound engineer. Because of the lack of information online and some reticence from the distributor Gruenrekorder, we think that being from Seoul might still introduce some problems in the communication of specific niches. The search for information about the label also didn’t produce results, so it’s hard to fully understand the specific context the five tracks originated within. Nonetheless the listening experience is very pleasant, relaxed and meditative, and the remix, despite being similar to the original, is another proof of the project’s eclecticism, on the edge between different yet contiguous approaches. Take a look also to the elegant video teaser directed by Mihye Cha, shown mainly in black and white and settled in some countryside areas, with the two musicians as protagonists. Snow is definitely experimental, originating from some romantic-conceptual, dreamy and postmodern waves.
111min – Snow
