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.
10CD Box – Reiger Records Reeks
Here more than 10 hours of sound loops are presented in an elegant 10 CD box. This is Scanning by Roland Kayn. The work was entirely remastered by Jim O’Rourke, always a huge fan of the master from Reutlingen, a fundamental electronic musician and composer. The recordings here date back to 1982 and 1983, years after the period Kayn spent in Italy as a member of the Gruppo Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. In the history of electronic music, the story of Kayn is really peculiar: he began to be well known and appreciated for his unconventional production only six years after his death in 2011. In 2017, Frozen Reeds published A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound, a 14-hour recording divided into 16 CDs. Later in 2018 Die Schachtel reprinted Simultan. The reasons why Kayn wasn’t appreciated and known for his works as an avant-garde composer in his lifetime are maybe the same reasons why he is now particularly interesting to a post-digital audience. Decades ago Kayn dealt with cybernetic music, by lessening the role of the author and being more interested in the generative processes of composition through software. On his own he was able to produce an immense body of works and create sound forms activated only by a system of signals and commands. It’s easy to get lost in the listening, a sort of interstellar journey, even psychedelic at times, but also frozen in its sequences, that yet always retain a choral breath, a live strain, a sensual participation and perception. “Music is sound, which is sufficient in itself”, Kayn used to say. The goal of scanning is to be able to see inside and deeply explore the borders between clarity and vagueness. Kayn manages to do this in an extremely cultured and variegated way, one that is visionary and propositional at the same time. The attempt to shed light on his exterminate sound archives must be praised. His daughter Ilse is undertaking this commitment with the family label, Reiger Records Reeks, which released this work.
Roland Kayn – Scanning
