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 – Fluid Audio
An album inspired by the psychology of Gestalt and by the topology of the colour blue is definitely unusual, despite the fact that other artists, musicians and philosophers have also been enchanted by the charm of this most spiritual of colours. However, there is no special need of some abstract theoretical work to realise what emotional fields Bill Seaman wants to stimulate. This is a dark and melancholic work, hopeless in many parts, which provides a feeling of fervent affliction. The packaging design is very refined, enriched by 20 photos printed on Fujicolor crystal archive paper, and by 6 double-sided vintage prints that include track titles and poetry along with page inserts from antique psychology books (Psychology in Service of the Soul, New Concepts of Hypnosis, Introduction to Experimental Method in the Social Sciences). The titles of the tracks, almost always long and descriptive, are clearly inspired by treatment or recovery locations (“room passages, memories of motioning, repetitions, similar but different”, “time refractions, physical remembrance, distances and touch”, “signals and body language, hands, the clock of tears, code housing, subtle shifts, in the light”). The general atmosphere is mostly dark and slow, with delicate piano passages by Seaman, in dialogue with electronic samples and precise percussion. The work features contributions from Wei Ping Lin on violin, David Rothenberg on clarinet and Sid Richardson and Tim Bjorklund on electric guitar. Then, quite surprisingly for us because we would never guess from listening, the entire recording is edited by Seaman in Ableton Live. In addition, Seaman does a great job as a videographer, and his interpretation on Vimeo of the first track we mentioned is, formally speaking, very elegant. The work demonstrates a poetic effort and also a social commitment to explore mental health issues. But sometimes reality and fiction have soft borders, and this could be another good lesson this work is leaving us.
Bill Seaman – The Topologies of Blue
