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.
12″ vinyl – BIN
Anders Monrad is quite frank about the bizarre combinations that characterize the making of his third album: “These tracks are based on time stretched sounds created using my first, early attempt at programming a granular synthesizer in Pure Data. For this synthesizer, I inadvertently implemented a typical “beginners-error” in the algorithm, by basing the “scroll function” (which reads pre-recorded audio files at varying speeds) on a “control” object, rather than a “dsp”-object. This causes a discrepancy between the control data (which transmits control messages in a “coarser resolution”) and the actual dsp-based algorithm (working by continuous streams of data)”. Paradoxically, the effect these time gaps caused in the sound sequences were not completely useless and had a kind of hypnotic charm, particularly discreet in the case of the highly dilated sounds. This functional mistake created a sort of mumbling, a glitch of the rhythmic structure Monrad used for the first time in a sound design project at the exhibition Apophenia Cloud Travel Apparatus in 2014, an installation by the visual artist Jacob Tækker at the gallery Cph in Overgaden. An undesired disruption produced a controlled aesthetic and musical experiment. The following step naturally consisted in adapting the sounds to this kind of technique. The result was six different tracks. Apart from the granular synthesizer, Monrad also employed the sounds of two other synths developed for this specific research. These additional sounds are included in tracks 2 and 4 (and also in the 6, “Σ k k = 1”, which is actually the sum of all the other 5 tracks overlapping). Overall there is a developed spatial character, but the general atmosphere is abstract and conceptual. The transparent blue vinyl of the edition maybe wants to pay homage to the exhibition by Jacob Tækkera, sci-fi author and creator of alternative worlds. The LP is published by BIN by Jonas Olesen, a Danish composer and coordinator of the music education plan Nordic Sound Art.
Anders Monrad – Apophenia Cloud Travel Apparatus #2
