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.
2xLP – Staalplaat
From first impact, the composer Charlemagne Palestine brings us again to the most vibrant and experimental tradition of modern American music – redolent of names such as John Cage, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and La Monte Young. He has never missed an opportunity to expand his horizons, for example with his historic collaboration with Pan Sonic, Mort aux vaches, with the violinist Tony Conrad, or with Michael Gira, a multi-instrumentalist and leader of Swans. This album, released by Staalplaat Holland, is not a musical collaboration, but the result of a request made to Palestine by the visual artist, inventor and ultra-radical architect John Körmeling. Here the architect acts as the developer of a new instrument that illustrates mathematical relationships.
The title of the album, Ffroggssichorddd, refers to the name of a new and unusual instrument featured in the release. The instrument also features an unusual tuning too and is the perfect medium for Palestine, who is a pioneer of long-form improvisations on harpsichord, harmonium and other neglected keyboard instruments. The music takes inspiration from the universal language of mathematics and Körmeling created a musical system that sets apart the western tuning of classical music and is instead based on square roots, area and volume. This double LP documents performances on the Ffroggssichorddd in Bruxelles, Rotterdam and in Cappadocia (Turkey). It is proof of a well-structured and detailed form of music, one that is also exotic in its own terms. The album features twelve tracks. The b-sides of the two vinyls include extended tracks, “Vibratio For Pythagorean Frogsichord (Rotterdam)” (26 minutes) and Vibratio For Pythagorean Frogsichord (Turkey)” (almost 36 minutes). Finally the artwork, with the typical care by Staalplat, is worthy of a mention: the illustration by Jeroen Erosie comes in a lovely green package, which reminds us of the color of the instrument Martin Bezemer made, supporting the pop and unconventional vein of the developer.
Charlemagne Palestine, John Körmeling – Ffroggssichorddd
