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 – Own Release
The themes of introspection, transformation and renovation were already inspirations for Vitor Joaquim’s previous release Impermanence, and for his project HAN, in partnership with Emídio Buchinho. His new release Nothingness, a solo project, is a poetic reflection on how beings, things, sensations, feelings, thoughts and situations come into the world and die. Here and now is the moment where we can really live. His sequences flutter, unstable and unpredictable, sometimes with tickings, hisses and different samples, with moments of absence or more “ambient” segments. The work is in constant movement, including pauses and restarts, moments of standstill and others that are highly evolutionary. Obviously, we are in the lands of deep listening, but we feel the influence of the acousmatic culture and the approach is quite abstract, even if Joaquim tends to make an additional filter of these influences, and tries to push the listener to focus more on the message, in a penetrating but neutral way. When following this principle, it’s hard to find other directions; there is nothing left here to reassure or lead the listener. It’s necessary to go with the flow. If the technology is fundamental to the mix of the different sources of sounds, it is not the main point to refer to. Piano, vocal, keyboards, electronics, guitar, buzzes and low sounds, and the samples from a shortwave radio and a 1970s stylophone: these are the instruments used by the Portuguese artist. Joaquin is a researcher of computer music at Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts – CITAR – at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, where he also works as a teacher. If we want to use a short simplification, we can say that most of the elements that define the ambient, drone and glitch genres are skillfully played with here in an elegant and reactive mix. But these influences and references are nothing new for Joaquim, since his work was based on different fields, sounds and video art, dance, theatre, installations and cross-media platforms.
Vitor Joaquim – Nothingness
