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 – Gruenrekorder
During the 20th edition of Kamuna on August 4th 2018, a habitual music event in the Karlsruhe Museum, three different in-situ performances took place. The locations were the project room ßpace, the space Halo ARS and the pedestrian area Kaiserstraße, connected to the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), The first space was given to the sound-artist Lasse-Marc Riek, who in real time presented some quite naturalistic field recordings, mixed with some recorded sounds, in a hyper-vivid combination. The other room, directly run by the artists, in the east area of Karlshrue, was employed for the live performance by Lintu + Røyk. Their set was made with modular synths and they presented a quite raw and experimental kind of electronic music. In the pedestrian area of Kaiserstraße, KITerature gave life to a participative performance called “SYNONiMUS”, while the No Imput Ensemble was in the basement of ZKM under the blue cube. All these sonic inputs were directed to the ZKM, and then re-processed and reused in a sound installation by Yannick Hofmann, Marco Kempf, Ben Miller, Sebastian Schottke and Dan Wilcox. Within the experimental field, the idea is not new, if we think of the anticipations of the Italian theatre post-avantgarde at the end of seventies, the theories on the “Città del Teatro” (City of Theatre) and the FM radio broadcasts of the performances made at several Roman locations and artistic spaces, later promoted at Beat 72. The city is a big stage, especially in the case of the sounds, which are not simply what we listen to on the street, but also consist of their imaginative sets, the ways of the artists who live in that city. The whole complexity of this project is presented in the form of an audio CD, produced by Gruenrekorder, whose release was also supported by the EU funding program, Creative Europe. A single track of 60 minutes can be difficult for most listeners. However, for an accustomed audience, this is the right choice to introduce such a variety of experiences and genres. The work shows the many sides of the experiences involved and their deep aptitude of recombination.
Various Artists – Next City Sounds: Interfaces
