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 – Research and Waves
The Berlin label Research and Waves, an artistic project curated by Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Maria Karpushina, Gustavo Méndez Lopez, Norman Neumann and Henrik Nieratschker, released a twelve inch vinyl composed of words, a sort of manual for DJs, which can be used to create an artificial dialogue. ɅV (the phonetic transliteration for on/off) is for Andreas Bülhoff and Marc Matter, the creators of this very special work, a post-digital version of sound-poetry, with thirty-two monosyllabic words on each side. The words were collected during the winter 2018/19 from the website of the New York Times and from a subforum named Politically Incorrect. Two synthetic voices declaim the words and the platforms taken under consideration reflect the extreme opposites of the current online debate, on the edge between mainstream liberalism and reactionary subculture, formal and informal language, journalistic approach and chitchat. ɅV is also considered by the authors and the editorial collective as a starting point for Attune, the online platform of Research and Waves that explores and feeds sound processes and gestures, focusing on practices of remixing, sampling, cutting, mashing, quoting, covering, morphing and fading. This also activates an intercultural debate on several forms of oppression, from racism and white supremacy, through to patriarchy and neoliberalism. Can words be neutral? Clearly not, but a lot depends on what neutral is meant to be. Language is not something static; it is in continuous evolution and the language contexts the speakers and the writers employ are not neutral either. Language can also never be considered neutral from a political point of view, because the narration of what the reality seems to be is always changing and changes according to our perceptions and daily actions. What needs to be done at this point is to join the dots between words and their sources, the fragments of uneasy speech about the state of society, subject to viral assaults at the inner core of language.
Andreas Bülhoff and Marc Matter – ɅV / A Sonic Writing Tool
