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.
Cassette – Birmingham Record Company
Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells’ performance art is unusual and surprising. The two artists produced a simple and powerful outcome whose sonic implications are very engaging. The performance is also very significant in terms of the physical interaction produced between the two bodies, as in a sort of ‘contact improvisation’, intensified by the use of a specific item, a roll of adhesive tape. The two artists, each equipped with a roll of tape, give life to an unconventional dance, or, if you prefer, an encounter-fight, where they envelop each other in a way that is noisy and uneasy. The fight is convulsive, punctuated by the noise of the tape each unravels and wields with virtuosity and speed. In some moments the contest is aggressive, in others there is a mutual fastening or clinging, a sense of becoming the other or the object. The models of tape used are different and the way these ties are broken is different too: they can be torn one by one, or cut off all together, with a forceful movement. Naturally we could interpret such a performance in a symbolic way and treatises could be written on its meanings, inherent in the duo’s stage direction. The stage is a kind of writing that can never be univocal. Tape Piece cannot be limited to narrow genres (dance, audio art, performing art or some other niche subgenre) or some strictly psychological-behavioral interpretation. The work’s title somehow recalls the avant-garde electronic music of the 20th century, produced with the use of magnetic audio tapes. This is a further piece that tells us how well-articulated and coherent this project is, a work where the choreography becomes sound, with no need of further mediation, in a direct and flawless way. Furthermore, the border between composition and execution is purposefully left undefined, demonstrating an artistic practice that doesn’t privilege the sonic result, but sees this as one of many possibilities.
Andy Ingamells & Maya Verlaak / Tape piece / Kammer Klang / Cafe Oto
Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells – Tape Piece
