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 – In Paradisum
Philippe Hallais, an electronic musician and Honduran DJ based in Paris, also performs under the monikers Erwan Tarek, B-Ball Joints and Low Jack. Hallais is an eclectic artist who does not disdain live performances in clubs and on festival circuits dedicated to art and digital music. Invited in 2017 by the Center Culturel Suisse (CCS) to perform on the side-lines of a series of events on the consequences of AI to contemporary society, he collaborated on this occasion with !Mediengruppe Bitnik, a Swiss duo of artists and activists who grew up in Zurich between hacker and rave culture. Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo still maintain ties with those subcultures and are at ease involving the French sound artist. Alexa, Who is Joybubbles is the result of this meeting, which will be followed by Alexiety, another installation that will be installed in Berlin at the panke.gallery. The first is a tribute to Joybubbles, a primeval ‘phone freak’ and a counter-cultural icon of the hacking scene, a work that also questions the great influence that mobile phones may have had on contemporary consumer music. The next, which is condensed into three songs, introduces us to the concept of remote execution, the possibility of executing commands and interactions at a distance, which is naturally connected to the automation we are immersed in today. The three songs repeatedly use the name of Amazon’s intelligent home assistant and when played in the presence of one of these systems, they convulsively activate the application. The implicit finding is that a smart home assistant is beneficial not only for consumers, but also for distributors who collect private information about who uses those services. In Awesome!, now part of the catalogue of In Paradisum, a label founded by Guillaume Heuguet and Paul Régimbeau, two tracks are included, “What Do You Wear When Nobody Is Watching? Nothing” and “But Everybody Is Watching”, compositions organized in the manner of a coded vocal choreography, with repeated questions and affirmations, abrasive drones and dissonant beat sequences, in an elliptical flow of pulses, repeated references to a biting, unconventional and refined radicalism.
Philippe Hallais – Awesome!
