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 – Sofa
This is the first solo album of the Norwegian interdisciplinary composer and artist Tine Surel Lange, an experimenter known not only for her sound production but also for other kinds of creations, installations, performances and audiovisual works. The works presented are dilated and ambient little scores, engaging but never elegiac, full of defined and spatialized sounds. All the works included in this release by Sofa are composed in fifth order Ambisonics, a full sphere surround format that, apart from the horizontal plan, covers some sound sources placed above and below the listener. These were subsequently presented in many different forms due to practical reasons. Tine Surel Lange’s work with this system produces a realistic spatial representation of sound information that originates from mono auditory recordings, usually done with contact microphones, recordings that often boast a very physical and tactile grain, abstracted from their origins. These are materials almost always of an organic nature, somehow remodelled to varying degrees by working on tones, percussion, noise, resonances and vocal layers. Attention is focused in particular on the aesthetics of listening. The sound environments are almost always created with material taken from everyday life and this makes itself felt through a sort of magical realism, emanating a charm tinged with chamber experimentation, electroacoustics and drone music. This approach is best experienced in live performances and in multichannel installations and these compositions have been imitated and reproduced in many places. Even in the most basic stereo decodification and the most minimal passages, it is possible to appreciate the vertical movements of the sound, the special attention to detail and the compelling musical fluxes. In Tine Surel Lange’s compositions, the abstract forms of most of the audio manipulations become almost tangible, in a listening process that is evocative and suggestive. Ambisonic recordings, whose discovery as a technique dates back to the 1970s, have enjoyed great attention in recent times, thanks to their affinity with the world of 3D cameras and virtual reality. Tine Surel Lange is a specialist in this methodology and her work for this album is proof of that.
Tine Surel Lange – Works for Listening 1-10
