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.
LP – Moozak
The Austrian electronic experimenter Nikos Zachariadis and the French free form turntablist Alexandre Bellenger combined musical skills for this work. The first six tracks on the A side capture our attention with their extreme tonal elaborations, raw and intense, sometimes dilated and insistent in their flux, full of improvisational sequences and noisy interludes. The album was conceived and recorded in the autumn of 2017 during a short residency Bellenger spent in Austria. The eccentric sound compositions are combined with samples and complex manipulations. Even the artwork in this case is the result of complex alterations which consist in using old vinyl covers subjected to a careful manual laser cutting operation, the result of which is that each copy is unique. The geometric interweaving and the paper structures that derive from this meticulous cutting operation perhaps reveal something of the original covers, although the details have been deliberately altered in such a way as to make identification difficult, returning as vague reminiscences of certain moods and shapes. On the B-side of One Hundred Thousand Copies Sold, Zachariadis and Bellenger are joined by Patrick Wurzwallner on drums and Michael Eisl on bow saw, contraguitar (or schrammel) and electronics. The two new additions are both well-known musicians on the Graz experimental scene, and old acquaintances of Zachariadis. In this case the sonic blends become more intricate, free from preset forms, but full of tension and moments of deep, collective vitality. We are not far from free jazz. Maybe we should remember that “the improvisation cannot be improvised”, a funny paradox but also an accurate one, especially in this case, where the approach is softened and the tools used are less canonical than those normally used. Zachariadis and Bellenger deal with an unpredictable but also imagined “battlefield”, limited and simplified in order to stimulate the creativity of the musicians involved.
Bellenger | Eisl | Wurzwallner | Zachariadis – One Hundred Thousand Copies Sold
