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 – Shelter Press
Perceptual Geography, a musical project by Thomas Ankersmit released by Shelter Press, is a long suite, concentrated into a single track of almost 40 minutes. The work was designed to be used in live performances, commissioned in 2018-2019 by the CTM in Berlin and by Sonic Acts in Amsterdam. The piece is a tribute to Maryanne Amacher, the American composer, pupil of Karlheinz Stockhausen and collaborator with John Cage. The artist, who passed away in 2009, is also well known for being the partner of Serge Tcherepnin, the inventor of the iconic 1970s analogue synthesizer the Serge Modular. This instrument is now used by Ankersmit, who subjects everything to the amplification and spatiality of an equally famous GRM Acousmonium. Compared to the other synthesizers of the time (the Moog and the Buchla, for example), the Serge Modular adopted a somewhat different and more open philosophy, allowing the manipulation of the various modules in unusual and creative ways. An important choice in the composition was to work on otoacoustic emissions, sounds produced by our inner ear when it responds to a sound stimulus, with the intention of collecting information to be sent to the brain. The author therefore explores different “ways” of listening: not only what sounds are heard and when, but also how and where the sounds are experienced, options that a diffusion through the Acousmonium certainly makes richer in nuance and possibilities. In an at home playback, the recommended listening is through speakers and not headphones, possibly at a high volume, an action capable of generating additional tones inside the listener’s head. Maryanne Amacher was the first to theorize the musical use of such psychoacoustic phenomena: so called “ear tones”. Psychoacoustics in musical composition is a field of knowledge that is still little explored, after many years of research there is still a lot of experimentalism in place: Ankersmit in live performances has to tune his instrument to the resonant characteristics of the space, so that the sounds activate the structure, traveling through the architecture and setting it in motion. His constructions combine intricate sonic details and pure electrical power. It is a sound experience that is extremely physical and spatial but which, at the same time, through a deliberate and creative misuse of the equipment, also activates mental images and personal perceptual passages.
Thomas Ankersmit – Perceptual Geography
