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 + book – Raster
With the unusual title ‘OpticoAcoustic Oracle’, Greek sound artist and aural experimenter Thanasis Kaprouliasalias, alias Novi_sad, presented an audiovisual project in the ancient city of Olympia on the eve of the flame lighting ceremony for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games. ΚΕΡΑΥΝΟΣ is the title of the five compositions presented for the occasion. These compositions follow the path of an acoustics discourse marked by the changing relationships between sound, light, architecture, nature and image. They take inspiration from ancient Greek mythology and one of its eternal symbols, thunder, and also from its supreme deity, Zeus. This celebration of one of the most important global sporting moments is supported by intense coloured laser lights and musical pieces that are far from the mainstream pop or classical styles typical of such events.
Each composition is named after one of the continents and ambient sounds and audio recordings from the corresponding geographical areas were used: Oceania (Tarkine forests), Asia (Okinawa), Europe (Ancient Olympia and Iceland), Africa (Uganda, Botswana and Namibia) and the Americas (Amazon rainforest and Niagara Falls). Perhaps Novi_sad is fascinated by the mystery of a disappearing world. A symbolist postmodern artist, he conjures up a world populated by emblems, supernatural creatures, ancient fears and inexplicable forces. It is a total surrender of the senses and the power of the soundscapes evoked here impress with soft and ambient recordings, or at other times with noises, full sounds and melodies. Even the title, ΚΕΡΑΥΝΟΣ, with its clear allusion to thunder, actually refers to the laser lights that illuminate the sky during the performance, drawing the outlines of the five Olympic rings, continents, figures of athletes and mathematical symbols. The swarming electronics are tense in “Oceania”, while both “Asia” and “Africa” contain harmonic flows, fluid sequences and deep, meditative tones. In “Africa” Kaproulias opts for more musical constructions articulating the field recordings into something more orchestral and repetitive. Then comes the grand finale “America”, a very dense and dynamically dark composition.
Novi_sad – ΚΕΡΑΥΝΟΣ
