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 – Dialogo | Cramps Records
Italian Label Dialogo’s series of reissues from the catalogue of Cramp Records continues with Bird and Person Dyning. Cramp records was one of the most important underground labels in Europe during the 1970s and was founded in Milan by Gianni Sassi, Sergio Albergoni and Franco Mamone to provide a platform for avant-garde artists and releases that couldn’t find a home within the ‘traditional’ record industry. Bird and Person Dyning was composed by Alvin Lucier, an American experimental music composer, sound artist and founding member, along with Robert Ashley, David Behram and Gordon Mumma, of the Sonic Arts Union. Originally released in 1976, it was Lucier’s first solo effort and is still considered a visionary work today. Although at first we may think the album title contains a misprint, this is not the case. Dyning is a shortened version of heterodyne, a word used within the field of radio wave engineering propagation to describe the phenomenon that occurs when two sound waves are mixed, resulting in two new signals one at the sum of the original two and the other at their difference. Lucier’s focus was on exploring scientific theories about the physical properties of sound and this work serves as a sort of manifesto on how an artist might use and express different tones. The tones in Bird and Person Dyning come from two different sources, the first is the electronic chirping of a decorative bird, the second is from the feedback created by a binaural microphone and a stereo system. These sources then depend on the position of the listener within the space, who change and control the frequency of the feedback by moving or changing the position of their head. The work conveys a sense of intimacy, an intimacy that, like its composer, is truly unique.
Alvin Lucier – Bird and Person Dyning
Alvin Lucier: Bird and Person Dyning (2009)
