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 – Concentric Records>
Produced by Concentric Records, this new release from Tobias Freund immediately grabs our attention with its Fellini reference on the cover, showing the actor Marcello Mastroianni in La Città delle Donne. “I have movies in my head”, says the German musician and each of the eight tracks represents a scene from a short, fictional movie. At times these tracks create a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere, but there are also more graceful dreamlike moments. Another celebrated director, Ingmar Bergman, once stated, “No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls”. Creating sounds that evoke a wide range of sensations and emotions like a film flowing not only inside our imagination but also in our senses, is no mean feat. However, it is something that Tobias Freund accomplishes with ease.
In the productions of Tobias Freund, it is difficult to identify one specific inspiration that drives him. Freund has been working since the 1980s and is a true renaissance man of the electronic music scene. He is a mixing engineer and studio maverick, a partner of Atom™, and a veteran of Berghain. It is nice to see how active he remains today, producing compelling and inspiring work that comfortably spans a wide range of musical styles from post-punk to Stockhausen. Music is more than the sum of its parts and this record should be listened to all in one go, its eight tracks demonstrate the experience and passion of Freund in his approach to producing music and will leave you wanting more.
Tobias Freund – Hall ov Fame
