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.
Cassette – CCSS++
Diogo Tudela is a media artist and independent researcher whose practice is informed by speculative IT, mechatronics and science fiction. He teaches sound art and creative programming at School of Arts — UCP since 2019, a university located in his home town of Porto, and was also a member of the SOOPA Collective, a multidisciplinary platform for music and the visual arts. The focus of this recording is on the concept of tooling within artistic practice. This is guided by the construction and use of tools in the development of the twelve tracks featured on the album. These tracks are derived from a selection of previously recorded audio files and include sound installations and field recordings, along with the results of (unsuccessful) physical modelling experimentation and the preliminary outputs of Tudel’s neural network research. The mixing of these eclectic audio forms was achieved through an act of tooling – the construction of a granular synthesis-based system used by the artist to arrange sounds spatially. The software used for these experiments is still in development and this project is Tudel’s first series engagement with SuperCollider, a platform for audio synthesis and algorithm composition. Tooling Vol. 1 is available as a limited edition cassette and is released by CCSS++, a record label and research platform also based in Porto. This work is for those who are attracted to abrasive sounds but even for the experienced listener, it’s almost impossible to decode any original data. The artist-programmer extends the parameters of his practice and does so through an impersonal process and aesthetic that is intentionally unclear, an approach that questions the concept of authorship and the shifting of the conceptual to the technical.
Diogo Tudela – Tooling Vol. 1
