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 – Unseen Worlds
Released by the Unseen Worlds label, Pulse Music features four compositions from John McGuire all created between 1975 and 1979. This is the first time we find these intriguing recordings collected together. They were conceived during a transitional period in McGuire’s career, beginning in Occidental College Los Angeles, followed by a move to Berkeley and then on to Europe where he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Gottfried Michael Koenig. The first recording, made in the Studio for Electronic Music at the Musikhochschule Köln, is an exercise in style, shaped by McGuire’s minimalism at a speed far too intense for live performance. The following piece is slower – performed by the Bremen orchestra, with four piano players (Christoph Delz, Herbert Henck, Deborah Richards and Doris Thomsen) with McGuire on organ. This mournful and hypnotic version was first performed and recorded in 1978 as part of the Pro Musica Nova Festival at Radio Bremen. The third composition in this series was created in the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio, which also commissioned it, and is a delicate work with measured tempo changes. The closing track is the charming ‘108 Pulses’. This twenty-minute suite, makes even clearer how McGuire is concerned more with continuous movement than focusing on a specific fixed sound. The release is undoubtedly of historical value and is also a celebration of a brilliant composer who until now has been relatively unknown.
John McGuire – Pulse Music
