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 – Ash International
Data streams generated by various simulation models of astrophysical black holes and observational data of regions in space with extreme gravitational fields converge in Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001, a new release from Valery Vermeulen. Aside from being a mathematician, new media artist, researcher and musician Vermeulen is also obviously a very capable producer on the basis of his ability to transform data inputs into these excellent environmental compositions. This is not the first time the eclectic Belgian experimenter has worked on music projects related to astrophysics. He first had the idea for the album in 2016 but it was only two years later, following an invitation from the Concertgebouw Brugge to create a new piece of music and live show for their Cosmos Festival, that he was able to begin the process. Fine-tuning that work led to this release for Ash International, a subsidiary label of Mike Harding’s Touch. For Vermeulen, data is an immeasurable source of information and inspiration: this scientist-artist has made full use of it in other projects, for example in Krystal Ball an interactive multimedia project where the mechanisms that cause cyclical financial crises are used to generate images and algorithmic music, or in EMO-Synth, where, starting from the design and implementation of an interactive system, the automatically generated audio is directed towards the user’s emotional responses. For Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001, the flow of information includes gravitational wave data, data generated by black branes, neutron star data, white dwarf data and the trajectory data of elementary particles close to black holes. The overall effect reinforces the mysterious and galactic exoticism of these celestial bodies. The scientific component of Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001 was developed in collaboration with several academic partners including the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Alabama University (US), the Alabama Holography Research Group (US), the Institute for Theoretical Physics of KU Leuven (BE), the Center for Mathematical Plasma Astrophysics of KULeuven (BE), the Department of Mathematics of the University of Antwerp (BE), the quantum cosmologist Prof. Dr. Thomas Hertog, Prof. Dr. Matthias Kaminski, Dr. Casey Cartwright, Dr. Ileyk El Mellah, Dr. Bart Ripperda, Dr. Fabio Bacchini and Prof. Dr. David Eelbode.
Valery Vermeulen – Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001
