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 – Persistence Of Sound
From Dusk Till Dawn is a posthumous album showcasing the creative and experimental flair of Ian Rawes, a field recordist who passed away on October 19, 2021. The eight tracks presented here are all the result of audio recordings taken by Rawes in East Anglia, UK. These were mainly recorded at Lakenheath Fen, a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds reserve on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, and taken, with the rigor of an archivist, in the time from sunrise to sunset. The collection is a solemn tribute to the incomparable ability of the sound artist to capture the genius loci of distinct and engaging environments. Take, for example, the extraordinary song of a flock of birds in flight, the wind beating against abandoned industrial buildings, the shrill squawking of geese and ducks as they migrate westward. Ian Rawes, who boasts a past as an anarcho-punk publisher in the early eighties, conceived and directed the fanzine Pigs For Slaughter under the moniker The London Sound Survey. In 2009 he founded a website of the same name. The material presented is characterised by a multi-layered sound map of the English capital, a platform which collects a wide range of recordings made in various places throughout the metropolis, and also includes historical recordings and texts taken from a variety of sources, including the BBC archives. Field recordings were, for Rawes, the most direct and effective way to make other human beings experience a particular place and moment. They were better than a photograph, a tactile and magical event, a form of knowledge of the space that surrounds us and admits no deceit. The dominance of visual knowledge is called into question. Even if Rawes preferred to gloss over the “philosophical” and “political” value of his approach, his was a way of working that was enterprising, creative and playful, attentive to the nuances of everyday life. Rawes was able to field a network of (sound) stories that will surely be appreciated by each new generation that encounters his work.
The London Sound Survey – From Dusk Till Dawn
