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 – Eich
The large number of twenty tracks compose “Black, Pink and Yellow noises”, an album made in partnership by the French artists Marc Baron and Jean-Philippe Gross. The first is an alto saxophonist we remember in pair with Jean-Luc Guionnet (2007 and 2013), the second one is an improvisation musician, firstly a drummer, then composer, operative mind behind the Eich Records and founder of the cultural association Fragment. The amount – and the quality – of the musical experiences of the two musicians is huge and includes several genres and sub-genres, the electroacoustics, the free-noise, the theatre-music, the field recordings, the research of sounds and the glitch and tape noise experimentations, just to mention some of the fields they have worked and without considering all the work Gross did as concert promoter for others. This variety of practices and knowledge the duo share results in an eclecticism, which is released from any genre and is difficult to define with only one aesthetic line. No track reaches three minutes, most of them are not even longer than two minutes and half. The choice to have such short scores made easier to Gross and Baron the work, allowing them to keep an extremely open and ductile way and leading the inspiration to useful results. After the first two tracks the flux is shimmering, firstly abrasive, then it tends toward an alien funk, full of experimentalism. When the cuts are not rubbed, we find the presence of noisy sounds, or fields recordings who play the role of leading the listener to another place. The division in colors, indirectly mentioned in the title, includes 6 black sounds, 8 pink sounds and 6 yellow sounds, although this organization seems to be more an inner factor for the construction of the parts, rather then being a result the listener can actually perceive. The duo uses some items and expands the resonance they produce, or they record some people voices and the tones of some specific settings. A large part of the work is due to some editing process and sometimes you might get the impression of something already listened, not so differently from the plundersphonics experimentations and in line with the post-dadaism attitude, stinging, but, in the end, enjoyable.
Marc Baron – Jean-Philippe Gross – Black, Pink and Yellow noises
