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
The Langham Research Center is a collective dedicated to analogue electronic music experimentation, innovation and performance and, following in the tradition of concrete music and 20th century avantgarde movements, is committed to opening the field to new approaches and concepts. For this release on the Persistence of Sound label, two of the center’s members, Iain Chambers and Robert Worby are in control, along with special guest John Butcher, a respected musician in the free form scene, who is well aware of the uniqueness of each setting and attentive to the different relationships that can be created through improvisation. The Langham Research Center is an open group with many vocations and interests – they have performed compositions by John Cage on numerous occasions and have created a soundtrack for J.G Ballard’s visionary novel, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’. In Six Hands at an Open Door, Chambers and Worby use tape recorders, sine wave oscillators and shortwave radios. They meticulously cultivate sounds, which Butcher responds to in his own uniquely intricate way. Butcher claims that you have to free your subconscious to grasp instant ideas and make connections. ‘I am very interested in transformations and developments, that is, how it’s possible to pass from one moment to the next with the help of the ideas that are gathered in that moment’. Here, the music does not come from nothing and expectations are triggered by well-prepared interventions and unconventional sound qualities. This release features six compositions, ’Giddy Liberty’ and ‘Everything is Immanent’, are short, lasting only about two minutes, while ‘A Thousand Small Deliberations’ and ‘Fancies Are Curled Around These Images’ are longer at five and eight minutes respectively. ‘A Structural Creaking’ and ‘Shadows in Place of Logic’ are both over ten minutes and are particularly interesting due to their structure and interpretation of the concept of ‘controlled improvisation’.
Langham Research Centre and John Butcher – Six Hands at an Open Door
