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.
LP + CDR – Verlag System
The fact that a legend of experimental music might resist to epochal changes, after repeated years of absence from the scene, is not everyone’s cup of tea and Maurizio Bianchi deserves to be acknowledged for his intransigent conceptual relationship with the practices of musical research he was carrying, although intermittently, over more than forty-five years, since he was working at the end of seventies as musical critic for the magazines Mucchio Selvaggio, Rockerilla and Buscadero, focusing on industrial and electronics productions. Among the fans of a certain age, who does not remember his first tendentious releases on tape? When he was using the moniker Sacher-Pelz, or again between 1980 and 1982, at the beginning of the first industrial scene, with the pseudonym M.B., focusing on themes on trend at that time, such as the noise, the isolationism and the “power electronics”. Released now by the Spanish label Verlag System, Computers S.P.A. has a long history of reeditions, to begin with its first publicatio in 1980 on tape, the result of two improvisations on a monophonic synth Korg MS-20. The album, freely inspired by the computer music that began to rule at every latitude from the second half of the seventies, is valid still today, although its harsh radicality and the limited technologies of that time. Bianchi describes these tracks as “a dramatic abandon of the sounds generated without the main help of emotion and spontaneity”. Actually, the ideas matter as the – individual or collective – turmoils, and at the beginning of the electronics as mainstream, just following some certain scenes was significant. In addition to the vinyl, there is also a CDr in attachment, that includes some “dismantled” versions of the tracks of Siegmar Fricke, alias Pharmakustik, and other bonus material here released for the first time, a real treat for collectors and admirers of this incredible artist and character.
Maurizio Bianchi – Computers S.P.A.
