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 – Touch
The Blue Beyond includes two compositions the Audemars Piguet Contemporary, a prestigious Swiss watchmaking company, commissioned to the artist Jana Winderen. In the first track, “The Art of Listening: Under Water”, the idea she developed was a sound environment with the record of sounds in the Atlantic Ocean in front of Miami, and in the Barents Sea around the North Pole and the tropical oceans, with the goal to underline the constant submarine presence of sounds the man created. The final installation was made in partnership with Tony Myatt, a sound artist, engineer and academic, a specialist in the production of spatialized audio and presented at the Art Basel Miami. “Du Petit Risoud aux Profondeurs du Lac de Joux” was developed during two sound explorations in Le Brassus in the Vallée de Joux, in the heart of the Swiss Jura, where Audemars Piguet is based since 1875. In these excursions, Jana Winderen captured the sounds of the waters at the Lac de Joux and in the Risoud forest. In both the compositions, the experimenter works to make us listen carefully to the sound emissions of the underwater inhabitants of a specific region, implicitly suggesting that, as in every environment, the human activity interacts and interferes with the water and terrestrial life. An operation that paradoxically made possible the meeting of two different species of fishes, the freshwater pike of the Lack of Joux and the snapper of Miami, who lives in the salty waters. Thanks to its techniques that stimulate the collective imagination, the art makes potentially possible any meeting, and already the paleolithic ancestors were worrying for the extinction of their preys, while the first farmers must be committed to keep the soil fertile. The theme of environmental sustainability is a complex concept, that needs adaptations and solutions that might go beyond the momentary trends, showing the contradictions between what we do and what we can later observe in nature. In this record the beauty of the result, full of sophisticated and slightly disturbing sequences, makes us think in a sensorial manner about this kind of contradictions.
Jana Winderen – The Blue Beyond
