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.
2CD + booklet – Futura Resistenza
Accompanied by a stylish 16-page green booklet comes the latest effort from Christof Migone, a sound artist, professor, curator and writer of Swiss origin who now resides in Toronto. Wet Water (Let’s Dance) immediately grabs the listener’s attention with a series of unusual sounds – electroacoustic, hisses, strange interferences, and field recordings that are often difficult to distinguish from digitally manipulated sounds. Are they flocks of birds or just well-calibrated buzzes? Or modified recordings of natural events? Do we really care what the nature of these sounds are? Isn’t it perhaps more interesting that a certain amount of mystery prevails in this regard? The reality is that throughout the project lines are always blurred and the relationships between the different elements are complex and unpredictable, aimed at an almost improvisational relational occurrence that is slippery in its performativity. Slippery and numb like a tomato frozen in a block of ice held in the performer’s mouth until both melt and fall. This sounds like a surrealist sketch but is the story of ‘The Release (Into Motion)’, a piece released in four different versions whose video was used as one of the three sources for the piece ‘Lake of Coherence’, a composition not on this release and which dates back to 2003. Migone is accustomed to using different media, moving between the suggestions of language and voice, of the body and intimacy, between sound and silence, play and pathos, reiterating a series of obsessions that include destroying microphones, handling books and pages, hybridizing multiple languages and releasing records, to name just a few of the recurring motifs of his artistic practice. The works presented are modulated in the manner of atypical canons for which the impediment, the disconnection, and the inability to communicate are prevalent, with a certain degree of uncertainty and jumps in registers, accumulating audio layers and repeating to the point of exhaustion. This musician is then a kind of medium, a catalyst of alien energies for all of us to appreciate.
Christof Migone – Wet Water (Let’s Dance)
