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 – Hospital Hill
Serge Tcherepnin’s Serge Modular Music Systems were one of the most iconic types of modular analog synthesizers in the seventies, instruments in which today there is still great interest – no real surprise considering the contemporary passion for early electronics and for everything in music pertaining to be offline. The first 20 Serge systems were built in 1973, in Tcherepnin’s home, at the time he was a professor at CalArts and wanted to create something that resembled the Buchla modular synthesizers but was more financially accessible. Metastability was composed and performed on the La Trobe Serge ‘Paperface’, a 1975 synthesizer and majestic analogue system currently housed at the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS). During two residencies there in 2019 and 2021, Ben Carey didn’t miss the opportunity to fully explore the multifaceted instrument, research that has culminated in these five tracks, released on Hospital Hill. The construction philosophy of Serge synthesizers is typically West Coast, which pays great attention to the ‘programmability of the patches’, and where the low-level functions of the instrument are put to the test by the musician, who is focused on redefining the scope of the instrument’s architecture as part of the compositional process. For Carey, the truly fascinating side of this work is precisely that of the man-machine iteration, an imaginary collaboration that, by means of an imposing tangle of cables, gives life to sounds and processes that influence each other. ‘As a patch begins to become more and more complex, I am deeply aware that my compositional decisions are not exclusively mine’ states the experimenter who thus infuses the entire release, which has been recalibrated live, with a post-human appeal in an octophonic surround sound performance, including recordings coming from Serge, some performed live and others re-edited from the same album. The great innovation of analog synthesizers was that, for the first time, they produced sounds that did not come from an acoustic source but directly from an electrical impulse enabled by circuits, giving rise to something that did not exist in nature. The co-presence of artistic sensitivity and technological skills thus took on decidedly new characteristics and, consequently, today we investigate that epochal transition, research that Carey carries out with total competence and attention.
Ben Carey – Metastability
