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 – iDEAL
In a time of retromania and fetishization of the offline, it is logical that some electronic artists are interested in vintage instruments and performance techniques that have nothing to do with modern digital setups. In the case of Egil Kalman, it is worth noting that somewhat of a cult of enthusiasts has developed around the Electric Music Box Buchla 200 that he uses, a cult that glorifies the interface systems and underlying construction philosophy of West Coast synthesis. Much of the Buchla 200’s fame comes from the fact that it is an extremely flexible synthesizer devoted to radical experimentation. So much so, that a new series of the system has been produced, one that respects the futuristic vision of its designer, even if – naturally – the original models, those without MIDI controls, patch memory storage, or hybrid digitisation, are still highly sought after. Egil Kalman recorded Forest of Tines live at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm, and in this release on iDEAL Recordings, a Swedish label founded in 1998 by Joachim Nordwall, no DAW-styled overdubbing or layering has been added. The result is twenty short compositions – only a couple are longer than 5 minutes – that are both exotic and melancholic, full of references to Scandinavian folk music while simultaneously being situated in contemporary electroacoustic minimalism. Kalman’s approach is sincere, his look to the past does not linger on any particular nostalgic elements. Although his interest seems to be retracing how the future of sounds was imagined in the past, there is no frustration within this process, but rather a sense of philosophical and aesthetic harmony. In short, Kalman’s work is liberating, capable of incorporating references from multiple musical eras, and imitating certain tonal and structural fluctuations of strings with advanced tuning and sequencing techniques. Forest of Tines, although delicate in some respects, brings a difficult, raw instrument back to an almost acoustic sensitivity.
Egil Kalman – Forest of Tines (Egil Kalman plays the Buchla 200)
