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.
CD + print – arbitrary
Mesmer is an experimental trio fascinated by the transience of sounds and the different contexts – be they natural or from cultural environments – that their musical practices traverse.
With Emil Jensen on trumpets, modular synths, sequencers, and field recordings, Anders Filipsen also on synths, and Victor Dybbroe bringing it all together rhythmically, Terrain Vague, is the combo’s debut album. It features recordings taken from three live concerts, whose individual elements originated from auditory captures of Copenhagen and its surroundings, instilled with soundscapes of places where nature and culture meet and challenge each other. Delicately an illuminating harmony is sought and many inspirations flow into the eleven compositions on this release. Cinematic and narrative futuristic sounds pulsate throughout, but there is no shortage of subtle romanticisms – intricate electroacoustic hybridisations are central to the ensemble’s development. One can get lost among the melodic lines and poignant sense of melancholy that pushes the listener towards introverted thoughts, but which are no stranger to the minimalistic echoes of repetitive music, folk and free jazz, and various experiments with European origins. When analysing these audio journeys, it is difficult not to get caught up in the leitmotif of contamination, the result of the exhaustion of a linear project. Above all, this is the success of an effective idea in popular music that since the 1980s has insisted on overcoming of barriers, differences and oppositional attitudes in favour of a reshuffling of practices, styles, aesthetics and production forms. There is always so much happening around music that conditions it, modifies, and distorts it. On Terrain Vague, the processes underlying the compositions are never completely explicit, perhaps a consequence of a strict, established approach. However, improvisation is among the many techniques used and if there is a twist, it seems mild and further nuanced in Emil Nielsen’s mix – an artist who is accustomed to operating with rich textures and sound sources and combining them in unrecognisable ways.
Mesmer – Terrain Vague
