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.
cassette – Gruenrekorder|K7
DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult’s focus here is on early radio transmission technologies. These technologies are now being updated by virtue of the need of the world of finance to transfer data at ever higher speeds – attainable using specific frequencies rather than the internet. Broadcasting via radio waves, an almost forgotten technology, remains one of the most immediate and secure methods of data transmission, which in high-frequency trading (HFT), together with the complex algorithms that analyse different markets, allows stock trading to be even more profitable by exploiting in real time the fluctuations that arise in the value of shares. The two French musicians have been mapping these radio routes since 2016, geolocating the pylons, frequencies, and relay connections that transmit HFT data back and forth, to make audio captures in proximity to the pylons where satellite dishes act as network bridges, thus recording the noise of the signal, the wind beating on the cables that support the structures, along with electromagnetic hums and radio static currents while occasionally adding a voice to provide context. All of this has to do with digitisation, which translates into multiple different temporalities, rhythms, and scansions. It speaks to us of speed and abstraction, of paths that are not circumscribed by borders but instead follow the trajectories of aggressive financial operations. In this speculative trading model, large amounts of capital are required to exploit the slightest changes in stock market variations, as well as the latest generation technologies, hardware and software. The techniques used by the artists are however the classic ones of field recordists, which they employ to explore the aesthetic, material, and social aspects of technological transmission. The duo then modulate the results in electroacoustic compositions, sound installations, and radio broadcasts incorporating readings, other testimonials and images relating to the research. This shouldn’t make you think that the ‘musical’ performance isn’t equally significant. Listening to Gold Lines is fascinating, engaging and mysterious. Gruenrekorder have released it in an elegant cassette format which has previously been presented in various forms at the Serendipity Arts Festival and included in the even more complex Antenna Gods project.
Bird & Renoult – Gold Lines
