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.
10” – arbitrary
This is the second in a series of collaborations, released on 10″ vinyl in the guise of remixes, by Mads Emil Nielsen and Chromacolor. Nielsen is a musician/composer from Copenhagen accustomed to bold projects using sound sources often integrated with short percussive and orchestral samples. By doing so, he emphasises – in a true compositional ‘manner’ – the errors generated by machines through the amplification process. On side A, it is ‘Heartbeats’ that wins us over, a composition that Nielsen originally created for a radio soundtrack, built from sine wave loops and granulations to which modular synthesizer pulses were added, before being arranged together with synthesized bass and layers of organ-like tones. On side B, we find a refined remix by Chromacolor, the alias of German sound artist and producer Hanno Leichtmann, who reworks the original material according to his own vision. On ‘Constellation’, Leichtmann manipulates the sounds of the original mix, merging them with his peculiar instrumental textures, generated by a Hohner Guitaret, a Fender Rhodes and a Moog bass. The intervention is further enriched thanks to the contributions of Anthea Caddy’s cello and Annie Garlid’s voice, which add depth and emotional dimension to the composition. The result is a work that, while maintaining a strong link with the original, develops into new and evocative sound territories, where electronics and acoustic instruments are intertwined in a close and engaging dialogue. In this dynamic of exchange and transformation, it clearly emerges how the two sides of the album complement each other. If side A shows us Nielsen’s minimal and rigorous approach to the elaboration of sound, Leichtmann’s remixing work opens these structures to new interpretative possibilities, creating a bridge between the compositional precision of the first and a more organic and distant dimension. This second chapter of the series confirms not only the effectiveness of the collaborative formula chosen by the label but also its ability to explore the multiple facets of the dialogue between experimental electronics and traditional instrumentation.
Mads Emil Nielsen + Chromacolor – Heartbeats
