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+book – REV. Lab.
There are 24 tracks in under half an hour on Traces, the latest effort by Filax Staël, a collaborative project led by Bas Mantel and Okko Perekki – both of whom are well-versed in working with electronic sounds, field recordings, sample experimentation and extreme cut-up techniques. This is their first official release even though the original implementations of the project date back to 2013. Traces is also complemented by a 52-page book in which the graphic skills of Mantel (a designer trained at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht) stand out. As often happens when cut, copy & paste techniques are the primary inspiration, especially when the outcomes are so visceral and unpredictable, the immediate cultural references point towards Dadaism and William S. Burroughs, although perhaps a more modern reference can be found in Brion Gysin. Furthermore, the use of sound recordings of educational films from the 50s brings some compositions on this album closer to the plunderphonic techniques of sound artists such as John Oswald or Negativland. Traces manages to evoke a soundscape full of heterogeneous yet interconnected auditory fragments, creating an experience that is as much cerebral as it is sensorial. Each track seems like a sound collage that compels the listener to confront the unexpected, playing with familiarity and strangeness. Abrasive sounds and distorted loops blend with disembodied voices, generating a sense of disorientation that is nevertheless fascinating. The interaction between sound and graphic design is ultimately a central aspect of the release: the book attached to the LP does not only serve as a visual support, but extends the themes of the album, enriching the overall experience. Mantel’s visual collages align perfectly with the cut-up philosophy of sound, as if the pages of the book were a visual echo of the sonic chaos. The underlying idea is still that of a poetics of the fragment and recontextualization, where the past is dissected and recomposed in new forms, between nostalgia and subversion. The result is a multidimensional work that transcends the boundaries between visual and sound art, providing a very complex and immersive experience. Traces thus takes the form of a journey through broken memories, in which chaos finds its hidden coherence.
Filax Staël – Traces
