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 – Kohlhaas
When using a single instrument by pushing it to the limits of technical possibilities to generate pure sounds in a musical project, in this case, an electric guitar accompanied by sparse electronics and faint percussion, it can be instinctive to think that everything else is introduced with live performances in mind. We remember Perciballi as one of the musicians on Didone, an album by Alessandro Bosetti from 2021, but this experimenter has crossed multiple genres and approaches: from jazz to creative improvisation and sound design. He has also written music for both small and large ensembles, for cinema, theater and dance, and in doing so, has developed a compositional practice rooted in a performative attitude. Composing and performing live give life to an inextricable union that corresponds to one’s own musical reality. The effect of this double action produces sounds that are processed and propagated through infinite references and memories. What is imprinted is a jumble of polyrhythms and noises, displayed in energetic and virtuoso passages that range from electric amplification to acoustic, while also making clever use of specially prepared loudspeakers and foot percussions. This is a raw and alienating experience, visceral and direct on the senses, yet with space to also be subtle. Perciballi’s instrumental expertise is indisputably articulated and imaginative: it matters little what remains to be considered within the tradition of the instrument. Each new method adds something to a musical technique and as Gustav Mahler emphasised ‘tradition is not keeping the ashes but passing over the fire’. In this case, the focus is on escaping an idea of the electric guitar tied to the genres that have made it famous for almost a hundred years – a relatively recent history that comes to terms with the past beginning with a conception of music that is already ‘popular’. Better then to rely on suggestions that come from other artistic disciplines, from theatre and poetry, from the world of fantasy, or those that are intimately connected to a spiritual sphere. Inspiration that, when playing solo, takes the form of an open construction site on one’s own expressive language. Sacred Habits is released by Kohlhaas Records, an Italian label brilliantly managed by Marco Segabinazzi.
Luca Perciballi – Sacred Habits
