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.
The language of the video has undergone various semiotic jerks in the nineties, years that saw the opportunity to swoop in personal computers home video editing. The resulting geometric increase of the trials and the parallel development of compositional tools for electronic music has created a generation of savvy filmmaker, ready to have fun with narrative techniques and digested in the decades that preceded them. Firstborn sons of this phenomenon have definitely been the Hexstatic grown up and pampered by the forge of irreverent electronic manipulation that has always been the Ninja Tune. In a production process which has always taken far from art galleries and in clubs and raves, the duo of Stuart Warren-Hill and Robin Brunson proudly claims its otherness. At the center of their production appears to have been a precise concept: the use of video as an additional electronic musical instrument. The title is a quote verbally that overturns the old ViewMaster of Fisher Price, a toy instrument that allowed a 3D viewing of images specially prepared. The same title that summarizes the rhythmic interpreted that determines the visual one, and therefore unable to use the multiple languages and dialects of the video to get the flocking and flourish of the elements, almost always in perfect sync buttons. Even the sequence of the video game arcade type is made to coincide with the sound flow of a crossover of genres (hip hop, electronica, ambient, techno). And the taste of the constant curiosity towards new forms of enjoyment has finally allowed the inclusion of some of the videos in 3D format through the splitting of the red and blue channels, testable using the anaglyphic glasses of cardboard attached. The anthology is so amused and historical at the same time, reflecting an attitude hybridization of languages that has become more and more natural to the present day.
