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.
Zimoun is known for his multiform artworks and installations created from commonplace industrial objects that explore array aesthetics combined with rhythmic sound. His most recent work, 60 Medical Infusion Sets, Water, Fire, Metal Sheets, consists of a room containing medical drip sets each of which drops water onto heated metal sheets. On contact with the metal the water is instantaneously transformed into small jets of steam. The moment of union is marked by a crisp hiss as the water is vaporised by extreme heat. Over a period of time the metal sheets become oxidised and act as canvases documenting the slow chemical transformation of metal as rust formations accumulate. The dripping processes emerge by virtue of the properties of fluid flow so that the rhythmic patterns of the water dripping phase between randomness and order. Whereas the rhythmic sonic events in Zimoun’s previous works, such as 198 prepared dc-motors, wire isolated, cardboard boxes 30x30x8cm, were extremely dense, created by multiple non-synchronous sound-emitting motors, this new work proposes a more meditative situation with respect to sound. Here, time is perceived to have slowed – the silent intervals act as strong counterpoints to the infrequent vaporisations. Each vaporisation draws our eye to its respective metal sheet generating a specific spatial awareness of the array within the installation. Including elements such as water and fire in the title only goes to reinforce the alchemical intimations of the work. An extremely simple, taken-for-granted reaction between water and fire is represented as a primal elemental transmutation and recorded as irregular concentric patterns of accreted oxide on the metal surface. This piece, as with all of Zimoun’s work, relies on clinical aesthetics where multiple objects are spatially ordered while being precisely situated. These ‘architecturally-minded platforms of sound’ propose an array aesthetic that embraces minimalism and maximalism simultaneously.
Paul Prudence
Zimoun : 60 medical infusion sets, water, fire, metal sheets 20x20x4cm
Zimoun : 198 prepared dc-motors, wire isolated, cardboard boxes 30x30x8cm
