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 – AussenRaum
Stacja Nigdy w Życiu is the LP debut for the duo of Kasper T. Toeplitz and Anna Zaradny. They are respectively a composer and a musician of Polish origin. Toeplitz is one of the most important personalities of the new Polish Avant-garde, while Zaradny is an instrumentalist (saxophone and computers) with an inclination to a sophisticated and complex performativity. Toeplitz is skilled at giving life to hieratic sound improvisations, suspended in sidereal abstractions, backwashes and wheezes. Here the bass is played with a bow connected to several midi controllers and an iPad, as well as using a gong, several microphones, an FX pedal and a small mixer. There are two compositions included in the album, one on each side of the vinyl published by AussenRaum – “Jamais” and “Never” – and the intriguing texture in perpetual mutation will captivate any listener.The breath theme seems to be one of the hidden inspirations of the project, where it refers to feedback and to the restlessness of every condition of existence. This is also indicated by the title (never station in life), in search of a model that isn’t written, nurturing a non-composition that seems to come from nowhere. This is the centerpiece of this collaboration on the pure sensation of tone. In the performance held in January 2016 at the Centre National de Création Musicale of Bétheny – in France – and masterfully filmed by Gilles Pate, the participatory tension of the two experimenters is glaringly obvious. It is almost a cult of salvation which is embodied in the live, where the cohesive bodies of the two celebrants tackle the precarious experience that oozes from an almost private setting, intimate and shared only with a small audience of “affiliates”, jointly responsible for sharing and taking part in a true audio-healing ritual.
Kasper T. Toeplitz / Anna Zaradny
