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.
2CD – Sub Rosa
If the current political situation in Turkey represents a diminishing of personal and collective liberty, this release for Sub Rosa can become an exemplar of modernity repressed, a zone of influence that has not been subjugated by a handful of bigots and troglodyte housekeepers. This anthology presents productions by Turkish musicians from 1960s electronica to the many experimental forms of the 2010s, As a document then, it performs the function of showcasing a very innovative and cosmopolitan art. The impressive collection, unravelled in two CDs, is curated by Batur Sönmez and Erdem Helvacioglu, who selected a total of 29 musicians. Among these were Ilhan Mimaroglu, best known in Italy for his contribution to the soundtrack of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon, and Bülent Arel, a composer heavily involved with experimentation at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre in the late 1950s. The work of İlhan Mimaroğlu is also included,. The composer also studied during the 1960s in the same centre under Vladimir Ussachevsky and on occasion worked with Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe. He is a remarkable author and his Prelude No. 17 [Istanbul Fog], the last track of the first CD, would do well in any audio-art catalogue. If the selection on the first of the two CD selection is somewhat ‘dry’ under the all-encompassing Electronic Music tag on the second the curatorship becomes more fuzzy and conceptual. This is already suggested in the title: Politic, Sampler, Ambient Music, including – it is no accident – such activist songs as “Democracy Lessons” by Asaf Zeki Yüksel, “The Monopoly of Victim Status” by Osman Kayatazoglus and “I want to be a suicide bomber,” by the SIFIR group, the only track on the album that boasts vocals and coldwave-like atmospheres. In this rich anthology we go from a raw free form to feedback and noisy audio-abuses, from post-rock to cinematic soundscapes. It serves to reminds us that the history of Turkish culture was very much alive and still could be.
VVAA – 1961-2014 An Anthology of Turkish Experimental Music
