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.
digital + book – Gruenrekorder
While leafing through the essential but elegant booklet of In The Shadow Of The Silent Mountain and starting “Acqua Bianca”, the first of 8 files/compositions present in this digital album by Angus Carlyle for Gruenrekorder, we soon get the feeling of plunging into a point-like sound landscape. This landscape is characterized by natural sounds, at first hardly recognizable, then similar to something dripping, fluid, winter-like: maybe ice sheets breaking and snow under the boots. The various creakings then leave space for stronger sounds. In “Bells of Church” we find some descriptive field recordings (the bells, the flock to pasture, some southern Italian dialects typical of a rural setting). In “Fifty Breaths in the Valley” we find more repetition of sound effects, basically some echoes which are repeated and more shaded and attached to some dialogue fragments, all objects of sound editing. It’s nothing really special or aesthetically beautiful, but the work provides different questions to the expert listener. What is the strategy of this sound artist? What exactly is he trying to tell us, to explore or let us think about this audio experience? Undoubtedly the mix between sounds, words and images is not secondary: this mix was innate of any magical expression, W.S.Burroughs said, and of any artistic expression too, obviously. This inter-disciplinary mix refers to a different approach, which is more contemporary and abstract, and to a clear editorial choice (the physical sounds are not reported in the final package). All of this is apparently mostly related to the relationship between the experimenter and the sounds surrounding him. In this case the artist is in a specific environment of audio captures: the Piacentin mountains, in the Campania Apeninnes. According to Carlyle, sound art does not need to make sounds and this is enough to think that writing, or photography, or a film, may be considered sound art too. The main thing is showing the special link which is the base of the way we and the surrounding world are connected: maybe this is a limited strategy, but this strategy has its own charm too.
Angus Carlyle – In The Shadow Of The Silent Mountain
