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.
CD – Zarek
From Zarek, a German label which has reached its sixteenth release, here’s a dilated, flowing and elegiac composition by Perlonex, an electro-acoustic trio composed of Ignaz Schick, Joerg Maria Zeger and Burkhard Beins. Its recording has been made during a live at Sophiensaele Berlin on the occasion of the Echtzeitmusiktage event in 2010 by Ignaz Schick himself and Kassian Troyer, and then mixed afterwards without any overdub added. The mix of elements is immediately powerful while listening and instantly we’re dragged into somewhat strident atmospheres, but full of reverb and of a broad spatiality, a mix that gives way to digital treatments which grow and proliferate, gradually filling the scene with the sounds (we can imagine the place of action). Then – after about twenty minutes it gives way to a folding of the forces and resumes the imaginative flow that welcomes back vague tastes of concrete music, improvisational styles, environmental harmonies and Industrial influences. This fusion of music-inspired awesomness has always been one of the main features of the collective ensemble, formed in 1998, and even in choosing the events at which it has performed has always kept to a certain eclecticism, preferring not to confine its research to specialist environments. Schick for this occasion uses a number of objects, including a turntable, he adds sinusoidal waves and electronic hardware of various types. Zeger’s contribution is recognizable by the sounds of the electric guitars and various feedback, and still live-electronics, while Burkhard intervenes on percussion and mainly handles the rhythmic part, but also playing a zither (a kind of table cetra, belonging to the chordophone family, a very popular instrument in southern Germany). There are different dynamic “emergencies” and counterpoints we can distinguish in the sound continuum and a remarkable energy is stored in the performance, feeding it, which is always impeccable and keeps high the climax of the constructed aural relationships. Hummings, slow changes, shrieks and unresolved tensions: it is a tour de force to which the combo engages with, triggering an iterated drone-dense force, with exorbitant frequencies and subtly partner-in-crime textures. This is a test that is hoping for the continuity of such a fruitful artistic collaboration.
