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.
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262035262, English, 312 pages, 2016, USA
The essential moment of transition between the mechanical and the media takes place rapidly with the pervasive use of electricity. Its impact on our perception of sounds, beyond its cultural resonance in avant-garde, is investigated in this book in an original way. It’s a careful chronology on the history of electroacoustics, starting in 1860s with Lord Rayleigh developing the “duplex” theory for human sound localisation and Hermann von Helmholtz creating his celebrated “resonator”, through the industrial automation of acoustics over World War I. It then continues with the subsequent acoustics’ demilitarisation during the Weimar Republic, to its utter militarisation with National Socialism. The transition from the 19th century bourgeois science to its popularisation through new electric media, then tremendously empowered by electronics (mainly telephony and radio), is pictured as a progressively interwoven historical course of actions. It’s easy to recognise this book as a history of science in classic terms. It researches the evolution of socio-political progresses or regresses through the advancement in sound technologies. The evolving relationship between academic research, industrial development and social impact describes a forceful direction, analysed in its beginnings, but still present today, although with quite different coordinates. Interpreting acoustics as “inseparable from human hearing, voice and music”, as Wittje affirms, helping to recognise science as a key agent in crucial social dynamics.
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