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.
Editions, ISBN: 978-3033060722, English, 244 pages, 2017, Germany
“How can words convey a sense of place?” This is a relevant question not only for our visually obsessed society in general, but for sound art in particular where textual material is involved. Jason Kahn (you can read his interview in Neural #55) pays great attention to text in his installations, especially those which can be qualified as “site-specific”. This book includes the text of three of Kahn’s installations: “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Hong Kong (After Perec)”, “Drifting” (both released in 2016), and “Other Ghosts” (in 2015). Here he compares the practice of “reading between the lines” with “hearing between the sounds”, as every text reinforces the sounds described, but, surprisingly, is still valid on its own. So, avoiding to classically define this book as the “libretto” of those installations, we can instead freely dive into the sound evoked by the words, completely assimilable to a specific type of sound poetry. They effectively serve one of Kahn’s major principles: “transmitting a sense of place”. In his opinion it’s not just an aesthetic quality, but a political one, as a rising awareness of the space leads to better chances to fight alienation and increase solidarity. In addition, this book should be read in relation to its original production (the installations), but if it should be found by accident, and we ignore its references, it’d still be a fascinating poetry book about unexpectedly heard sounds, describing a whole series of engagements. In its own right, it can be seen as a music release in words.
Check bibliographic details on Neural Archive!
