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 – Cellule 75
This is a new release by Marc Richte, aka Jehm Circs, better known as Black to Comm, whose second album is once again published in Hamburg with his home record company, Cellule 75. The work includes 24 tracks, only one longer than 4 minutes, and gives us the feeling of a very sensitive collage, sometimes harsh, full of audio fragments, scums and “memories” collected over time. Richte underlines that the result of the manipulations is due to a digital mix, made by some deconstructions and samples. Listening at first, the work plan is not easy to discover: it originates from some contemporary pop sequences and from different sources “captured” from YouTube or other musical promotion and distribution commercial platforms. Probably the “plagiarist” contents were limited on purpose to prevent from identifying the scans and the links. The approach here doesn’t clearly show how the art absorbs elements to entrap the listener and stimulate his ability to analyze and recognize the quotes. More than the post-punk or to the space-primitivism energy of the fundamental cyber seasons, we are reminded of the surrealism cadavre exquis, here under the forms of casual audio parts, that are manipulated and later set up thanks to a meticulous editing and to the use of less synthetic patterns and field recordings. The liquid and stretched sequences often overlap with some fractured rhythms and different inserts such as sabers, reverberations, echoes and special effects of different kinds and intensity. Different suggestions and sounds are perfectly combined in this well-modulated confusion. Thanks to this digital craft work, all the elements give the work a coherence in its all parts, despite the various natures and origins. Jemh Circs is able to fuse together concepts, sounds and atmospheres, even if he needs to divide the narration into more pieces, sometimes quite different in the planning. However, all the pieces show the coherence of composition, an uncommon personal taste and the control of unusual constructs. The experimenter sets together many small pieces, maybe useless for some, and loses himself in the unlimited possibilities of combination but at the same time he performs some involving rhythms and harmonies, whose quality and importance is undeniable.
Jemh Circs – (untitled) Kingdom
