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.
12” – Le Cabanon
Born in 1987, Othello Aubern is Italian from his mother’s side and Swiss from his father’s, and currently lives in Omsk, a Russian city located in Southwestern Siberia, capital of the region. Maybe the sky of the local starry nights, often lightened by sudden meteorite or anomalous atmospheric phenomena, might have instigated the young author’s obsessions about the exchange of Earth-Moon-Earth signals, a sort of fascination that includes many fantasies about the sound emissions connected to these intangible relationships. The experiments derived from this passion were carefully recorded and collected and then set up with the aim to create some musical figures. Two-Way Switch is immediately intriguing, thanks to personal and experimental electronics, which present some glitches and space elements, and breaking and beating rhythms. Oblique melodies come out from the cuts, inspiring some alien suggestions and empty landscapes. The release, a new part of the series Colors by Le Cabanon Records, includes fives tracks and lasts more than twenty-six minutes. It’s an EP, but Othello Aubern wanted to make a well thought-out work, dense and intimately involving, a poetical manifesto whose developments are now atmospheric and refined, and now abstract and stylized. “Eme” reminds us of Luke Slater and some synthetic funk waves, “Zootrope” instead make us think of some rarefied and cryptic pointillist processing. “Samaritan Metric” starts with a long and almost silent introduction, but later joins some metrical routes. “Triple Double” shares a similar starting point but presents a different development, more harsh and slightly vibrating, the track harmonies are just sketched and full of kinematic shocks. “Buffer Zone” is the ending track: the sound organization here is more orchestral, the development is more thinned but also conspiratorial and persuasive, inspired by a diaphanous and algid beauty, hard to be distant from. Othello Auburn makes a successful debut and we wish he might soon tell of new futuristic adventures, hopefully also in lands far from his initial formation fascinations.
Othello Aubern – Two-Way Switch
