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 – Kvitnu
Released by Kvitnu, Transition is the new studio album by Plaster, a moniker hiding the real name of Gianclaudio Hashem Moniri (earlier in a duo with Giuseppe Carlini). Transition shows a different approach from the past: more minimal and concrete, thanks to the use in the compositions of analogue and hardware sets, on the edge with inspired industrial suites and ambient developments. The sequences are dark and disturbing, reminiscent of uninhabited lands and lunar landscapes. Despite the transition the title suggests clearly refers to a more experimental inclination, a technoid set is still somehow there in the eight tracks, wonderfully designed by the artwork of Zavoloka, brain and designer of the Viennese label. The fictional worlds recalled refer to classic dystopian sci-fi, with a mix of apocalyptic and post-human visions, moving the listener across some hypnotic and at the same time synthetic, threatening and rhythmical beatings. There are also moments of peace, for example “Unregistered Product”, where an elegiac loop is modulated with great expertise and persistence, praising some musing connections. In the following “Imaginary Friend”, the connections become almost retrowave or more noisy, if you prefer, tending to a different enjoyment, more raw, vibrant and direct. But what we keep in our synapses are the fake melodies created with the analog synthesizers, “The Last Goodbye” or “Casual Encounter”. Thanks to their evocative character, we imagine that they will be very effective in live performances, for an audience that needs to return to the origins, when everything was not as glossy at it seems now and being harsh and irritating was not an option. We don’t know if Moniri is interested in this. Anyway, we would like the idea that this talent might in the future be challenged far from his comfort zone. He would be more in syntony with his own obsessions. These obsessions are definitely not comforting and find inspiration from the darker and more complicated twists and turns across the genres, always on an anxious and hyper-vivid, hard and enigmatic modulation.
PLASTER “Transition” (KVITNU 57
