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.
Cassette – Dinzu Artefacts
Insistent tickles, a constant background buzz, some slightly perceptible gongs, some whistles, refrained frequencies, some metal screeches and other warm and sensitive audio emergencies. This is the set of samples you can experience while listening to the first part of G5, whose recordings fully occupy side A of the edition in audio cassette format (available also on digital) produced by Dinzu Artefacts. After carefully listening for some minutes, we find out these sounds are the result of a performance at Sonic Arts, a festival held in Amsterdam and organized by the institution of the same name, focusing on the research, the development and the production of works inter-crossing art, science and theory. The second part is a different live session, at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek, an event in Utrecht. The trio is made up of Radboud Mens, Gijs Gieskes e Geert-Jan Hobijn. The three experimenters and musicians have, in the past, individually performed with an audio-art approach and made new instruments and equipment for sound production and for new media composition and performance. Their name, Ohm, already seems a prediction: they use many unconventional instruments to make their weaves, which are full of iterative sequences, meditative and ambient in their atmospheres, the result of aerial vibes, sweet but at the same time disturbing. In this project there were already some site specific installations and Geert-Jan Hobijn has, for some time, been a member of Staalplaat Soundsystem. This crew is a fundamental combo in the polarization of a multidisciplinary and DIY approach and has made several works and acts in different spaces, such as museums, factories, urban and extra-urban public spaces. With this trio, the live versions moves to free form, thanks to the improvisation process created by the musicians, who are artists used to making a different and more sophisticated distinction between sound, noise and music. There is nothing very esoteric or technological in the expression of this musicality and trying to distinguish the origin of the sound definitely makes the listening experience easier. Every vibrational phenomenon already has a lot of mysticism around itself and sometimes the need to make everything more evident supports us in our perceptions.
1Ohm – G5
