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 – MICL
When we talk about Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, we immediately refer to a classic music universe, highly emotional and tied to an inner space full of shades and tensions, floating between tradition and modernity, daily life and physical places, immateriality and transcendental states. Based in New York, the Lithuanian composer geometrically summarizes in the construction of Horizons a multiform vision, tonally full of exotic but at the same time controlled suggestions. In the transparencies and in the density of layers, the weaves resound willfully, following a dichotomy always on the edge “between the proximity and the distance, getting close and leaving”. The five album tracks are compositions written between 2006 and 2015. This period was obviously not short, a phase of the creative career of the artist, when she moved to USA and she experienced the loss of her father. When some existential pathos comes out from the cuts, with a high and controlled strain, the result is a refined weave, especially in the initial title track and in the second “The Blue of Distance”, soaked with delicacy and calm. These tracks are followed by “Completely Embraced by the Beauty of Emptiness”, whose rhythmic movements are faster and more orchestral, intimate but not punitive, addressed to listeners ready to face meditative, refined and gracious descriptions. “Thousand Doors to the World” and “Serenity Diptychs” are the ending tracks of this release, which was produced thanks to the worthwhile partnership with the Music Information Centre Lithuania (MICL) and to the support of Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. It’s not the first time these institutions support similar high quality and international projects, which are presented in different stages and situations all over the world. The album includes both live recordings and studio sessions, performed by different Lithuanian and foreign artists, with the participation of a vocal ensemble directed by Robert Geary and a contemporary music band led by Alex Paks. Mārtiņš Ozoliņš was in charge for the performance of Horizons with the participation of Juozas Domarkas and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė – Horizons (Official)
Zibuokle Martinaityte “Horizons” The University of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra
