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 + booklet – Glacial Movements
The composer Fernando Corona, better known as Murcof, needs no further introduction after the outputs of the last decade. Released by the Roman label Glacial Movements, Lost in Time is a 2014 double vinyl release, one that is not as famous as his previous albums and which is now ready to find new exposure. This Murcof project is specifically born as a soundtrack to the eponymous movie by the Canadian artist Patrick Bernatchez. Murcof sets the choir de Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal to sing J.S. Bach’s Goldberg variations. The CD edition is made more attractive thanks to the addition of an exclusive epilogue for Glacial Movements. The label jumped at the chance for such a partnership, given that the approach is close to the ambient-drone and rarefied glacial poetics typical of its productions. The movie in question is a dystopian parable set between ice and polar landscapes, the result of two never-ending and intertwined parallel narrations, where the two main characters literally get lost in these surreal spaces of whiteness. So too, Murcof’s sequences, despite the division of the works into discrete chapters, do not seem to have any reference point; they show powerful and elegiac orchestration but they are somehow lost in the dark and distressing emptiness of an inhabited land. The Mexican composer is perfectly at ease with the frames of Bernatchez. Indeed, it’s not the first time he has worked on a movie soundtrack (take, for example Nicotina, La vita senza filtro, a surreal 2004 thriller comedy by the Spanish director Hugo Rodriguez and La Sangre Iluminada, directed in 2009 by Ivan Duenas). In this case Murcof wonderfully connects his passion for classical music with elements of minimalism and the pared-back arrangements he is famous for. Every Murcof record has a systematic approach – in this case the inspiration has a double side, because a specific setting is given to each chapter by moving images from the unconventional movie #narration#. Some may consider this a strong empowerment; others may instead take this as a constraint to the free imagination; in either case they will be moved by the masterful sound.
Murcof – Lost In Time
