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 – Sofa
The saxophonist Espen Reinertsen and the trumpeter Eivind Lønning have played together since 2005 under the moniker Streifenjunko. Apart from their studio works and their work with the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, they have performed in different international festivals, some specifically jazz, other more open-minded, always followed by an audience accustomed to experimentation and crossovers between audio and art. Now the sounds of Like Driving, their third album, released by Sofa Records, make us think the duo have shifted their focus to a different style, closer to electronics and structured on dilated patterns that work as leads for their sonic interventions. Streifenjunko show their elegance following slow but unstoppable fluxes with rhythmic elements, a lightning calibration of pauses and false starts, light variations in dynamics, and some studied minimalist iterations. A signature of the duo is to set a melody in motion only to suddenly halt it in its tracks, with a constant return to that same melody and a careful modulation of starts and stops. It almost seems as though some parts are self-generated and not the result of the composers’ skills in creating such precise musical structures. Clearly the attachment of the musicians to their own instruments is still strong, so they keep feeling the need to follow a preset plot. This is not a limitation and some simplicity is praiseworthy. However, there are also sudden dynamic changes and some rough overlaps, always softened by the embracing wind instruments. The variations in tonality set the mood of the first track, “Everything We Touch Is Electric”, a sweet and slightly disturbing composition lasting over 16 minutes, characterised by weak phrasings and controlled bunches of clicks and crackles. The second track, “Astronaut Peace”, is more subtle and atmospherically ambient, with few selected drum elements and dissonances. The final score, “Like Driving”, seems the most coherent, the most programmatic and the most oriented to the future. The sophisticated artwork by Kjell Bjørgeengen is also worth a mention. The artist happily adapted his background in graphic design and is now a specialist of artistic flickerings in colorful video synchronizations.
Streifenjunko: Everything we touch is electric
