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.
2CD – Sub Rosa
The people of Sub Rosa, the famous experimental label run by Guy Marc Hinant e Frédéric Walheer, have often given life to sensitive productions in between critical revivals and contemporaneity in the past. But their catalogue also includes special editions dedicated to specific authors and remarkable live performances, alongside some anthological series and musical productions comparable to real historical documents. Under the spotlight here are Kosmose, a Belgian collective working somewhere between psychedelia and cosmic music, whose members changed a lot over the years, but always under the leadership of the multi-instrumentalists Alain Neffe and Francis Pourcel. This is the umpteenth rereading of the Seventies (the band was active from 1973 until 1978), an age that clearly never stops to emanate its mutagen energy, in spite of the frills and the unessential hippy-related theoretical trinkets. Kosmic Music from the Black Country was, in 2015, the first official album by Sub Rosa the combo released. First Time Out, a 2 CD recording, is the result of some recordings dated to March 1975 in Charleroi. These new materials, lasting 43 and 60 minutes, are left in their basic forms, with no re-adaptations, mixes or additional post-production elements. We think this choice was based on the need to offer a better context to that special sound genre: a home-made Kraut Rock with few instruments and sound effects and without drums. Despite the live performance, this showed an artisanal but complex lighting set, with strobe and the profusion of incense (not dissimilar to some Italian imagine-theatre shows performed more or less at that time). It is easy to be transported by this jam session’s improvisational flux, but now the revival is cerebral, leading us to rethink an age that was more creative and hallucinatory than the current one, more sensitive to structure and language but lacking in imagination and futuristic pulses. It does not matter if these sets show some of the improvisational aesthetics typical of avant-garde jazz applied to a “rock” setting: soon punk and new wave followed, leaving the “alternative” field free from any other competitor.
Kosmose – First Time Out (Charleroi 1975)
