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.
LP – Avatar Quebec
Fluff is produced by Avatar Quebec and is the latest outcome of a collaboration between multimedia artist Marla Hlady and guitarist, singer and composer Eric Chenaux. The duo works on experimentations defined as field-performance-recordings. The idea to improvise on field recordings is not particularly new, just as the border between sound art and music is no longer easy to define. The album is the result of a residence in Avatar in June 2017. Here, the two artists explored the acoustic and poetic properties of specific places, such as a gym or a forest. These weaves are followed by a free form and improvisational subtext, full of micro-percussion and the rarefied breaks of stringed instruments (for example in “Refuge Du Domaine De Gaspé 1”). In addition, there are some hypnotic, confused, noisy and rough sequences, whose structures are quite repetitive (in a following version of the track in the same space). “Patro Roc – Amadour” starts quite musically, like a group tuning up before playing, and then continues under the form of an extreme rarefied post-rock musical aria. Marla Hlady is currently an associate professor at the Department of Art, Culture and Media in the University of Toronto. Éric Chenaux is a musician whose career spans more than 25 years, with infinite collaborations and five solo albums produced by the label Constellation. In our opinion, Hlady is more at ease with what we might define as the “poetics of aesthetization of daily life”, while Chenaux develops his special technique, very laconic and essential, made by a slow and essential list of audible options. The locations of recordings were chosen this time without a specific stress on the symbolic characters of the spaces and mostly on the basis of their own specific acoustic properties: reverberation, echo and return noise. This asks us to sharpen our senses to another kind of tuning, focusing on common environmental features. Here, every surface reflects any audio emission: the two artists move and give us different impressions of the sounds and drive us to a different, extraordinary enjoyment.
Marla Hlady & Eric Chenaux – Fluff
