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 – Fang Bomb
The Cray Twins newest release, In The Company Of Architects, features Kai Fagaschinski on bass clarinet, Paul Baran on organ, buchla, and several electronic instruments, Antoine Beurger on flute, Werner Dafeldecker on guitar, Sergio Merce on micro-tonal saxophone, Ryoko Akama on modular synths, Bruno Duplant on temple bells, the voice of soprano Lavinia Blackwell and spoken word by Jessica Evelyn. In the eponymous first track, which is approximately 38 minutes, the treatments are minimalist and quite dark and closed, hovering between abnormal harmonies and developments, with hazy drones and rings, a muffled sound and some background noises, highs and lows from keyboards instruments and minaret voices. Is it experimental jazz? Electroacoustics? Are these sacred songs from some unknown sect? We don’t know, but the slowness of the sequences suggests some unconventional ritual, a call to prayer, the hidden tension of a prophecy or the need to catch some slight changes of state, with the background noises and fragments of melodies hooking the listener. The development of this first long suite is sometimes confused, but in other moments there are some clear resonances or enigmatic atmospheric reversals. The following track, “The Absence of Architects” is more broad and dreamy; in this composition Lavinia Blackwell wonderfully revitalizes vintage and dreamy atmospheres in a touching orchestral track. “Anarchitects” is the closing track: here the composition shows some synthetic and chaotic characteristics, which develop into a choral song, between rings and electronics, drones, and dreamy, sugared poetry declaiming voices. This new release for Fang Bomb clearly shows how these experimenters care about every single sound and the connection they might have in the compositions. The foundations of the work in poetry and sound art are also obvious. Here the Cray Twins make a great mix of intellectual and technical elements, designing mental passages in a refined and appealing narration.
The Cray Twins – Anarchitects
