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 10” – COdA
The Italian musician Imok hails from Cisterna, a hamlet of Coseano, a town twenty kilometres from Udine located deep in the Fruili Province. The electroacoustic composer is known for his experimental approach and in particular for his digital reinterpretations of analogue noises and sounds. Porte E Cardini is his first solo release. He focuses his attention on four different materials: plastic, wood and two different kinds of metal. For his compositions the artist used audio recordings of doors and hinges, as the Italian title clearly suggests. Unfortunately, we don’t know the rationale for this choice and lmok isn’t interested in filling us in. Clearly the artist wants to limit his research field, confident that he can offer sufficient variation from a limited number of elements. In the first track the sounds are hazy and creaking, as of iterated moans, mixed with tickles and repeated aspirated loops. The arrangement is obsessive, but the general effect is engaging, and the setting shows itself as ghostly, with some springs to set restlessly the passing of the time. The following composition is shorter and more strident, but again there is also a lot of digital manipulative work and the treatments draw on simple noise recordings. The other two tracks on metals are also very suggestive. The first brings us back to the electroacoustic tradition of the 1960s, with several sound forms playing at the same time, moving the listener’s attention from one side to the other. The last track, whichis also the lngest in the selection, resounds with clearly evident drum elements and strong echoes, blows, scrapes, whistles and different kinds of abrasions. Formerly, Imok had published a live track for the compilation spiritella under the moniker K and another composition and live recording for the Housewives Coffee Break Mask Compilation, available for free download on Bandcamp. Now, he can be happy with his solo debut, a work where simple inputs produce rich outputs.
Imok – Porte E Cardini
 
