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 + poster – Aagoo
The album DnT originates from a partnership between Jerome Noetinger and Anthony Laguerre. Both are sound artists and engineers, two refined and experienced experimental musicians, who met in 2018 at Centre Culturel André Malraux in Vandoeuvre-lés-Nancy (France), for a two day session. There are seven selected compositions, filled with electroacoustics but also colored by consistent manipulation, with free form and mutating jazz inspirations. The release begins with “Vespertillon”, a very balanced and basic composition, with beats in the foreground and some elusive space-age effects that gradually take over the scene, also mixed together with what we think are field recordings. The following track, “Èveil”, is more dissonant, based only on the unpredictable flair of the two musicians. “Etage en panne” is the most circular track of the album, while “Frisson furtif” is more introverted and focused on itself, as it is largely swallowing its own sounds. In “Le lendemain de la veille à l’Ouest“ something between the tapes and the beats resounds cosmically, while “Masse Le Fer Du Son“ shows a return to some more chaotic beats, alternated between empty and full spaces, following the trend of the most vehement improvisational tradition. “Réveil“ is the final track, harsh and noisy, with dark and scraping sequences. Laguerre and Noetinger engage the listener’s attention and never get lost in unnecessary conceptualizations. Their avant-impro well knows all the tools of the box and is rich with techniques, but eventually quite simple, largely based on the classic dichotomies of this genre: the alternations between silence-noise, chaos-control, rhythm-drones, outside-inside, density-relaxation, the list goes on. The album is dedicated to the memory of the guitarist and director of the historic Music Action festival Dominique Répécaud, who passed away in 2016. The graphic design by Bas Mantel is a direct reference to the experimentation Laguerre and Noetinger make on rhythms and sounds. The autonomous sounds have separate patterns, that, isolated in a continuous flux, suggest new abstract graphic forms.
Laguerre/Noetinger – DnT
