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.
12″ vinyl – 90%WASSER
Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg and Felix Kubin have produced a split EP for 90%WASSER. On the A-side, the first musician presents 8 short and interesting productions, lasting 2-4 minutes each. On the B-side, Kubin has set a cohesive, electroacoustic composition that is just over 17 minutes long. The project originates from NNOI, an art and experimental music festival that took place in 2019 between Zernikow and Burow, a location some 70 km from Berlin. This release is the first of a four planned festivals, including such remarkable artists as Rashad Becker, Robert Schalinski, Asmus Tietchens, Frieder Butzmann and Air Cushion Finish. The design of the whole series is based on the drawings of Frank Diersch, an artist whose work was presented in several exhibitions in important galleries and museums.Aas WHITECONCEPTS. Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg is extremely at ease with tickings, piercing effects, suctions and unpredictable passages. His tracks, despite their shortness, can be easily enjoyed as a progressive continuum, without sounding boring or repetitive. This experimentalist always knows what he is doing: he is definitely an expert electroacoustic musician, at ease with different techniques and clearly able to make mixes in an artisanal but refined way, with great control over volume and musicality. On the other hand, Felix Kubin works on a classic work of Dadaist cinema, Entr’acte (1924). He has totally rewritten the music, with a new soundtrack somehow retaining the weird inspiration of the original choreography. The movie includes totems of the avant-garde movement: Erik Satie and Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. The original music of Entr’acte was written by Satie and performed in an orchestra hall. Given the ironical and rhythmic character of the original version, the remake by Kubin is undoubtedly more abstract and conceptual. The approach is original and contemporary, but still within the framework of the historical avant-garde, which clearly has never stopped releasing energy and influence.
NNOI#I – Felix Kubin/Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg
