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 – Raster
There is no future without tears and here the work centres on sensory processing by human-machine hybrids. It’s not the first time Uwe Schmidt aka Atom™ focuses on sounds bordering on pop, soaked with a glitch aesthetic. These are sounds and narrations of the technological present, but easily digestible for an audience that does not want to engage with the conceptual details of the project. We might call this new electronic genre Hard code pop. In this case Atom™ performs with X1N, an entity for the generation of human voice and contents in natural language, an approach not so far from what Holly Herndon implemented in Proto. It doesn’t really matter that in “R3V” the refrain “the revolution will not be online” is a sort of mix between “We Want Your Soul” by Adam Freeland and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott Heron, to mention the most famous influences. The hyper-centrifuge of applied and recombined technology gives life to new constellations of meaning, as in the ideally continuous loop of the first and last track, “Almost a Unit”, an evocative dissertation on artificial intelligence and machines deep learning, where, beneath the cache of hidden references we are reminded of the synthetic vocal experiments of Laurie Anderson. The robotic voice of X1N reminds us that “in the broad surface of all the mathematical equations it’s possible to hear events which seem to come from other dimensions”. The setting this time is definitely post-apocalyptic and less ironic than in former works (for example the masterpiece Pop Artificielle (1998)) despite the presence of some playful moments. Take, for example, “ac boy/dc girl”, a track infused with some circuit bending themes. The work is a must for any valuable collection, especially in the classic vinyl vintage format and with the elegant paperboard cover, an artwork made by the creative partnership of Atom ™ and X1N with Olaf Bender, the historical designer and co-founder of Raster-Noton, now divided into two entities, and in this case simply Raster, the label producing this release.
Atom™ – <3
