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.
7″ one sided – Kvitnu
If choosing to remain silent is also a linguistic act, Then the greeting that Kotra and Zavoloka address to their audience as the last act before the closure of the label Kvitnu is especially poignant: an intense and quintessential gesture. Silence in music is everything, it is the basis of all acoustic transmutation, the zero point from which vibrations and sounds then propagate, something that is always present, that must not be found or created. Silence is an inner condition. Silence will be the last vinyl produced by Kvitnu and it is designed with a single silent ring cut, exactly in the center of the white one-sided 7″ record. Kvitnu, founded in 2006 in Kiev, Ukraine, by Dmytro Fedorenko, better known as Kotra, has been able to count from the beginning on the support of Zavoloka, who in addition to being a talented musician, has managed the visual aspect of the label. This is a brand that boasts releases from legends such as Pan Sonic, high calibre composers such as Vitor Joaquim, Muslimgauze, Matter and Andrea Gastaldello, as well as certain eclectic and non-mainstream groups such as Plaster, Sturqen and Redukt. It is Zavoloka herself who announced the end of the label, explaining that it’s not possible to avoid ongoing changes and that “the role of a label as a mediator between listener and producer is changing drastically, giving life to something new.” With 14 years of activity and more than 70 releases, Kvitnu has certainly written a very special page in the history of experimental music and will also be remembered for their theatrical releases, exactly in sync with what was a rather immaterial, refined and conceptual approach. Cage said that “silence does not exist” and even in an anechoic chamber you can still hear something. There is always something happening to produce sounds. It’s the same here, where the simple minimal movement of the needle creates an imperceptible rustle and the cyclic nature of a ring recording makes the execution theoretically endless. But sooner or later everything ends, even good projects. A new beginning will perhaps see the duo concentrating more on their own musical productions or on developing new performance formats. “What is the best time for a radical change if not during such a great turmoil that we are all experiencing right now?” The future for now is silent, unpredictable.
Kotra & Zavoloka – Silence
