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 – Unsounds
What is the thin line dividing a live performance, a studio work and being part of an artistic installation where a large number of people can participate? Yannis Kyriakides and Andy Moor opted for a halfway position when they were invited to participate in the Studio Venezia project at the French pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. They opted for occasional audience interaction, working to break the expectations inherent in the idea of concert or a performance in which the dividing line between musicians and audience is rigorously defined. The Parisian multimedia artist’s principle idea was to project visitors into the world of a recording studio, inspired by the seminal intuitions of Kurt Schwitters, the founder of Merzbau in Hanover, an atelier that was at the same time a work in itself, a space-event. The pavilion also drew inspiration in part from The Bauhaus, from its being a place of artistic creation, blending visual art and music, also nodding to the experiments of The Black Mountain School, an innovative American college founded in 1933 and dedicated to the study of art in its various expressions. In this recording-sculpture studio there were several musicians invited from all over the world who, during the seven months of the Biennale, would create in an extraordinary environment with the highest quality equipment, sound technicians and instruments at their disposal. Kyriakides and Moor chose to use only the historical synthesizers by Moog, Buchla and Vermona and the sound that has now been selected comes from a total of nine hours of recordings, mostly improvised or based on some rhythmic patterns that Kyriakides had previously prepared. The material, condensed into 45 minutes, has necessarily undergone numerous cuts and modifications, becoming even more fascinating and dissonant, with somewhat different scores divided by inspiration and effects into six different tracks. The emotional impact is remarkable and Moor’s guitar chords are compelling, while Kyriakides’ electronics evoke different layers and abstract structures, with dreamy, tense and minute envelopes.
Yannis Kyriakides & Andy Moor – Pavilion
