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 – Crónica
GML Variations by Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela stems from an initial composition presented alongside other works in a public screening at the Casa da Música, in Porto. The focus of this event was the Robotic Gamelan, a complex instrument developed in 2008/2009 by Rui Penha, José Luís Azevedo and Miguel Ferraz that involves a network of robots capable of playing the Javanese gamelan. The unusual apparatus, originally designed for use by people with reduced mobility, is controlled by a computer that sends serial information using Max/MSP and can be operated by performing simple movements, captured by the sensors that are incorporated into the system. The piece was presented in January 2018 and shortly after recorded in the same location. Carvalhais and Tudela returned to that recording several times, manipulating and processing samples, adding original materials and finally developing the four variations and the final track on the album. Many of the new sound structures were latent in the composition and the duo had to do nothing but make them manifest, impressing a different perspective on the same work. What seems obvious to us is how the very clear percussions evolve into digital sounds, creating somewhat strange and fascinating amalgamations, with iridescent layers, often overlaid by electronic noise that surrounds the gamelan sound. If a gamelan is an entity whose instruments are built and tuned to play together, even the electronics in this case adapt to the tones and atmospheres produced by the robotic set of instruments. In these GML Variations, the technique of contrasting acoustic instruments and digital developments in an exaggerated manner is never used. The quality and coherence of @c’s compositions are always outstanding. In listening the electroacoustic elements blend beautifully with the ethereal, abstract and spatial digital treatments. Not satisfied, Pedro Tudela has also released a box set reminiscent of the great installation awdiˈtɔrju held at MAAT, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in Lisbon, whose vinyl release once more includes a studio remix of installation samples.
@c – GML Variations
