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 – Bocian
Anthony Pateras established an electroacoustic group with seven members for the project Musica Sanae, developed with the Creative Victoria Creator’s Fund. The result is Pseudacusis, a work executed in 2019 in Naples, Sokolowsko, Berlin and Krakow. Krakow was the location of the Sacrum Profanum Festival, curated by Krzysztof Pietraszewski, the full recording of which was produced for the label Bocian. More precisely, this project is the result of an artistic partnership between three European entities: Phonurgia (Naples, Italy), In Situ (Sokolowsko, Poland) and NK (Berlin, Germany). The main concept behind the project is the exploration of the connection between music and medicine, an unusual theme, which, in the case of Pateras, is reminiscent of his research on the hallucinatory aspects of sound. The chosen musicians come from the afore-mentioned cities: they are Chiara Mallozzi, Riccardo La Foresta, Mike Majkowski, Lucio Capece, Gerard Lebik and Tiziana Bertoncini. The title also respects the purpose of the project and is a quote with a medical-scientific origin. Pseudacusis is a specific term for a hallucination or auditory illusion. Pateras directly suggests the states that inspired it: auditory pareidolia, exploding head syndrome, otoacoustic emissions and psychoacoustics more generally. Even more striking is how Pateras develops these suggestions in a strictly technical way, spatializing the sound, modulating the pitch and timbres of the sequences, making use of stochastic effects, extreme or heterodynamic dynamics, polyrhythmic repetitions and acousmatic speaker environments. The works also show elements of electro-acoustic interference and the use of different beat frequencies and tones. It’s a special ensemble made of different instruments: cello, violin and double bass, flanked by two wind instruments and percussion. Not all the above-mentioned musicians, who were fundamental to the development of the music in the early stages of the project, could actually be in Krakow to record the album. These were replaced by Krzysztof Guńka on sax, Deborah Walker on cello and Lizzy Welsh on violin. We should also mention that the album production followed an unusual technique: a first tape was made in Australia and recorded with different musicians, who played the same instruments of the sextet. Then Pateras processed the sounds one by one and orchestrated them in Europe with the group. Live, each member of the ensemble was in the middle of the loudspeakers, with Pateras mixing and triggering the electronics by placing himself in the centre of the space.
Anthony Pateras – Pseudacusis
