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 – Gruenrekorder
Despite the many negative impacts of the Covid-19 lockdowns, there were plenty of artistic and musical initiatives that drew conceptual inspiration from such an unusual and challenging time. One such project is Sounds of Absence by Peter Kiefer, head of the Art-Research-Sound project at the Mainz School of Music. For this project, Kiefer invited artists to submit field recordings made during the lockdown period, as well as compositions that expressed their experiences and impressions during this difficult period. Many hours of recordings were compiled – sound documents that offered a nuanced insight into the reality of the situation along with codified information on different environments, be they urban or natural. Only later, when the regulations became increasingly complex during the second lockdown, did the project transform into a work that brought together artists from various geographical areas to focus specifically on the theme of absence in those two very particular years. Compositions were collected from all over the world, encompassing a wide variety of approaches to audio capturing and electroacoustic composition. Theorizing an aesthetics of absence is certainly not a new concept, especially in music. This has recently been highlighted in relation to Glenn Gould, but there are an infinite number of examples starting with 4’33” by John Cage, or in the visual arts with Lucio Fontana, Edward Hopper and others, not to mention how it has been expressed in contemporary architecture. To be even more radical, one could say that the history of modern art is pervaded by the theme of absence if, as Deleuze and Guattari observed, it is a series of indefinable ephemeral sensations that compels us to look to other objects and memories. Absence is then an empty form that contains an induced and never satisfied desire, it works on unconscious and symbolic mechanisms, for which nothing can be certain. Alvin Curran, Lasse-Marc Riek, Juan Bermúdez, Wingel Mendoza and Stefan G. Fricke, to name just a few of the artists who participated in the project, have focused precisely on these mechanisms. It is the complexity and diversity of their contributions that make this collection truly special – a document of a dark time, but a time that was never without hope.
