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 – Bam Balam
A vortex of sounds in the first track, “Coda” drags the listener into noise, through fuzzy and calibrated drones, brought together with an almost sacred chord progression. The following track, “Postcoda”, is equally beatific, and loops are spatialised and westernised. Richard Pinhas and Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, are experimenters who boast an intense and long-standing collaboration, which began in 2008 with Keio Line, a double album released by Cuneiform Records. The collaboration continued in 2010, on the same label, with another double release, Metal/Crystal, a production that included Wolf Eyes, another icon of the most extreme wing of the international noise scene. In 2011, most of the live collaborations between the two were published in Rhizome and in Paris 2008. In 2016, Process And Reality was released, a project where the strident and manic sequences celebrate the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. Already at the time of their debut, the French guitarist and the seminal Japanese noise artist had surprised the public, who knew them well for other sonic pursuits: Richard Pinhas, in particular, was an acclaimed member of Heldon, an assistant professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and a passionate lover of a particularly dystopian and visionary science fiction. Merzbow was an apologist for extremely abrasive noise music. The collaboration between the two now turns towards quieter shores, in rather sober iterations that give space to Pinhas’ cosmic and sci-fi vocations. Oren Ambarchi, Jonas Rosén and Florian Tatard join the pair and in the second track they play, variously, motorized guitar, synthesizers and accordion. The debt to the great American minimalist tradition is clear, but their own musical history is equally inspiring. This is a pilgrimage through the avant-garde of two distinct centuries. The avant-garde, even that of fifty years ago, remains fresh, and this conceptual approach to artistic practice remains relevant.
Merzbow and Richard Pinhas – Coda
