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 – arbitrary
Alongside various microphones, hydrophones and recorders, Richard Scott also uses some truly iconic analogue and modular synthesizers in this release. These are joined by programs such as Max/MSP and samplers, self-built controllers and effects such as a Blippoo Box by Rob Hordijk. Delirious Cartographies, the Berlin experimenter says, captures aspects of his personal sonic experience of specific times and places, augmenting his usual work with analogue synthesizers. “These compositions open doors and windows to the outside world, incorporating field recordings made in various places and situations”. Scott calls the relationship between sonic elements and geographies “molecular dialogues”, exploring how inspiration is guided but never dictated by context. After all, even the title, which can only refer to Felix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, is, in its own way, an oxymoron, a deliberate contrast that links two incompatible terms. There are four tracks featured, three (tracks 1, 3 and 4) of which range from approximately thirteen to seventeen minutes and a fourth (track 2), which lasts just over three and a half minutes. “Fragments of an everyday cosmos”, the first track in the line-up, plunges us straight into an intriguing mix of sounds, a sort of studied improvisation, a gentle, well-organised chaos, full of ticking, roaring, dripping, chimes, modulated voices, pulsations, natural recordings and synthetic sounds. “Grace and delirium in Boliqueime” is shorter than the other compositions, but the approach remains fundamentally the same, where a rhythmic devices is used to hold the listener’s attention. In “Thunder, actually bicycles…” the balance shifts more towards synthetic and alien settings, before closing with “Further fragments of an everyday cosmos”, a demonstration – again using Guattari’s words – that “the reality of the possible always takes priority over the possibility of reality”. The maps laid out for us seem to offer the beginning, perhaps a route to a musicality freed from the usual coordinates of style and solution.
Richard Scott – Delirious Cartographies
