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.
LP – OUS
“Music gives us the illusion that time is not time, but space. It is then that music transforms from process to object”. This is how Noemi Buchi, who is fascinated with the materialisation of the sonic process, introduces us to Matter, her debut album for OUS, the Italian label Switzerland led by Ink!, Feldermelder, IOKOI and JJ. “Sound is matter”, is the mantra of the Swiss composer and sound artist, accustomed to a symphonic electronic maximalism, in a delicate synthesis of dense interweaving and orchestral electroacoustic abstraction, which explores the potential of consonance and dissonance, modulating irregularities and more harmonic passages, creating a totally expansive and engaging listening experience. Noémi Büchi made her debut on Light of Other Day in 2019 with the EP Matière. In 2020 she released a second album for the tape label Visible Dinner For Invisible People, Prismic Passages, which featured no less than seven compositions. Here she seems to structure the eight tracks presented in as many movements, preparing us to listen to a substantial number of instrumental parts, like the sections of an imaginary orchestra, built in a hybrid way by annexing digital synthesizers, objects, computer programs, acoustic instruments, sound and vocal recordings. Chords, specific progressions, intonations and resonances – nothing is left to chance. Without any limitation, every sound fantasy is realised, in a flow that remains fundamentally creative and intuitive in nature. Büchi’s inspiration draws on all kinds of things, even non-musical prompts, such as photos, drawings, images and found sounds. The approach is to let everything flow, without exercising particular forms of. Buchi makes no secret of being a big fan of Eliane Radigue, one of the pioneers of electronic music, who always maintained that time, silence and space are among the principal materials for a composer. This is a lesson that evidently has been well learned by Büchi, who does not hesitate to edit each of his improvisations using a computer, also adding other sounds without restrictions of any kind.
Noémi Büchi – Matter
