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 – Constellation Records
In recent years the entire international artistic community – and musicians in particular – have been harmed by the pandemic. But in some situations the response has been a greater commitment, as though the isolation imposed created the necessary conditions for a change in direction or unprecedented experimentation. This is the case with All The Things That Happen by Steve Bates, a record that grew from his isolation in Saskatoon, Canada, an area that was once purely indigenous territory. Evolving from an ambient, silent and mournful dimension, towards noisy and emotionally significant shores, much of the recorded material was made using only a Casio SK-1. The toy keyboard, launched on the market in 1985, provided a self-inflicted limitation that assumes disparate poetic threads here, injecting distortions but also an ineffable pre-internet and retro-futurist melancholy into the music. Bates himself stated that the situation of having more time available meant that “he kept looking for more texture and noise”. With a background rooted in the Canadian anarcho-punk community and a musical history that led him to participate in hardcore and indie rock projects, Bates immediately impresses with “Groves of…Everything!”. The opening track is distorted, introducing us to something uncanny, shadowy, sibilant and elegiac. In “These problems are multiplied by the difficulty I have in front of a tape recorder” the sequences become more melodic, however, the result of a certain instrumental familiarity with such a spartan keyboard. In “Glistening”, Bates also creates a calm contrast between melodic passages and noisy drones, the result of controlled feedback, while in “Covered in silt and weed” the trend is repetitive, echoing and gentle. There is no change in register in “Destroy the palace”, “Glimpse an end” and in the other three tracks and presented, “Bring on black flames”, “We do not, nor to hide” and in the beatific “September through September”. The latter is the right outro for an album with a significant emotional structure, full of feeling and with an innovative approach despite the use of somewhat dated effects, amplifiers and electronic devices.
Steve Bates – All The Things That Happen
