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 + ArtZine – GaSaG
If we don’t have in mind examples from the history of cinema where a soundtrack comes before of everything else – maybe such strategy is valid only in a special type of animation movies – L’important, whose subtitle is film music with no film, might be included in the most unusual and abstract sound projects inspired by the big screen. While listening, the plots of Rosa Arruti, aka Nad Spiro, do not seem so conciliatory and conventional to some kind of traditional screenplay, but more under the forms of an imaginative soundtrack. The Spanish activist and experimenter is at her ease in these fields of the contemporary audio-researches who are still uncertain and unexplored. So, making clear that there is no film is perhaps just a mannerism, it doesn’t imply a real belonging or non-belonging to a precise music genre. The eleven tracks of the album ideally sail between a spatial vehicle lost in the cosmos and an astronaut adrift, with recordings from the transcriptions of hidden tapes. It’s a travel through the galaxies between industrial sequences, mechanical trills and deeper drones that give life to sidereal, disturbing, and unhealthy atmospheres, especially in the first part of the release. Then, the vocal parts of the author, savored but suggestive, within the frame of this kind of space travel, give the second part an additional touch of mystery and solemnity, that has its peak in the final track, “L’Important c’est… (Zulawski mix)”, the most melodic, poignant, rarefied and sacred of the compositions in the lineup. “The work of the composer”, the master Ennio Morricone used to say, “is a sort of electrocardiogram of our own musical tendency, where one practices on and finds new solutions”. We believe this is valid also for Nad Spiro, whose imagination often enigmatically returns to ghostly symphonies and secret explorations, made of dark, suggestive, and cerebral tones. Definitely in harmony with all the other things is the elegant folded cover, that includes drawings and the 1984 story of Zane Speer, the work source of inspiration, with photos by Joan Fontcuberta and art works by Marc Valls. L’Important is a project on tapes by Crystal Mine, a Spanish label supervised by Sarah Rasines and on CD and digital for GaSaG, a sublabel of Geometrik Records.
Nad Spiro – L’important
