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 – Noton
This is the second volume of the Hybr:ID series from Alva Noto and features his compositions from the soundtrack to the Ectopia – Shooting in the Corner show at Tanztheater Wuppertal. The show, directed by Pina Bausch, is a creation of dancer and choreographer Richard Siegal who was inspired by a work from Anish Kapoor, an artist who constantly underlines ‘the strange relationship that exists in art between what is real and what is not.’ Indeed, this concept can be expressed by the word ‘hybrid’, a cross between different species, a term that derives etymologically from Greek meaning sin and arrogance, and which relates to fiction in real life. A fiction induced today by a whole series of mechanisms, prostheses of various types and new technologies which are an extension of our identities and our actions within the social sphere. These complex cultural dynamics – closely intertwined with each other – are the result of the coexistence of multiple languages in a common space. Alva Noto is at ease with similar interactions in which he can fully deploy his ethereal, intense, and geometric sound design. This is an expression of a particularly articulated, elegant, and at times, almost surgical, digital production. This release features ten tracks accompanied by an interesting twelve-page booklet with which we can compare the structures of the tracks by following the graphic notes of the sound and acoustic codes the composer used. These are meticulously designed and punctuated sounds, regulated by detailed rhythmic patterns while embracing cosmic fascinations and a sensitivity that is neither dark nor dystopian, yet the final articulation of the work cannot mistaken be as simplistic atmospheric aestheticization. Anish Kapoor’s shots give life to an ever-changing sculpture in a performance where the dancers are exposed without protection. This is also the case for the sound sequences deployed by Alva Noto. There is no defense, opposition, or rejection in this case to the hubris of the hybrid form which, with its Venusian appeal, goes from being austere to elegiac, from punctiform to fluid, from material to spiritual. Alva Noto fully deserves his fame – after so much time in the spotlight he can still produce such magnificent work.
Alva Noto – Hybr:ID II
