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.
7″ + booklet, and foldout poster – Singuhr Editions
Robert Lippok presents with Singuhr Editions, two recordings that derive from a performance and sound installation dating back to an event that originally took place at the Meinblau Projektraum in Berlin in 2017. That first iteration was inspired by the rhythm machines of Joe Jones (an American avant-garde musician associated with Fluxus who died in 1993) and by The Fairy Queen, a work by Henry Purcell, one of the most talented baroque music composers, most famous for his theatrical works and for the attention he gave to the nascent lyrical genre (a primordial form of multimedia in music). The final output is the result of mechanical devices organised in slender constructions using various objects, such as wood, plates, and rotating plastic. The sounds obtained were diffused using a 4-channel system and condensed into a loop that lasts approximately 20 minutes. It is difficult to understand exactly how the artist extracted and rearranged the two pieces which feature delicate, pulsating, and harmonious drones, from the original material. Lippock, who is well known for his participation in Ornament und Verbrechen and To Rococo Rot, is always at ease with sound installations in which various elements are brought together, including music, theatre, radio and film, set designs and objects. The reduction to what is essential seems to be a constant characteristic of Lippock’s stylistic approach – the name of his first group, founded way back in 1982 says a lot about his style, citing the minimalist architect’s Adolf Loos most important work. The implicit invitation is to embrace a non-accessory and stereotyped aesthetic in music too, far from excessively exhibited redundancies. The Berlin experimenter has as far back as 1989, self-produced mechanical musical mechanisms, organizing them together with magnetic tapes, electric motors, and a piano keyboard, just as instruments reconstructed from the most disparate materials were used in Ornament und Verbrechen, emphasizing those DIY practices that were the ancestral heritage of punk and industrial culture. What is Dance? is a small precious gem in Lippock’s discography – a testimony of a secret path that connects an entire generation of electronic experimenters.
Robert Lippok – What is Dance?
