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.
To what extent are the sounds we use when speaking influenced by the surrounding soundscape? We may adapt our vocal communication to the conditions in which we find ourselves, but this (perhaps even reciprocal) influence could also be traced back to the formation of our languages. This could be a view that finally breaks away from the anthropocentric obsession and sees communication as a peer-to-peer transmission that incorporates a lot of positive ‘noise’. Historically, the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego have a special connection between their native languages and the specific sounds of their natural habitat. Environmental Linguistics by Carsten Stabenow and Raviv Ganchrow is a project that aims to investigate, analyse and then show these ‘language- landscape links’, finding ‘elemental imprints of terrain and climate on the sonority of spoken words’. They have accessed and listened to the Gusinde-Feuerland Collection, a collection of sound recordings of the spoken language of indigenous populations (Selk’nam, Yámana and Kawésqar). These recordings were made in this region at the beginning of the 20th century. They were made with large equipment on cylinders, with all the ambient noise surrounding them. One of these was a recording of single words of Selk’nam repeated twice, like a recited vocabulary, spoken by Antonio Toin in 1923. From this, Stabenow and Ganchrow experimented with sound propagation in different local environments, sometimes being heard up to a distance of 50 metres away. Above all, the ability to be heard in windy conditions was a key feature of the characteristics of these languages. The artists then developed an installation in which Toni’s recording is played back to the locations via a phonograph horn to preserve the original acoustic properties from a century ago. By carefully preserving the original sounds, this work unfolds multiple layers of meaning. The reintroduction of sounds in the same places sounds like a re-enactment in mutated climate conditions and becomes a call from the past to the threatened present. And the specific propagation characteristics of these sounds connect on a deeper level with all the other sounds that surround them.
