Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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 – Runningonair
Torna in queste ultimissime stagioni experimental un certo interesse sul “tintinnabuli style”, un approccio compositivo sviluppato alla fine degli anni settanta dal maestro estone di musica contemporanea Arvo Pärt, autore legato al minimalismo e per il quale già “tre note di un accordo sono come campane”, da cui – appunto – ne consegue la stessa definizione del genere, onomatopeicamente scaturita da quello specifico risuonare. Guy Birkin si era precedentemente confrontato con questa tecnica in “Mirror in Mirror”, traccia apparsa per la sua prima uscita su Runningonair, nell’album Symmetry-Breaking. pubblicato nel Luglio del 2011. Sulla stessa etichetta adesso, in Tintinnabuli Mathematica Vol. I lo sperimentatore inglese elabora le parti melodiche (M-voices) utilizzando algoritmi basati su metodi stocastici e sequenze intere scritte in Mathematica, un programma software di calcolo basato sulla matematica simbolica e utilizzato nel campo delle scienze, dell’ingegneria, della stessa matematica – ovviamente – e dell’informatica. Le parti armoniche (T-voices) vengono realizzate a loro volta utilizzando algoritmi specifici che operano trasformazioni delle parti melodiche in guisa delle concezioni “tintinnabuli” originarie. L’obiettivo del progetto è quello dichiaratamente di sperimentare assieme linguaggio musicale e linguaggio di programmazione, dando vita a nuova musica generativa. Tutto ciò, diremmo felicemente, non rinunciando a un certo gusto sonoro che stempera la purezza “geometrica” con suoni addizionali che appaiono in punti chiave propriamente posizionati. Sono ambientazioni in definitiva soavi, seppure melanconiche, un po’ chiesastiche e infantili come nenie di carillon, ad arte ricamate evocando stati d’animo ricchi di sfumature ed emozioni, giostrando fra astrazione e sentimento.
Guy Birkin – Tintinnabuli Mathematica
