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.
This is “user friendly” even in its name. The ‘Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (TWCDC)‘ collective has made an operating system really for the users, as opposed to a view of software as a proprietary item. The collective states that, by building one’s own operating system, it’s possible to hack and defeat capitalism. The proof is ACOS, whose interface resembles Windows, but provides tools and contents much more “personalized”, to infiltrate the power and overturn it. It sports the same icons, files and folders of Windows but, once the user starts clicking, it behaves very differently. ACOS version 2.0, copyleft of course, offers a new interface, new programs, a new control panel, new background images. The best features of this system can be found among the programs: Will Work, Bed-In For Peace, The Guerrilla Tea Room, Citibank Global Domination. Will Work is a program to find a job in the capitalist society without being a capitalist; Bed-In For Peace is an action conceived by Yoko Ono and John Lennon to protest against the Vietnam war: today, staying in bed, the user can participate to a 48 hours long debate on war, video-conferencing with other people from Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, USA, Korea, United Kingdom and Australia; Guerrilla Tea Room is a prototype of a program to manage a franchising enterprise of anarchistic tea rooms in the whole world; Citibank Global Domination proposes the use of bank profits to support environmental protection programmes. The makers of ACOS are: Amy Berk, theorist and feminist pop-artist; Andy Cox, civil engineer, artist and activist; Gabriel Guzman, film and video editor; Stephen Hartzog, artist, web programmer and teacher; David LAwrence, artist and iconoclastic media activist; Lluis Vall, theatre artist; Megan Wilson, artist and consultant for no-profit organizations.
