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.
In the north of Italy, from Milan to triveneto, as a response to the policies of zero tolerance and progressive closure of the national border, were born hacktivist new realities that continue to survive despite numerous attempts to delete them. Synusia , the new HackLab of triveneto and Reload , the new space that, despite numerous evictions, always manages to revive, are an example of energy and proactivity of who carries out the strongest terms the concept of hacking. Hacking as a right, and art of 'get their hands' on technology and its products. The collective Synusia has given birth to a HackLab that puts emphasis on the issues related to security, free software and sharing of knowledge, combining in a single project all 'mites' triveneto. The same is making the new HackLab of Bologna , who fight for the free circulation of knowledge and digital rights. Another source of experimentation and exchange of information on technology is the collective Reload ö reality hacking, now looking for a new space after the eviction from the square before Segrino and recently in Milan, Via Confalonieri. Wirless internet point, radio, video and workshops are the activities of study, research and testing of a laboratory that aims to amplify the ideas, the use of technology, technical information and free software, coming from varied backgrounds towns digital activism or not. Actions and new projects are enlivening the neighborhoods and streets of the city of Milan, including the recent initiative for the privacy and anonymity in opposition to the now widespread presence of surveillance cameras. A 'strike' of 101 cameras in Milan, obscured to live for a night in the freedom of movement.
