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.
Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674015436 The prospect of hackers as a social class is undoubtedly fascinating. Think, in fact, to the global community that has a common denominator pragmatism in handling everyday social practices and technology through abstraction, sometimes brilliant, with a radical libertarian utopia upstream, makes you feel together all those who have chosen to ban the his life will lethal coupled consumerism / conformism. On the other hand it is considered that the condition of the precarious intellectual workers dell'infosfera (the 'cognitariat', as defined by Bifo), of which many hackers are part of, is fragmented into a thousand circles of contact and partitioned Daily Times that make it difficult the creation of a collective consciousness. That's why the 'call' ideological and enlarged contained in this text is divided into 389 short and sometimes fulminant paragraphs, streamlines themes through illuminating flare-ups aiming to simplify the theory in a manner intelligible. While subtending the classic structure of a 'manifesto', then, Marxist theories are here applied to infrastructures with scientific and clarity. This involves, among other things, the rejection of the commodification of the data, the abstraction of production flows of immaterial goods, the rethinking of the mechanisms of power inherent in the productive structures of knowledge, criticism of vocational training as ideological enslavement, and various other thoughts of the social networks. The relevance and potential hackers properly understood (those who believe in the discovery, in the creation of an idea and freedom of expression) is increasing at a delicate moment in history, namely the transition to a civilization mainly based on information and data . The text can then be able to pick another and unleash further necessary cohesion and awareness. And this can be essential because accumunati a social condition, a shared imagination and, above all, an enthusiasm that leads to collective exciting products, the hackers are and remain one of the concrete hopes for change.
