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.
book – The MIT Press – ISBN 0262182424
The meanings that emerge from hypertextual links are one of the real languages of the Web, where links and their density, as sublimated by Google’s ranking policies, become the fundamental quantitative and strategical piece for building intelligible meanings on the Net. The peculiar communication techniques of the Web and the huge possibilities for it to be used as a political tool are to be found in its structure, which is different, sometimes completely, from that of the traditional means of communication. This text accurately analyzes the ‘link policies’ and can be seen as the first draft of a real epistemology of the Web, founded on the computer programs for analysis and visualization made by the author. Analyzing the links means not only trying to understand the reasons behind the popularity of certain terms, but also outlining the meaning of the choices behind those links. The outline sketched by this kind of analysis permits to tear apart the opaque veil of online marketing, which is mostly self-referential and pretentious, outlining the peculiar internal mechanisms of the evolution of the endless web of links. This analysis quantifies not only the debates and arguments, but also examines techniques such as ‘collaborative filtering’, that is, the prediction of the user’s preferences based on the preferences of other users with similar tastes, or the aforementioned specific programs which can pinpoint, for example, new subjects of debates on the Net by sensing particular concentrations of links, or subjects of relevant social pressure by analyzing those most frequently cited by the great newspapers of a country in the period before the elections. Recognizing the dynamics and consequences of these epistemologic theories is one of the biggest hopes to understand the hyperfast mechanisms of the Web, which are still mostly unknown in their true social and linguistic dynamics.
