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.
. EMusic 
15:10:01 Napster, mp3Pro, sales and other stories.
– Sales down. According to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) world music sales on physical media have declined by 5 percent in the first six months of 2001. In detail, the CD sales were down 4.6 percent, those boxes of 16.3 percent. Sales for the individual are down 14.4 percent, and estimates are lower than the European average (-1 per cent) even if you have peaks in England (-10 per cent) and France (-8 percent ). Conversely, the IFPI 'complaint' an increase in sales of CD-R eighty percent. So what?
– According to the research firm Webnoize, the number of files exchanged through MusicCity, Kazaa and Grokster during the month of September increased in total by 56 percent, and, more generally, the Jupiter Media Metrix speaks of growth between March and August, this year by 500 percent in the past data through alternative programs to Napster.
– The 6 percent of the files traded on KaZaA, one of the most successful successors to Napster, it is a virus. Although it is not possible to infect a mp3 files, the system filters the KaZaA allows you to rename a file as pippo.mp3.vbs and when a user searches for 'foo', the. Vbs is not shown, deceiving it.
– Listen.com has signed an agreement with some independent labels for its online distribution platform Rhapsody. Have joined, among others, Alligator Records, Bar / None Records (DJ Spooky), J-Bird Music Group (Boy George), Lost Cat Records, Bloodshot Records, label and six other children.
– The Bertelsmann has estimated at 100 million dollars the cost to keep them alive between Napster causes, copyrights and various investments.
– Mp3.com has entered into an agreement with Thompson Multimedia to promote the new compression standard mp3PRO in a joint website, which will be part of the same portal mp3.com.
