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.
. Hacktivism 
11:01:02 Hacker in trouble.
Jon Johansen, the Norwegian eighteen (pictured), has been indicted by a court in Oslo for violating national laws on cybercrime in 1999. In reality it is a cause that has undergone the extreme pressures of the major Hollywood movie and their lobby represented by the Motion Picture Association of America, as Johansen is mainly one of the authors of DeCSS, the popular Linux software, which reveals protections apply to DVD. In testimony made in New York had declared him to be one of the authors, and to be part of the crew of hackers 'Masters of Reverse Engineering'. After an interrogation following a raid carried out by the local police in January 2000, the DVD Copy Control Association of the United States and the Norwegian Motion Picture Association had openly allied to pursue Johansen, but the question is still open, since the software is been classified as a crime against intellectual property, which is yet to be proven. Meanwhile, Benjamin Breuninger, a twenty-two of Minnesota pleaded guilty to be entered in a network not classified within the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The boy, whose nickname is 'Konceptor' admitted that he had punctured the nuclear lab network in November 1999, setting up a kind of backdoor that allowed him to access it again in the next ten days, and he said it was to fight his chronic depression. According to the indictment, the laboratory then spent 20,000 dolalri again to make sure access to the network. Ironically, the incident took place six months after the same Breuninger had a speech at the Rootfest hacker conference on the theme 'avoid arrest', and now faces five years in prison.
