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 
01/16/02 Hi-Tech Hate, six boys under indictment by the GDF.
Whisk the hacker on the front page, a story old and already 'seen it many times before. The measures taken against six guys in the crew Hi-Tech Hate (aged 16 to 23 years) are not known in detail, but after twenty-four hours you know by heart the reason for their accusation (defacement of the home page of the middle world 'matters', for a list see the' archive Alldas.de ), and the face of Umberto Rapetto satisfied, the 42-year old Piedmontese who commands the group in Rome anti-crime technology of the Guardia di Finanza. With presentations from video games, the inflexible guardian of justice computing said he would like to paternalistic 'get them on his side', but in the meantime the six face up to three years in prison, despite the assurances of the prosecutor. No media cathode quoted one of the proclamations of the group reported by Indimedia which among other things stated: "We use hacker practices to counter misinformation, we are not terrorists, NZ stupid kids who do not know what to do. We're just kids, perhaps more grown up? fast, but very curious. Is it a crime to want to understand '. " Moreover, already the Sole 24 Ore on Sunday, October 7, 2001, reported an interview with the 'commander', in which, interspersed with some attitudes gigioneschi as "If a hacker dare, knocks him down. Or at least I try. Guaranteed." stated "we just caught the perpetrators of a storm computer in the days of the G-8." So why the measures are triggered only now, with more than three months late? Really it took a tracking company to Ravenna to frame?
