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.
. Art 
19:08:02 Proce55ing, software for a multimedia development playful.
It's finally available the first alpha version of Proce55ing 1.0 , the ambitious project initiated by Ben Fry (MIT Media Laboratory) and Casey Reas (Interaction Design Institute Ivrea). Proce55ing is not a professional production tool or a commercial product but a software program to learn and use the language of electronic media. It consists of a programming environment for Java derivation whose strong point, according to the authors, is the simplicity and extensibility and will have in the next beta version of a library base that will allow the use of 2D and 3D vector graphics, in addition to the generation, composition and manipulation of sounds and images, the interaction with hardware devices inside and outside, the synthesis of 3D environments, etc.. This software is extensible in the sense that it can be used at multiple levels of difficulty while the core library can be extended by the people who make and share their plans on the net. He is currently experienced at the MIT Media Lab and Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, where students are encouraged to planning and their own means of production without having to fall back on those of others. The product, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, it is free to download and use, and it is widely encouraged. Despite the initial stumbling block due to the structuring of a programming language, Proce55ing is a tool that allows a more playful approach to the development of electronic media, and tries to experiment without the constraints of the multimedia software in watertight compartments, in addition to its nature 'horizontal 'makes it not as dramatic, as' evolutionary': born from the needs of the present and pointing straight ahead to a future potential.
Clement Pestelli
