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 
08:10:02 Bruce Perens: the danger of patents for the web.
In an article for news.com Bruce Perens points out the potential dangers of patents on standards of the internet lately thwarted by a ruling of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Patent Policy Board who voted for a recommendation for the adoption of policies royalty-free, expected to be approved shortly by director Tim Berners-Lee and the majority of the board. The decision will allow developers to Apache, Linux and GNU software (just to name a few) to continue to implement W3C standards competing with proprietary software. The decision lifts the fortunes of all the small developers who do not have to pay royalties so that they can not afford, to differences of large multinational software. But a policy devoid of the copyright does not ensure that the standards are not covered by patents, so if these will prove to be already granted, the W3C will have to rethink to avoid the patent. However the consortium's decision limits the policy of royalty-free patent application with the standards of the network, so companies can sell their rights to other types of developments. The original purpose of patents is indeed to promote technological progress by rewarding those who discover new processes, but since the software algorithms are in fact 'mathematical' Perens asks if they can really be considered 'inventions' or discoveries based on the universe mathematical and therefore not related to the category 'patents'. There are other problems such as that of twenty years for which a patent is valid, there is a LOT for 'generations' of information technology, and the secrecy of the patents (all possible in the U.S.) that allows you to keep technologies in limbo until someone else thinks he can take advantage of in a big way and then require you fine rights. The battle, then. is still long and it is hoped that a similar decision also involves in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), first, and then the governments that guarantee the freedom of research and development cooperative network that is, in fact, the property of all .
