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 
09:01:03 Activism Online: More than just a petition.
The network, since its inception, has always been associated with an imaginary intelligences intangible assets that communicate through nodes at a rate spread, beyond the usual limits of time and space. Much of this imagery is certainly fascinating from the emotional point of view, but sometimes little relation to reality. Other topical aspects of the network are progressively confirmed, for example, online activism following strategies and tactics that put him in a different plane than activism "traditional", you lose something in terms of physicality, but you gain in the plan of immediacy and ubiquity in the dissemination of information. If you decide to use the technology in a different way compared to how "from library", actually the new technological means possible in a short time to implement "actions", involving the widespread use a large amount of people. Many American sites have told the story of Sara Iglesias, a girl of 29 years who had never participated actively in marches and similar situations, but the network was looking for a way to make your voice heard: browsing the site of ' activist Michael Moore, and 'arrived within a few links to the site of the " Answer "(International Act Now to Stop War and Racism) by providing your e-mail address. Within three weeks has become the leader of a group large enough to fill a bus in October, he traveled to the capital to carry on their protest. Sarah Sloan, a component of Answer, says that his association is able to organize a protest within one hour of the bombing of a country by the U.S. government, all within a network of mailing lists, websites, wireless message. Many practices of activism are often not very useful, and sometimes even harmful, such as petitions used as a "virus" designed to clog your mailbox and slow down traffic on line, or to "capture" the names of possible signers. Other times, the petitions are useful, especially if in the form of personal e-mail direct to individual politicians, as stated by Howard Rheingold, author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution," which analyzes how, through new technologies, were well coordinated protests from the Philippines to the streets of Seattle. Sites that prove to be effective, however, for online petitions are e.thePeople, ThePetitionSite and PetitionOnline, or sites such as MoveOn.org that promote fundraising for issues of public interest.
Tatiana Bazzichelli
