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 
1/22/03 RFID, radio frequency identifying everything.
RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and is one of the rising standard of acting through identification microchip so tiny that they can be plugged into any object. The size of these chips are in the order of grains of sand and are able to receive a radio frequency transmission of responding with their unique 64-bit identification code, and do not even have the energy, given that fail to take advantage the energy of the incoming signal. Already the mega retail chains Walmart and Tesco are testing publicly the 'smart shelves' that verify the presence of goods, inventory and facilitating the detection of theft. And the German-KSW Microtec has patented an RFID tag 'washed' and therefore suitable for clothes while the European Central Bank is considering the possibility of introducing tags into banknotes since 2005. The cost to industry of a tag should be within 25 cents of euro that can drop to 10 if you order 1 billion tags. Needless to say, the huge risk of these technologies is more invasive control ever made. From commercial purposes (to detect the products have already been purchased by a customer, offering them what they can probably want) to those surveillance (constantly check a suspect) until those criminals (detect owners of expensive goods) is certainly the only one to lose the citizen, and above all its privacy increasingly vaporized, despite the hypocritical assurances of industries. A group affiliated with MIT, the ' Auto-ID Center , which deals with standards has already announced an application to destroy the tags with a reader or loss. And we hope that this is not the only hope.
