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
31.03.03 NGV and Viral Video Project: independent TV channels on the Net.
NGV, New Global Vision is a constantly updated visual database where anybody can add his vhs-quality video to download and watch at home and/or to record on a tape or CD. “The contents must be expressed by the movement, by anybody’s own critical conscience, by those who produce free culture and information”. This phrase by the NGV collective clearly states the goals of this project: to create online video channels, independent and very cheap. NGV was born from the collaboration of people working on the Net who share the same attitude towards the collectivization of technological means, the sharing of knowledge and resources and the free diffusion of knowledge. For this reason, NGV uses open standards and free software. Right now a very large visual archive of the movement is available on the file sharing networks. They encourage everybody to keep these videos online to help them achieve the maximum possible visibility, a clear demonstration of the fact that the enjoyment of these videos, too, can be peer-to-peer, using the opportunities offered by broadband access to the Net to create a truly horizontal visual communication. Among their video productions are: Candida TV, Visual Communication Project, VideoAssalti, Indymedia Italia, AHA Television, Deep Dish TV, Akkraak, Le Tecniche, Polivisioni, Paper Tiger TV. The Viral Video Project, too, uses the same means of enjoyment and diffusion of its video material: “Freedom is a virus, spread the disease”. The idea was born from the growing worries for the state of information in Italy, especially regarding the interferences of the political power on information and justice. To defend freedom of thinking, it’s possible to download videos on italian political and judicial events. Everybody’s asked to share these files on p2p networks to spread them as much as possible: all of them, in fact, are distributed with a copyleft license.
Tatiana Bazzichelli
