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.
How much privacy is a key issue for electronic communications is seen clearly in the practices and in daily episodes, such as the one resounding only found out yesterday by the heads of serveri of Autistic and Invented. The facts are that in June 2004, agents of the postal police on behalf of the Public Prosecutor of Aruba Bologna have asked the provider to access the server that contained the emails sent and received by croceneraanarchica@inventati.org. Aruba has not only made available to the server, after detaching it from the network, without the slightest warning the owners of what was happening, but the phone calls of protest of the directors responded citing an electrical fault completely invented. The problem is that having had free access to the server, the police have also acquired the SSL keys, monitoring potentially its entire operation, including all the personal emails of all users who have a box of tipo@autistici.org or invented @ . org. The owners of the servers have withdrawn the same and put it online soon after due 'reclamation' with another provider. The blatant violation of any privacy, the lack of any 'notice of' in these cases and the end of the 'server seizure' as a practice normally pursued and that could be followed by the suspects in the event of timely notice from the same provider, have provoked the anger and despair of an entire community that has been discovered spied at home for a year without knowing it, and mocked in its technical and ethical principles that has always advocated. While we need a regulatory investigation procedures of tools that can sufficiently protect the suspects (currently at the mercy of the police), although there are other free tools to protect its communications through cryptographic techniques, these are still too unwieldy and difficult to understand for the average user and as a rule not implemented in a standard way in the e-mail software. A simplified and effective use of cryptographic techniques, for the most popular platforms, it would allow a much greater spread in the community and a consequent exponentially greater privacy protection against abuses like this.
