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.
The MIT Press, ISBN 9780262026420, USA, 2008, English
The gigantic media effort to justify the senseless war in Iraqi has become an historical case study for 21st century journalism (as the first Gulf War used to be for the nineties). With respect to modes of communication we are in divisive times, with power and media ownership on one side and alternative media and (mostly online) citizen journalism on the other. The question has become how to describe, or even define reality when the information we receive seems increasingly fragile. The role of the web is becoming more and more preponderant, and the ambivalence of trust and deception is played endlessly through pages with an established reputation. Activist individuals and groups, with their strategies, have always been there, leading the discourse in the mediated public sphere. In this anthology many different tactics are explained and documented, with an impressive attention on news and constructed narratives in reports. But it’s not really a self-celebrating anthology. Jodi Dean’s chapter (“Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics”), for example, is examining different complications related to the web 2.0-based platforms, questioning the ultra-positive conception of technology typically discussed by tech-savvy activists. We are asked to consider that the shape of reality is partly formed by a large community that is well aware of the value and influence of information. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that it is currently an elite of talented writers who are fostering citizen journalism on the blogosphere. Their presence and work is vital for maintaining, defending and improving online freedom of expression and control over mainstream media constructed reality.
