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.
Deep in the core of the Kindle (Amazon’s e-book reader) terms and conditions there is one clear sentence concerning the ownership of digital content: “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider”. This means that every Kindle owner only has a license for reading: they are not the owners of the e-books they buy. E-book lover and associate professor at Vienna University of Technology Peter Purgathofer has expressed an opinion on this kind of trade-off: when you buy a book, a physical book, you are free to do what do you want with it. Buying e-books is not the same. So he built a DIY Kindle Scanner, created with an automatic robotic chain. A Lego Mindstorm robot supports a Kindle that is positioned in front of a laptop. The robot performs two commands in loop: it pushes the “turn page” button on the Kindle and then spacebar on the laptop, which is connected to software that enables the built-in camera to take a picture of the Kindle. A script automatically sends the resulting pictures to some optical character recognition software (OCR) that extracts text files from the images. At the end of the process is a new e-book, obtained legally (considering the exclusive personal use of the output), with no need for decrypting the contents or using any DRM circumvention tools. This action is merely provocative. It concerns the “dramatic loss of rights for the book owner. The owner is not even an owner anymore but rather a licensee of the book”. Purgathofer doesn’t share the scanned e-books nor the code he uses. But he clearly shows the way it can be done, leaving to others the task of making everything public. The choice of a tool such as Lego Mindstorm could also be read ironically. An object indefinitely replicable, the multicolour robot seems to say: even children know that digital content is not intended for exclusive and monopolistic devices. Chiara Ciociola
DIY Kindle Scanner
