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 International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has complained to the local police precinct Chengkung fourteen students of the National University of Taiwan, accusing them of illegally copied and exchanged files to mp3. A raid in their rooms and the seizure of their computer helped formulate the charges. Li Jui-bin, the spokesman for the IFPI Taiwan has defined this as 'a clear message' to the students of the campus. The website of the organization itself is unreachable for some days. IFPI's members are part of EMI, Sony, BMG, Universal, Warner and RIAA. But the whole operation has had from the beginning contours are unclear. First of all what would trigger the mandates would be a letter * anonymous * the brother of one of the students that he would ask the Authority of the 'save the setting for the Internet', anyone could have written that letter. The attack on the students under the guise of piracy then closes both eyes on the real creators of illegal software and music and that is dangerous on the well-organized criminal gang that local authorities are careful from addressing. A voice has already risen in favor of the students, and that is to Ovid Tzeng (pictured), Minister of Education, who has already gained the support of a national organization of volunteer lawyers to defend the students. Now we show that we are witnessing the campus is curious. Students leave the computer disassembled, taking the hard drive to class, and the boys have formed a support group for girls less experienced in hardware, helping them to disassemble and reassemble the hard disks to not let depleted 'evidence' dangerous.
