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.
. EMusic 
10.23.01 Sting, MOCA, Disney cartoon with Napster.
– Sting, after having obtained the ownership of the domain sting.com, overcoming different obstacles, given that 'sting' (literally sting) is a common term, has joined the free concert that Microsoft is planning for tomorrow at Bryant Park in New York to officially launch its Windows XP and at the same time remember the victims of the city. The concert will be webcast in the U.S. alone on MSN, the portal of Microsoft itself.
– The Digital Media Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation along with other smaller groups are looking for support within and outside the U.S. parliament to approve the Music Online Competition Act (MOCA). This is to prevent MusicNet and Pressplay form a duopoly able to control 80 per cent of the network distribution of music.
– The episode of October 5, the Disney cartoon 'The Proud Family' was titled 'EZ Jackster'. 'EZ Jackster' is a site similar to Napster with the heroine of cartoon Penny (pictured), who after spending $ 125 on CD (with a weekly allowance of 5 cents) meets a boy, Mega, who speaks of EZ Jackster, and she downloads music all weekend. At this point the rapper Paid-A-Lot sees reduced his weekly salary to five cents, and unleash the police against the girl who is arrested. The episode ends with the lecture disguised as unlikely conversation between teenagers in which she argues that "downloading is like stealing" and that "a world without rules is wrong."
