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.
. Hacktivism 
27.05.02 Big Brother into the VCR.
In another attempt to subjugate the real world to achieve business goals, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the largest business lobby in Hollywood, submitted to the United States Senate's own 'Content Protection Status Report', a document that speaks of new regulations on the analog to digital converters, ADC, generic components that are found in medical equipment, scientific and entertainment. To bring this crazy project is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in his comment . The proposal conprende the insertion of a 'control chip' (cop-chip), which is able to turn the entire device in the case where if it detects the use to duplicate material protected by copyright. Needless to say, you might be faced with paradoxical cases, such as cell phones going off because we're speaking too close to your hi-fi. The delirious document comprises three parts: control digital device, check the analog converters and control the internet. The first is mainly targeted to a tough regulatory standards for digital television, while in the second you enter the ethics of the user total control. The plan of the MPAA is to include a watermark, which marks the almost invisible in the work published and to force the detection of the same device-ADC. This means that trying to catch a movie with a camera would immediately turn off the camera itself, which would detect the watermark included in the film. The consequences of large-scale might be bizarre to say the least, as the camera turns off because while taking the kids play is framed on the TV that transmits a famous cartoon, or a camera that refuses to take a good picture during the holidays, in the frame because there is the sign of a protected trademark. In the last part then deals with the part relating to the network starting from the "end endorsement of film on so-called theft of services 'file sharing', as Morpheus, Gnutella and other p2p networks. This is technically impossible, as in the If gnutella, where there is no central server, without putting hand to the very structure of the Internet, which could be one of the tremendous long-term objectives of the MPAA.
