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 
04:07:02 Streamer, software pirate radio.
Streamer is software written English Iain McLeod to restore dignity to the pirate radio online, making it difficult to identify them by the authorities. The author was inspired dall'adirazione for the decisions of the U.S. government with regard to Internet radio and exaggerated royalties imposed by the lobby of the majors. The absurdity of these Gabelli cost is $ 7 per month per listener, for all stations unsustainable medium-sized companies. Even the SomaFM in San Francisco which collected more than a thousand users threw in the towel and left the message on his website 'Killed by the RIAA. June 20, 2002 '. Although as early as two Republican senators (Rick Boucher and Jay Inslee) are moving to revise this decision untenable, the more immediate solutions came from the underground. Streamer, in fact, despite his overt bug is a program for Windows under GPL license that works a little 'as Gnutella and other peer-to-peer networks that do not have central servers. The flow of streaming, in fact, is passed from computer to computer in a chain that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to trace its origin. The model has already been applied, for economy of bandwidth since other commercial facilities, but McLeod is to revive the spirit of broadcasters like Radio Caroline, who like others in the sixties and seventies broadcast from a boat that ran along the coasts English to circumvent the state monopoly, and this software if it finds appropriate contributions, seems to actualize birllantemente the same concept.
