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 
02:07:02 'The Art of Deception' the first novel by Kevin Mitnick.
Kevin Mitnick, who still can not use the internet in all its forms, even now that he is on probation, is finishing a story that deals with the issues of hacking. The text entitled The Art of Deception, describes more than a dozen different scenarios in which boys sufficiently awake manage to divulge passwords, encryption keys and details about the security designators for network administrators. But nothing is autobiographical, and the author has taken care of the painstaking creation of invented names for crackers described, their victims and the companies involved. The thirty-eight, which will be free in January 2003 and reiterated that the techniques described in the text are public domain, and that if he has a message that is intended for information security professionals to help them improve their work , broadening the horizons of the possible attack scenarios. Who trivially points out that the same techniques could induce the unscrupulous to use them for dishonest purposes, Mitnick has pointed out, if proof were needed, that the data does not have a default color and that is if we decide to use the information for any purpose good or bad,. According to those who have read the latest drafts, the contents are not as refined, but rather widely acquired yearly industry professionals. With a picture very different from the chubby boy arrested by the FBI in the nineties, Mitnick is now thinner and appears in public with an understated look, but very nice. The book was written with journalist William Simon and takes into account the prohibition at the time of being able to earn money through the publication of his story. Fortunately the judge has allowed him to use a computer to write the novel as long as it was not connected to the network. Mitinick can not formally use hardware and software, and for each shift must request specific authorization; quadagna now living writing articles and says he will not repeat the mistakes of the past, but certainly not because the prison has taught him something.
