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 
26.09.02 Activists send Californians recycled PC in Ecuador.
Some members of the ' Independent Media Center in Oakland (California) are recovering from computers running from residues donated to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, assembling the useful parts in order to give them life. Their purpose is not just environmentally friendly but politically, because the computer patiently for weeks 'restored' were dispatched in Ecuador where the next meeting will be held on the 'Free Trade Area of the Americas'. The purpose is to use the pc to support the protest in those days. But the BMI is not alone. Other volunteers stormed another center of riclaggio, the Free Geek in Portland and the ultimate goal is to be able to make available 300 Linux machines. Among them Evan Henshaw-Plath, owner of protest.net, a useful site for calendars of upcoming demonstrations, who spent much of last year in South America helping to put on workshops, networks and websites. According to him the 300 cars as well as in the capital of Ecuador (Quito) will reach even remote villages are a non-primary to the quality of life of the population, but to trigger appropriate strategic social change. In Quito is also provided for the creation of a wireless network, and all computers (for the most part before a Pentium with 1GB of hd and 80 Mbytes of RAM, plus all the software in the distribution Mandrake Linux) will be used for communications, namely email and web. If all goes well (for the donation have also been involved humanitarian associations that provide free shipping) the next beneficiaries will be the farmers Brazilians and Argentines weakened by the collapse of the national economy.
