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 
29.10.02 Pollution from mobile phones.
Environmentalists launch a new alarm continues to increase the number of subscribers to mobile phones and proportionally there is an increase in environmental pollution. According to reliable sources, subscribers in the U.S. are more than 128 million people, compared to 340,000 in 1985. On average, each cell is used for 18 months and then is replaced by a new model. This race towards ever higher technological standards, involves great damage to the environment: Inform the American company that deals with environmental quality, said in a research funded by ' Environmental Protection Agency , that by 2005 it will throw away 130 million cell phones . Considering the telephones, batteries and refills are produced each year 65,000 tons of waste. Although some phones are put in the drawer, others are thrown in landfills or are incinerated: chemical waste they produce, arrive at plants, water, sun and, ultimately, to the men. And this happens in the U.S., but also in Japan and Europe. To combat the problem, have been proposed programs 'destruction' mobile: discounts are offered for the purchase of cell delivery to those old ones, then returned to the manufacturing company. These are so tempted to produce phones with new products that are less polluting and more easily recyclable. Unfortunately, many big mobile manufacturing companies and associations on the internet you are opposite: we prefer to give the technological waste to developing countries or to charity, rather than eliminate the race to ultra-tech or Internet traffic caused by the messages promotional.
Tatiana Bazzichelli
