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 
02:12:02 Vagamundo: a street-game digital on illegal immigration.
Born in the summer of 2002, with full U.S. anti-terrorism campaign, the game Vagamundo – a Migrant's Tale , Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, was an intelligent response to growing forms of prejudice towards immigrants. It was created with the intention of furthering a reflection on the problem of illegal immigration and the conditions of life of those who must fight for their fundamental rights. In the U.S., there are over eight million illegal immigrants, including three million from Mexico. The project, part of The Kitchenis Neighborhood Street Fair, comes from interviews conducted in Latin American immigrants living in Manhattan and Brooklyn, stories of everyday life that are presented as such. Vagamundo is an art project 'mobile', which is born on the streets and living in the streets: the computer, monitor and joystick are placed in a cart for ice cream, which travels through the streets of New York (remembering, at a glance, one of the most common occupations among immigrants). The concept of the game involves passing three levels, to make the 'social ladder' in the USA: past obstacles and evidence relevant to the daily lives of immigrants, in the first level you try to win a job, the second has got a job as porter or florist, in the third one becomes a waiter at a classy restaurant and you have to entertain guests to receive a tip. In the extra level you are faced with a dilemma: to discriminate against new immigrants (and so has a job at customs with the possibility of fire on illegal immigrants), or help them (and you get a list of text and links of nonprofit organizations profit organizations that protect new immigrants).
Tatiana Bazzichelli
