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.
From the belly of the beast (the propaganda machine of war).
Second Gulf War.
The propaganda machine proceeds safe in his war against the truth. The bombings are constant and calculated. In all time? was calculated with care.
The apparatus of propaganda? in every home, and shows movies that should come from a distant war. We citizens, of course, we have no way to verify them independently, but many are happy to accept them for what they seem.
Let's peaceful streets by day in a delightful, prosperous and modern city. The images of night show, instead, the explosions from a safe distance. Which magical place are observed?
Pi? later shows images of damaged buildings, but they are all empty, as the streets of the rest. There are people involved, no? blood. is the United States' war against architecture, as if our enemy was the city of Baghdad.
The number of the dead, all Americans, all military? so "small that everyone has a specific name. We see their photos in uniform. Families who claim to be proud of. For each of them there '? a story to tell from the places of origin: truccatissima a wife who has just given birth to twins and try to smile to the camera, a boy just graduated, the community that you? gathered to help redecorate a home or mend a fence.
C '? pi? people dying on the highways of the USA every day in this war, say our news. Of course even more? The dead in the world of AIDS or lung cancer, but at this time we are not looking at their photographs or helping their families. At least not according to the news.
The program? structured as a curriculum, with problems and solutions. When we began to bombard the television networks showed a short film in which the experts have explained the difference between the bombs used in the previous Gulf War and those used today. Although at the time we were reassured that the bombs had all reached the target in a precise manner, was subsequently transpired that in fact the precision was horribly low. Today, experts explain that the bombs that are used are far superior to those used previously, and that this time? really true that you are hitting their targets, since? the devices today are really precise.
As soon as our soldiers entered the village first, rudimentary and poor? appeared a famous American reporter who interviewed an Iraqi woman living in the U.S., which enthusiastically assured that the house up to the Iraqi people with open arms the Americans liberators. The newspapers report that Iraqis running in the streets shouting 'Peace to all'. No one suggests, for ~, that the sentence can be a plea for clemency of unarmed peasants facing American soldiers with enough weapons on him to destroy the entire village in the blink of an eye.
The reporters traveling with U.S. troops, then, can call at home through satellite connections and show grainy images of heavily laden trains that cross the Iraqi desert. Like the proverbial pack animals, wagons are barely visible under their burdens of goods, food and protections that cover them. ~ There you are carrying, according to the tables commercial? very different from the fabrics of silk and spices that once crossed these roads. They transport goods from luxury incomprehensible to many people in Iraq: high-tech devices, clothes that protect against all possible dangers, medical supplies vital and perhaps there ~ that? pi? importantly, plenty of food and water to feed an army. In a nation that is able to feed themselves only thanks to international aid – aid that were stopped at the same time the arrival of U.S. troops – the chariots represent the unit of American well-being on the road.
I feel 'contaminated' by looking at these pictures, or reading newspapers. is an insult to be treated as a unit of human decerebrate, and be domesticated for the political fallout of the post-war era. I can not even convince me that a lot of people in this country you are drinking every word. But I will leave ~ I do not break down, thinking that the propaganda machine of war can be won.
We hope for peace.
member of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
