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.
User Friendly? This really is, starting with the name. The collective Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (TWCDC) has developed an operating system that wants to be really close to the user, in opposition to the idea of proprietary code. The collective is assumed that, building yourself your operating system, you can hack and defeat capitalism. It is proof of ACOS, whose interface seems to be that of Windows, but offers tools and content much more "custom" … to get to the heart of the power structures and detournarle. There are icons, files, folders, Windows, but just click on it to get into a very different world. ACOS 2.0, copyleft course, offers a new interface, new programs, a new control panel, new background images. Among the programs, the best performance of the operating system: Will Work, Bed-In for Peace, The Guerrilla Tea Room, Citibank Global Domination. Will Work is a program to find a job in capitalist society, while being anti-capitalist Bed-In for Peace is an action conceived by Yoko Ono and John Lennon to protest against the war in Vietnam today, according to bed, discusses the war for 48 hours, video conference with people of Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, USA, Korea, UK and Australia, the Guerrilla Tea Room is a prototype for spread of franchised teahouses anarchist worldwide; Citibank Global Domination proposes to use the bank profits, in collaboration with the Rainforest Action Network, to support environmental protection programs. Have devised ACOS Amy Berk, theoretical and pop-art feminist Andy Cox, a civil engineer, artist and activista; Gabriel Guzman, editor of film and video, Stephen Hartzog, artist, web programmer and teacher, David Lawrence, artist and media activist iconoclastic , Lluis Vall, theater artist, Megan Wilson, artist and consultant for nonprofit organizations. Tatiana Bazzichelli
