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.
The book ' copyleft: creativity, technology and freedom ', it is proposed to consider the use of free licenses, describing the current state of copyright laws and putting forward an analysis that aims to demonstrate how the use of non-proprietary software, outside the influence of the various "giants" who monopolize the market. The book is written by a woman, Miriam Rainsford, composer, musician, graphic designer and writer, born in New Zealand in 1971, grew up in Australia and now residing in London. Particular attention is given to the possibility of use in the text of the GNU General Public License (GPL) not only in the software industry, but also in art, music, literature, and in all other fields "creative." Names like Sony, Bertelsmann and AOL / Time / Warner, are associated with restrictive idea of music production, artistic and intellectual. The Free Software movement, however, aims to realize and vehicular products which are open and free (free), which can be modified, redistributed and also marketed, with the proviso, however, also maintain free copies. This is even more evident for the software, whose being is manifested in maintaining the free open source code. The book reconstructs the history of copyleft practices and are also described in the most recent actions of artistic manipulation and plagiarism of existing products, especially music (see the works of Negativland), until you get to the analysis of peer to Peere file sharing technology . The site of presentation of the book you can read the abstract and you can find many interesting news and updated information on copyleft and surroundings. The book, of course copyleft, will be published by GNU Press by 2003 and you can freely download from the site several sections, in line with the philosophy of the free. Tatiana Bazzichelli
