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
31.07.03 Farewell St. Jude (ex Mondo 2000).
Mondo 2000 was the magazine which literally opened the Pandora’s box of new technologies, much earlier than the others. Granted, it was written with the typical american enthusiasm, but at the same time it attempted one of the first disillusioned pop critiques of the deluded theory that stated that the spreading of new media was bound to bring on a massive social improvement. St. Jude (whose real name was Jude Milhon) was the Senior Editor of Mondo 2000 and she, an expert professional system administrator, wrote many enlightened pieces, always in her characteristic sarcastic tone, before passing away a few days ago. A sophisticated character, with a strong political background, she entered the world of computer programming in the Sixties, fought political battles in her own way and advocated ideals of freedom borrowed from the most active hackers. She invented the term ‘cypherpunk’, which has since then identified a large group of people keen on cryptography. Subtle leader writer, with a fine sense of humor, she has always been fascinated by ‘nerds’ and by a social vision where they roamed freely using their intelligence to gain access to the right resources. In a short interview published in the book ‘Net Chick’, talking about her newly published satyrical book titled ‘The Cyberpunk Handbook – The Cyberpunk Fakebook’, she said: “I hope that thousands of twelve-year-olds will be corrupted by my book and will transform their lives through not-exactly-legal actions, carried out with extreme discretion and intelligence…”
