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 Italian Hackmeeting is a very special kind of event. It’s very different from the other European or American hacker meetings because it’s compeltely self organized and decided through a public mailing list. The 8th edition will take place in Parma, 1-3 September, in a place (the ex USL building in Strada Boffalora 8) squatted a few days before, concretizing the very spirit of this event: hacking reality, not only code. In this place the computer network and the rest of public services has been collectively built in a few and the gathering will be a statement for defending another free zone. The latter practices were quite common also in the previous editions (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005). The spontaneous planned seminars are covering the edge of technology and culture: how to build your own FM transmitter, the Italian Pirate Partiet presentation, the dark side of Google, renewable energies, how to build and use the so-called Cantennas, how to deal with Italian copyright laws, the Blisset-style hoax of Serpica Naro in the world of fashion industry, writing poetry in C programming language, a critical videogame for mobile phones collectively developed and the projection of Revolution Open Source II, a documentary movie on the Italian OS scene. The core technical developments are naturally included as an introduction to semantic web, neural networks, Linux suite for professionaly producing multimedia, TOR, Trusted Computing, firewalls, reverse engineering and the usual Key signing party. The usual radio streaming of all the event through Radio Cybernet has been transformed into a so-called ‘protcast’. Anybody can dial a local phone number and then (thanks to a software hack developed by Jaromil) starting a recording of seminars or interviews or sound art or whatever, promptly made available online.
