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.
Launched on May 1st 2006, Telekommunisten is the first proto venture communist enterprise, one hundred per cent workers’ owned and operated technology company. Based in Bootlab (Berlin), this self-declared ‘anti-war, against corporate globalization, against racism and inequality’ company, has started a project that combines business and radical ideas. Dialstation is indeed a very low-cost platform for international mobile phone. The aim is keeping the trans-local communities in touch, cutting down long distance expensive rates charged by the telecommunications corporations. How does it work? Dialstation can be used with a normal telephone and requires no special software, and no Internet access. People can make calls in three different ways: calling with a Text Message (SMS) to telekomunisten SMS, through a classic callback scheme, calling with Touch-Tone (DTMF) telekomunisten voice gateway, same callback model, or converting any international number into a PDN, which is a special number that use Dialstation to call. According to Dmytri Kleiner, Telekommunisten founder, far more people in the world have access to a mobile phone then to computers or even regular phones. Telephone cards and vouchers have then become a sort of currency in remote places, being used as a payment currency instead of cash, which is often hard to transfer where bank accounts and Internet are not easily available. Thus money held in Dialstation accounts can be transfered between accounts using the voucher feature, available to all user, opening up the possibilities of being used for both market opportunities and gift economies. However Dialstation is still a Beta test and, ironically enough, still requires Internet connection to be explained and promoted.
Valentina Culatti
