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.
Shake Edizioni, ISBN 88-86926-79-0, 196+cd, Italiano, Italy,
‘Reasoning for not but metaphors for metamorphosis. ‘
‘Zut has become most perfect, most perfect is to become Zut.’
‘Radio Alice is a test, one of the many’, aired in the ether, in Bologna, starting from February 9, 1976, police closed by March 12, 1977, in charge, according to the accusers, that he organized and directed the riots of those days, the riots followed the death of Comrade Francesco Lorusso. Alice will resume immediately to transmit, hosted by other broadcasters, being able to give voice to one of the most significant uprisings of the last decades and winning its reopening soon thanks to the general mobilization. The Sands unhealthy the next decade, between normalization and social conformism coated, they swallowed the struggles, the enthusiasm, the brave experimentation of a hysterical but creative period. Radio Alice continue his research until 1981, a new wave in all directions, the ridge between very different periods, years that have passed more and more difficult and tormented and since then nothing will ever be the same. ‘Alice is the devil – Story of a subversive radio’, enclosing an interesting CD containing the original recordings recently dissequestrate, offers a snapshot clear of those experiences, with numerous materials systematized by Bifo and Rubber. The singularity of Alice and A / sideways, restless sheet neo-dada magazine and autonomy more fruitful, happily transgressive, grumpy, button ideology that dies and the end of politics, however, overflows from simple pages of memories, albeit Chronicles of non-ordinary, showing still intact, twenty-five years later, the strength and relevance of those insights. This denouncing the power of every discourse that will remove the desire from everyday life, making the language unstructured and delirious a powerful weapon class, exposing the real misery of society while recognizing the abundance of production and the sphere of imagination, advance of its time, an essential role in social evolution. So not only a historical text, or only evidence, but an important moment of reflection and reconciliation with the new emerging global movements of self-organized alternative, which can not be separated from those experiences, nor think to limit its scope to simple antagonism. The waves of Radio Alice, lost in space, repeat ‘Down’ / send messages that are not understandable pervert the order of language-product fuzzy elements of a new subjectivity that reshapes the coordinates of all the possible trend changes.
