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 
11:09:02 The network emergency broadcasting USA is not safe
The ' Emergency Alert System is a network of emergency that allows the U.S. president to stop all radio and television talking directly to the nation in case of extreme emergencies. The system was replaced in 1997, the Emergency Broadcast System counterpart, but neither of them has ever been activated (even on September 11, 2001), except for regional coverage, such as the famous 'Amber Alerts' with which you are this summer triggered the search for some missing children. Criticism against the system, however, are on the rise, declaring it obsolete in a thousand TV channels broadcast 24 hours a day. But the biggest problem seems to be the vulnerability of the system to spoofing, which if successfully brought by a criminal could diffuse the wrong message from broadcaster to broadcaster as a virus. The system works through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that activates the EAS through 34 radio stations scattered across the U.S., which are the 'primary entry points (PEPs)' of the system. All stations, typically news in AM, immediately interrupt their programming to broadcast the alert message. The message begins with a set of encoded data with a low-speed modem repeated three times, followed by a sound of attention than 8 seconds and the actual message to end with another data stream. The data are a starting time, a station identifier, a regional code, a scandenza and three letters that describe the type of alert. Starting from the radio the message is transmitted to the television stations over the air and cable which must re-transmit it. What is missing is an authentication system, so anyone can play the codes and transmit low-power can be propagate their message and not the final code even suspend broadcasts of the station until the intervention of a technician. The only current protection is the modem used, a 500 baud non-standard but it could be emulated by a PC through an ordinary sound card and specifications published by the FCC, which reflect another system used for transmissions of meteorological services to be announced forecasts of danger.
