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.
Two emblematic episodes are bringing the fight for the right to free exchange of content on the network. Tuesday, February 24 was the 'Grey Tuesday' in which nearly 170 sites hosted files indicted for a day of Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse, despite the ready letters of the law offices of EMI. The band went early in saturation for the high number of requests, and many other sites without much ability they have chosen to give a gray background of protest to their home page. With the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has questioned the legitimacy of the same EMI own the copyright of the White Album, the large number of protesters and those who have benefited played brilliantly those 'temporary autonomous zones' at the end of the nineties theorized by Hakim Bey, constituting one of their previous history. On another front Luetgert Sebastian, animator textz.com , a site for years makes downloaded in text format books famous literary and political, is risking arrest. The Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture asked him to pay € 2,300 for the unauthorized publication of two texts by Theodor W. Adorno ('Jargon der Eigentlichkeit' and 'Fascism and Anti-Semitic Propaganda'), laid the foundation would have rights. The complaint was made in 2002, without any communication textz.com, which, once notified of the same saw to remove files immediately. The foundation, whose name has become ironic implications least, has even challenged a request for doctoral free to repay the damage caused, pushing even further the demand for payment or arrest. At this point Luetgert has decided to make public all, relying in support of the amount of people who are accustomed to self-determined rules that apply in your network, see the absurdity of the request. Persecution on the two texts of Adorno seems even more ironic, bearing in mind the contents of the texts themselves. Various ways of supporting Luetgert, including a petition , a banner , and buy a copy of The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice , to support the legal costs.
