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 
03:06:02 Hacker Journal, a biweekly current issue of information security.
Thirty-two color pages without advertising, with lots of news and some brief insights, that is how Hacker Journal , the magazine for a few days on sale, sold only 2 euro and declared with an exceptional distribution of 150,000 copies. It is the first attempt in Italy to spread even on paper news and technical information related to the security sector more technical and passionate, mirror sites that have offered their assistance, as Bismark, Gnomixland and Ondaquadra. The magazine claims to have sold 100,000 copies of the first issue and it's gone from monthly to fortnightly, in addition to being soon joined by a small portal that, among other initiatives, would like to offer an immediate 'service' especially useful for beginners, namely 'Gymnasium', where a server to test different techniques of attack. At the moment, however, the simplicity of the same techniques illustrated (distant from the technical details of the American '2600 ', for example) and the tone of the articles put him towards a public computer much more generic and curious towards these subjects compared to that of the employees work, while some criticisms have been leveled by different companies that act on the same front, but at the same time are more politically engaged, who complain of a lack of contextualization of the various arguments, ignoring the many practices hacktivism widespread in our country. The publishing house that sponsored the operation is the publishing services, which already publishes, among other publications, The Day, The Gazette, True Chronicle and News 2000.
