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 
20:11:02 Internet Bookmobile, diffuse knowledge from the web to the paper.
The culture travels online, and not only: it's the ' Internet Bookmobile , the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, which aims to enhance communicative possibilities and diffusive Network, making knowledge accessible to everyone. Opposing a law called the Mickey Mouse Act, derived from the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, the Internet Bookmobile is a central moving production and dissemination of texts (the necessary equipment can be found on a caravan) with a very specific mission: to travel between different countries, stopping at schools, museums and libraries, create children's books and distribute them to the entire world by means of a digital library rhizomatic and widespread: the World Wide Web Starting from East Palo Alto, California, Kahle and his staff have attended a school in Salt Lake City and crossed the Ohio, the Akron, up to Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Washington. Important step in the journey of the Internet Bookmobile was the Supreme Court on 9 October, to protest against the aforementioned Sleep Bono Copyright Extension Act, which extends copyright by another 20 years for public domain books: exactly what the Internet Bookmobile want it to be free and free. The books no longer in circulation, or those who have passed 30 years of restrictive terms of copyright (thus becoming the public domain), are included in the digital library created by Kahle, ready to be downloaded and reprinted at widespread. Some texts are downloaded from the network, while others are scanned, but all are part of the online library and, on request, shall be printed and made available. The Internet Bookmobile apply in practice what in theory has always been a prerogative of the network: to make knowledge accessible to many, overcoming the barriers that make it the prerogative only of those who have physical and economic means to conquer it.
Tatiana Bazzichelli
