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.
V2_NAi Publishers, ISBN 90-5662-353-2
In a prolific flow of productions on paper, Geert Lovink, founder of NetTime and coordinator of many initiatives of net criticism, has just published his third book in little more than one year. After ‘Dark Fiber’ and ‘Uncanny Networks’, published by MIT Press, ‘My First Recession’ represents a more contemporary and less historical effort compared to his two previous works and it succeeds in putting together the euphoria and skepticism which characterized, alternatively, almost all of the historical texts about the Net. Here, the criticism is crystallized around a fundamental archeology of media based on the materials of the more recent past by sampling a large set of media theories and contextualizing them in a clear political perspective. The radicalization on transversal practices, inspired by the algorithms used in computer programming, consolidates a set of strategies which succeed in demolishing the usual self-congratulating journalism, always ready to scream about the latest big successes and big failures, relegating it to the role of jester of the corporations and building a coherent and fascinating landscape of effective methods and situations for a sustainable technological development. The comprehension of the mechanisms of the Net is always fundamental, together with the analysis of the potential of this network structure, a structure which characterizes the daily exchanges of informations and goods and which, politically, economically and ideologically, contributes to shape the innovation. All of this was made by closely watching the developments and controversies of the mailing lists, one of Lovink’s favorite fields of research. Probably, the lists are a sort of oral history for some contemporary events, told by multiple personal voices through which strong ideas emerge and spread in a viral way producing new meanings and, more and more often, new active aggregations ready to change their surrondings.
