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 
05:10:02 Shrinking World, Expanding Net, annual conference of the CPSR.
Shrinking World, Expanding Net , is the title of the annual conference organized by CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility) opened on 5 October at the famous Harvard University, which seeks to draw together the threads of sustainable technological development for human rights in the sense side. Divided into two sections sees 'Expanding the Net', the presence of Iqbal Quadir, founder of GrammenPhone, a cell phone company in Bangladesh that has as its primary objective to provide services to the entire national population and contribute to the development of infrastructure in the country, and those of Calestaous Juma, Kenya founder of the African Centre for Technology Studies, Daryl Martyris, representative of the World Computer Exchange branch in South-East Asia and Diane Anuis that will give a talk on 'Wireless for the Caribbean'. In 'Shrinking the World', however, are Judy Brewer, director of the Web Accessibility Initiative, Libby Levison at MIT with the project 'Providing Web Search Capability for Low-Connectivity Communities' and Hani Shakeel with the intervention' Community Knowledge Sharing: An Internet Application to Support Literacy Communications Across Levels'. Also awarded the prize Norbert Weiner, went this year to Karl Auerbach (pictured), as a pioneer of a democratic administration of the Internet, having feared by the not suspect the dangers of centralized management of the DNS, but it is now one of the members ICANN's most critical and representative for the users.
