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.
Every day the soldiers-American cowboys trample with bombs dozens of lives of Iraqi civilians, and Tomahawk missiles-Cruise of the pompous American generals have also hit the few internet infrastructure of the capital. Ironically (or perhaps especially) left standing Babil Online, one of the major sites of Saddam propaganda, putting offline the router that provided free to the citizens of Baghdad, according to a report in Salon.com . The popular blog 'Salam Pax-Where Is Raed?' is unreachable, and phones also seem to be largely out of use after the destruction of the center of the satellite transmission of the ministry of communications. The feeling of helplessness in the face of human carnage is unbearable and Franco 'Bifo' Berardi in a public intervention has suggested the idea of instinctive protest dialing a number in the case of the USA (001 followed by the area code and the remaining random digits ), and when someone answers, tell him in a firm tone and polite 'please stop killing Iraqi children, stop killing children in Iraq. Please impeach George Bush the murderer ', immediately after hanging up. And while according to the security company Zone-H defacements the beginning of the war were more than 20,000, the use of video games as propaganda media has become a sophisticated practice. ' Desert Combat ', a mod of' Battlefield 1942 'Electronic Arts, of which there have been downloaded 250,000 copies since last December, and stood at 2-3,000 players daily, with a possible lucrative commercial release in the near future . When you begin a serious trade boycott that is able to permanently weaken this culture anesthetized and killer at the same time?
