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
24.02.03 Telestreet and F-Hack Days, media-activists in action.
Saturday, February 22th, is a critical day for the Telestreet project, started in Bologna by Orfeo TV, which created a virtuous chain reaction during the past months. After the first transmission and the national meeting Eterea, organized on December 14th 2002, this is the first public act of a network involving a whopping 25 micro-TV stations in Italy, totally different, both technically and conceptually, from the commercial TV system. An act for openly declaring a model alternative to the centralized and obtuse broadcasting of ‘official’ TVs and democratizing at the grass-roots level the most widespread and powerful information process. Synthesizing the paradox of the potential unlawfulness of these actions, Stefano Bonaga declared: “We are illegal, but constitutional”, citing the 21st article of the italian constitution which guarantees the freedom of expression. On the same side is the draft bill by Giovanna Grignaffini, a leftist-democrat Member of Parliament, aimed at establishing the freedom of use of the local empty TV frequencies. On the Telestreet website there are instructions for building one’s own TV station with 1.000 euros and other technical and legal advices. Friday, 21st and Saturday 22nd, at the centro sociale Laurentino Occupato in Rome, there will also be the ‘The F-Hack Days‘ meeting, organized to share files, experiences and knowledge for building the local hacklab and support the inventati/autistici.org project. Workshops on DVD mastering, on the PC basics, stands for bartering hardware and media, Unreal Tournament and no-copyright zones.
