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 
14:09:01 USA: sampling the network (3).
Still some news on the impact on the network of American tragedy.
. The loud voice of the defenders of freedom is now threatening to crush the same freedom they champion. This is the case of U.S. Senator Judd Gregg, who asked not to prohibit the sale of all software products related to cryptography, since among the terrorists would make heavy use.
. Intolerance generated from the bathroom of the media these days begins to be felt. Joshua Salaam, the coordinator for the civil rights of the Council on American Islamic Relations has denounced a constant barrage of death threats and verbal attacks on its association with violent and many Muslims scattered across the States. A few days ago a girl from Los Angeles is vented in a mailing list of the continuous threatening phone calls that arrived at her house, motivated by volunteering his father in a mosque in the town.
. Also serious allegations of Alessandro Luciano, president of Italian Authority for Telecommunications, which stated that anonymous access to the network can prevent the arrest of criminals and that we must restrict certain rights and fundamental freedoms of cyberspace objectives for public security . Hopefully it's just a thought emotional and not a short-sighted and dangerous interpretation of what happened.
. As if that were not enough there are also reports of fake sites for donations put on by unscrupulous looters.
. Many, however, sites that have temporarily abandoned their offer support for commercial purposes, such as banners that advertise the donation of blood or the American Psychological Association offers tips on how to overcome the trauma or approach the subject with children, and well as many mailing lists of different topics have begun to act as a support for news of friends and relatives.
. A unique case that of The Coup, hip-hop group from Oakland (California), who had made a couple of months the cover of her new album 'Party Music' with a photo montage of an explosion of the Twin Towers (in the image ), tragically similar to what happened then. 75 The Ark, label printing operation has stopped short, asking the group to change the cover, but some reviews, thanks to the first pass copies to the press, were already printed on the paper editions of Wired and Spin.
