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.
O'Reilly, ISBN 0596007329 Spam is one of those peculiar phenomena of the network by exploiting its tremendous transmission techniques has come to be actively involved (willingly or not) the vast maggiornaza of its users. The trampoline that spammers have always used is based on an economy of scale that includes the communication almost free and automatic to an enormous amount of human beings, but not all passive or cunning in the face of advances. This text reconstructs the spread of spam tracing the interweaving of the personal stories of some of the major players in the 'bulk email marketing' on the one hand and militant struggle of the most active anti-spammer on the other. The parallel story of the abuser, in an irresponsible polluting a valuable public resource, and those who defend fighting and dedicandovici a substantial part of their time, draws the traits of an ethical conflict that underlies the use of the mass of the Internet, absolutely inherent in the contemporary world. The excess output (ie the power of communication) score possible by a single individual, while ensuring a high potential freedom of expression, is likely, in fact, to implode the medium of e-mail. And while it must refer to the cynicism of the techniques of 'scattershot' perfected by marketing the last twenty years, there are other innovations brutal concretizzabili only with cross-network of the Internet, as an invitation to buy unrecognized shares, resold immediately after the rise due to the purchase induced spam, or 'dictionary attack' that is used as the target email addresses from the same provider generated 'blindly' using statistical techniques that allow different azzercarne real. But in this infinite autoleggittimati devastating struggle between for-profit and spontaneous Crusaders ethics is told only one of the most glaring contradictions of the network. Inevitable, therefore, that this book will become a classic of the genre. And even if those who find the technical system to prevent it deserves the Nobel Prize, as does his characters say the famous cartoonist Thach Bui, desires and innermost boldest of human beings continue to be the target of chimeras offered by the jackals of the day.
