*Italian cyberculture at its most cyberrific.
http://www.labforculture.org/en/content/view/full/58748
"Neural is a magazine on new media art, hacktivism and e-music that is published three times a year in English and Italian. It is complemented by its blog http://www.neural.it/, which features daily news and reviews.
"The following interview between Alessandro Ludovico and Annette Wolfsberger took place on 2 June 2009 in Rotterdam.
"What was the trigger for you to start Neural, and what format did it have at the start?
"I started with the first print magazine 16 years ago, in November 1993. The first online presence of Neural was in May 1997 – something that I cannot really call a ‘blog’. It was a page with a few posts, which was supposed to be updated every 15 days and that’s what I tried to do. The site was meant to be a small issue, like a bonus to the magazine, but it ended up simply not working because it needed so much work and maintenance. It included text, pictures, and for every issue there was a piece of software art that could be downloaded. For me the blog was a reflection of the printed edition.
"I was always very interested in publishing, but I was also a geek. I bought my first Commodore 64 when I was 16 and I started to work for an underground electronic music label in Bari. At some point I proposed the idea of printing a magazine to a friend at work because we were both interested in all the stuff that was happening. Electronic publishing and the internet had just arrived, but there was no magazine about it. Neural concentrates on digital culture – that’s what we would call it now. At that time we called it cyberculture, and that included and still includes art, music and politics, all within or mediated by digital forms. Actually, the first issue of Neural was published six months after the first issue of Wired!
"Wow…
"I was not aware that Wired magazine was going to be published – there was no internet in that sense. Actually, the first thing we published before the magazine was a hybrid product with my friend’s record label called Minus Habens Records (which still exists). I was very passionate about virtual reality developments, so I started to collect stuff and I even did a couple of trips to see these VR machines.
"What we came up with in 1992 was the Virtual Reality Handbook, with all the physical addresses of producers, magazines, artists, you name it, and a few conceptual texts about virtual reality. It was a very thin book, about 40 pages, with a CD of music inspired by the topic. The book was bilingual (English and Italian) and was sold out in less than a year. It was shipped from Japan to the US, so I thought ‘why not push a bit harder and produce a magazine? We can do it!’ And that’s how it started…
"What is your background? Are you an artist yourself?
"It is the networked spirit of internet culture that fascinated me. My background was in publishing and music, and my arts background can be described as the mail art movement. Both mail art, and art made through the postal network, really fascinated me: not just because it was so radical that everyone could be an artist, make art and make a show; it was fun for me, but mostly I was fascinated by the possibilities of inter-exchanging art on specific topics all over the world: the ephemeral network. And when the digital network arrived, I thought ‘wow – so here it is’!
"That moment meant that I finally had the technological means to realise a synthesis of all these different things! From the very beginning, the concept of the magazine was to be a node. I never wanted to make the most beautiful magazine about everything digital in the world, but instead a very good magazine that was complementary to other efforts happening elsewhere: to create a – potentially important – node in a networked environment. This network consisted of nodes that were interconnected, shared and exchanged P2P [peer-to-peer] reviews, content contacts and created a bit of business to keep alive. Several of my initial contacts still exist, but many changed and do different things now...."
