digital technology
aleks.sierz
Has theatre’s time passed? In Tim Crouch’s latest 70-minute show, first staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh last year and now at Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) in south London, the nature of live performance is interrogated by this innovative and imaginative theatre-maker, with a little help from a virtual reality headset and William Shakespeare.Taking its title from one of the Fool’s comments in King Lear, this intriguing and entertaining event looks at how the metaphorical dog of truth has been whipped, while the hounds of post-truth deception are given too many treats.We are in Read more ...
Robert Beale
Is Artificial Intelligence pointing the way to musical composition in the future? The BBC Philharmonic, conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni and colleagues at the Royal Northern College of Music made a case for it in this concert.The highlight of the college’s Future Music festival, the programme celebrated the fifth anniversary of PRiSM (the centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music) at the RNCM, and also the supposed centennial of the orchestra itself. It presented two works by Emily Howard, PRiSM’s director: Antisphere (from 2019) and Elliptics, a setting of a poem by Michael Read more ...
Jon Turney
Scenes that stay in the mind: Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator peeling back the skin on his forearm to reveal the gleaming machinery within; a beady-eyed, new-born Alien bursting from John Hurt’s abdomen; that all-species bar in Star Wars; the spaceship’s long-awaited descent in Close Encounters.You probably have your own selection, from films, from computer games or, perhaps, from Disneyland’s 14-acre Star Wars themed park-within-a-park in California, Galaxy’s Edge. Science fiction, once a minority sport, has been mainstreamed in recent decades via popular media – and above all by Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Sitting in the park on a hot summer’s day, life began to imitate art. I had been soaking up the sun’s now overpowering rays for over an hour and was beginning to feel its radiating effects.Golden green filaments of grass moved back, the trees swayed in heady sympathetic succession; buzzing from the outside in, my body started to metabolise light at a speed my brain couldn’t fathom. My skin bubbled green, my tongue unfurled petals and my eyes sprouted luminous buds. I had become a plant – or so I felt – and the sun-soaked synthesis of my transformation was near complete.Hyperbole, you wonder? Read more ...
Jon Turney
Years ago, one of the leading mathematicians in the country tried to explain to me what his real work was like. When he was on the case, he said, he could be doing a range of other things – having his morning shave, making coffee, walking to a meeting – but all the time, “I am holding the problem in my mind”.Which didn’t help much. I did once know how to do some maths, but still had little idea what he meant. Where in the mind is a problem held? What holds it? Does the metaphor extend to putting it down and picking it up again, to examine it from a different angle? I have about as much notion Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Jurassic World: Dominion due in June, which will mark the end of the “Jurassic” movie franchise, here’s Apple TV’s alternative, science-based history of dinosaurs and their world. It’s produced by Jon Favreau, a key player in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and narrated by David Attenborough in his trademark “Whispering Dave” style. Attenborough likens it to his Planet Earth documentaries, except transported 66 million years into the past.Prehistoric Planet claims that it has incorporated all the latest research into the lives of the creatures that used to rule the earth, though much of Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
In his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing”, the American writer Donald Barthelme describes a fictional situation in which an unknown “someone” is writing a story.“From the world of conventional signs,” Barthelme writes, laying out for the reader this story being written, “he takes an azalea bush, plants it in a pleasant park. He takes a gold pocket watch from the world of conventional signs and places it under the azalea bush. He takes from the same rich source a handsome thief and a chastity belt, places the thief in the chastity belt and lays him tenderly under the azalea, not neglecting to wind the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In 1992 Martin Amis published a story, “Career Move”, in which the writers of sensational screenplays with titles like Decimator and Offensive from Qasar 13 read their work to empty rooms in shabby pubs. Meanwhile, wealthy and fêted poets pen verses entitled “Composed at – Castle” or “To Sophonisba Anguiscola” and their agents immediately juggle megabuck offers from LA: “In poetry, first class was something you didn't need to think about. It wasn’t discussed. It was statutory.” Dead Souls, the first (almost) conventional novel by poet Sam Riviere, shares Amis’s engagement both with male Read more ...
India Lewis
Unsettling, unremitting and psychologically stark, Klara and the Sun has all the hallmarks of a traditional Ishiguro novel. Dealing with his familiar themes of loss and love and the question of what makes us human, the book follows the "life" of an Artificial Friend (AF) called Klara, taken from her store of robot compatriots and left to navigate the complex world of human emotions. These AFs are companions for the children of this world, there throughout their infancy and then discarded as they reach maturity. Set against this background, the AFs' devotion to their children points to the Read more ...
India Lewis
Don DeLillo’s latest novella, The Silence, has been marketed with an emphasis on its prescience, describing the shocked lacuna of time around a devastating event whose repercussions are yet to be truly felt. It is a compelling short read, but a little bit too pretentious to be read without a certain amount of cynicism (particularly when the characters reel off long, declamatory statements about cryptocurrency).The Silence has echoes of other texts, with two in particular that stand out. The first was DeLillo’s own 1997 behemoth Underworld, with significant ball games being played in both. The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
During lockdown, some of the best online theatre has been shows that are specially created for this digital format. Much better than dull records of dramas that might have worked well on stage, but now seem sadly moribund and exceedingly slow on the laptop screen. So it’s good to welcome Midnight Your Time, which is remotely directed for streaming by Michael Longhurst, much lauded artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, after being reconceived by award-winning playwright Adam Brace, who wrote the original version of this one-woman show about a decade ago. Best of all, it features actor Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
With influences as diverse as Hitchcock’s Vertigo to 2010’s Catfish, Safy Nebbou’s genre-splicing French-language feature, starring Juliette Binoche, comes loaded with a heady mix of cheap thrills and surprising psychological depth. And it’s a hoot from start to finish. Nebbou’s sixth and most accomplished feature is an adaptation of Camille Lauren’s 2016 novel, ‘Celle que vous croyez’. Binoche is Claire, a fifty-something literature professor, with two children from a failed marriage. We meet her being interviewed by a psychiatrist, Doctor Bormans (Nicole Garcia), the Read more ...