Colin Raff proceeds into the biotic sculpture room

Justin Reed by Michael B. Mathias Aristotle commended the poets for their ability to portray the ways in which fate tests character and to display how human weaknesses may be amplified in unusual situations. By depicting human beings caught up in extraordinary circumstances, the poets did not simply entertain; they...

Monica Vitti as Guiliana in Red Desert, Rizzoli, 1964 From Words Without Borders: Ravenna, October 15, 1963 Finally, after a year’s delay, we are in Ravenna. Just a week left before the first take. The Red Desert will be born after a long and difficult gestation. Those of us here with...

Horny Season, Armen Eloyan From Bidoun: Would you say your paintings are dark at all? “I don’t think so.” Talking to Armen Eloyan, in spite of his gorgeous voice, can be taxing. He is exceedingly terse, mostly answering questions in combinations of one, two, three, or four words. Five...

Painters of sacred images in the Renaissance were constrained by the requirements of their patrons, by tradition and by the requirements of the Church...

Call of Duty 2, Activision, 2005 From Kill Screen: The Call of Duty series represents the extreme forward guard of “hyperrealism” and technological might in contemporary game design. It’s a bombastic, McBay take on American foreign policy. Parents, commentators, and critics look on in horror as frenzied gamers lap...

Marilyn Monroe and Charlie McCarthy by Joyelle McSweeney I’ve been thinking through a theory of Anachronism lately. My thinking goes that Art is a kind of Anachronism, breaking into, collapsing, and convulsing conventional ‘straight’ time with media, and, reflexively, turning conventional chronology into a kind of medium for convulsive,...

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop, still, Keiichi Matsuda, 2009 by Greg J. Smith Keiichi Matsuda is a multidisciplinary designer based in London and Tokyo who garnered widespread attention last year for Augmented (hyper)Reality, a speculative video series that explored near-future media environments. His short films Domestic Robocop and Augmented City 3D...

Points of Entry, Persuasive Games, 2007 From Columbia Journalism Review: In the summer of 2007, one of the hottest debates in America centered on immigration. Every pundit and politico had an opinion on the merit-based system proposed in the McCain-Kennedy Bill, either criticizing its rejection of family ties or...

Eine DuBarry von Heute, Alexander Korda, 1926 by David B. Clarke  The cinema has never shone except by pure seduction, by the pure vibrancy of non-sense – a hot shimmering that is all the more beautiful from having come from the cold. – Baudrillard (1990a, 96)  1.      Réalité Vérité  Until...