digital technology
Thomas H. Green
Another week of lockdown so another fresh and lively update on what’s out there, including an interactive orchestra experience, DJ sets, and a concert in your own living room. Dive in!One World: Together at Home – Curated by Lady GagaThe big event in popular music this week is, without doubt, this epic from-their-homes broadcast organized by Global Citizen, the Global Poverty Project’s New York festival arm, and the World Health Organization, in support of frontline healthcare workers. Put together by Lady Gaga, it features an American-leaning who’s who of music stars – Pharrell Williams, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s only been a week since London’s West End went dark, and theatres closed all over the UK, but it feels like months. Really. Like many, I’m in self-isolation, stressed by working online and worried about getting enough food and essentials, so it is heartening to know that digital performance – can you even call it theatre? – is alive, and, if not exactly live, certainly kicking. Theatre Uncut, a company whose slogan is “Political Theatre for Everyone Everywhere”, have this evening Facebook-streamed a recording of playwright Kieran Hurley’s short drama, Bubble. For the coming months, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
With counter-terrorism an urgent concern – and specifically how best to find, track and use the data of suspected threats, without sacrificing our privacy and civil liberties – it’s excellent timing for a meaty drama about the surveillance state. And the second half of this debut full-length stage work from Al Blyth, helmed by Hampstead AD Roxanna Silbert, comes excitingly close to being that play for today.However, you do have to wade through an overlong first half which, unfortunately, trips into every genre cliché going. The GCHQ computer whizzes who supply the security services with Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Eve Leigh is an experimental playwright who has tackled difficult issues for more than a decade. Yet most members of the public will know her, and her actor husband Tom Penn, as the neighbours who recorded an altercation between Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds in June this year. At least, that's what it says on the internet. But don't let this distract you. Her new play, Midnight Movie, marks her debut at the Royal Court and takes as its subject the hypnotic attractions of the net. In particular, it explores the way that people with a disability can use the digital world for good as well as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This brilliantly conceived and executed show is about provenance in art. It’s also about our perceptions of the truth. However, it’s a show where it would be churlish to reveal too much of what goes on. This is, of course, perverse since some will be reading to find out exactly that, but the brain-frazzling thrill of True Copy, alongside the story it tells engagingly and with humour, is delivered by the stunning twists and turns it throws in, which would be ruined if even hinted at.Berlin are the most perversely named, unGoogleable company. They’re from Belgium and major in multimedia pieces Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To consider the third album from experimental composer Holly Herndon solely as a piece of music is to miss the point. PROTO is part artwork, part research project, on which Herndon teams up with collaborators both human and inhuman to discover whether artificial intelligence can be trained to produce art. The results aren’t always beautiful but that, perhaps, is what makes them human.As track listings go, PROTO’s is perhaps a little too on-the-nose. The 13-track album opens with “Birth”; a minute-long, alien-sounding composition whose jarring sounds and guttural, inhuman vocals seem to pass Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“When we graduated we were seeing lot of theatre as a literary form,” explains Candice Edmunds of the theatre company Vox Motus, “But we were really excited by it as a visual form and everything we make, from our earliest scratch pieces up to Flight, has really been an experimentation into how much we can substitute dialogue and the written word for theatrical visuals.”Edmunds, together with fellow Artistic Director, Jamie Harrison, founded Vox Motus in 2004 after graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Based in Glasgow, they’ve built a hefty reputation with theatre heavily Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A covers a wide variety of games that are spearheading the gaming world at the moment. It takes a closer look at eight of the most innovative and different games that have changed the world of gaming in the last five years. Concept sketches and art show the games developing as they gradually take their final form. The exhibition also looks at how videogames could be more life-like and give a new perspective on the world.Some of the games cover topics never really seen before in games. Mafia 3 is set in 1968 USA, and addresses racism as an integral part of the Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Civilisation is under threat from a bunch of religious rednecks, and it’s your job as the new Deputy Sheriff of fictional Hope County to right the wrongs of a year-long silent coup initiated by Eden’s Gate, a fanatical doomsday cult, intent on purging sinners and imposing their law on the land. There's a Brexit gag in there somewhere.Set in America, a first for the franchise, Far Cry 5 serves up more of the same freedom to explore a massive open world. It’s a beautifully detailed environment filled with pine forests, mountain ranges, shimmering lakes, rickety old towns and winding roads. A Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Suddenly Steven Spielberg movies are plopping off the production line like Ford Fiestas or Cadburys Creme Eggs. It seems like only seconds ago that we were greeting The BFG and the breast-beating earnestness of The Post, and now the director comes steaming back with this huge and hectic tribute to the gamer-world and his own long-lost youth.Based, albeit with a fair bit of latitude, on Ernest Cline’s bestselling novel (Cline wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn), it’s set in a dismal, overcrowded 2045. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is not only named like a superhero’s alter ego, but he escapes into Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Imagine that you come across a story by a journalist who, writing for the Daily Mail or The Sun, steals the identity of a real young man from a poor neighbourhood of south-east London. He had died of an overdose, aged 20, in 1984. Not knowing whether this kid’s immediate family still lived, the sleuth hi-jacks the name of an actual individual – just as, notoriously, undercover officers of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad did when they infiltrated protest groups. First, the reporter buttresses this purloined identity with a sheaf of forged documents and an active Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For some of us Blur were an irritant during the 1990s rather than one of the decade’s premier bands. However, once Gorillaz arrived it was impossible to ignore Damon Albarn’s outrageous talent any longer. His golden touch ensured his cartoon group with artist Jamie Hewlett straddled not only multi-million-selling global success, but awed critical kudos. 2010’s The Fall album did not fare so well, but seemed to be a different kind of project, more experimental, cobbled together by Albarn on tour in the States, then fired out without extra polish. Their fifth album, though, seven years later, Read more ...