internet
Star Paws: The Rise of Superstar Pets, Channel 4Thursday, 28 August 2014Mid-week at 9pm has always struck me as the perfect televisual sweet spot. It’s not so close to the weekend that you’re likely to want to go out, but enough of the week is done that it seems right to put your feet up and relax with a glass of wine... Read more... |
Crystal Springs, Park Theatre / Little Stitches, Theatre503Monday, 25 August 2014Here's a fun fact: this year the Merriam-Webster dictionary added a new definition for the noun "catfish". As well as the amphibian, a catfish now also refers to "a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for... Read more... |
The Zero TheoremFriday, 14 March 2014Terry Gilliam’s career currently resembles Orson Welles’ declining years, and not just in both men’s seemingly impossible quests to finish a film of Don Quixote. Gilliam too is trying to work outside a Hollywood system that has tired of his maverick... Read more... |
'Always on, never alone'Sunday, 15 September 2013While newspapers alternately praise and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, there is a generation of children who have grown up with 24/7 connectivity and a smart phone in their hand.Public discourse seems to revolve around "grooming"... Read more... |
Storyville: Google and the World Brain/How Hackers Changed the World, BBC FourThursday, 21 February 2013At what stage will the trend among journalists and documentarians to regard anything relating to the internet with suspicion or, worse, ignorance come to an end? Although I recognise that my relationship with information technology has never been... Read more... |
Utopia, Channel 4Wednesday, 16 January 2013Read theartsdesk's review of the final episode of UtopiaNew from Kudos, makers of the likes of Spooks and Hunted, comes this sinister six-parter. Steeped in surveillance paranoia, conspiracy theory and online anomie, it concerns a mysterious graphic... Read more... |
dÉbruit, Auntie Flo at The Boiler RoomThursday, 10 May 2012Club culture has always had a tension between democratisation (“come one, come all!”) and exclusivity (the thrill of being in the know about the newest or most underground thing). The best clubs have always been the ones that find ways of short-... Read more... |
High Court orders Pirate Bay blockMonday, 30 April 2012High Court judge Mr Justice Arnold ruled today that UK internet service providers must block access to The Pirate Bay.The infamous site - founded in Sweden and even boasting an affiliated political party there - has been a figurehead for the pro-... Read more... |
Pippin, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 08 December 2011Should the people who made Tron - or for that matter James Cameron - ever decide to take on a Broadway musical, they owe themselves a trip to the Menier Chocolate Factory's ludicrous production of Pippin to find out how not to do it. Just because... Read more... |
Pete Townshend: the internet is killing musicTuesday, 01 November 2011Earlier this week Pete Townshend asked whether “John Peelism”, the ethos of supporting and celebrating small, independent artists at a grass-roots level, could survive the internet. His implied answer was clearly "no". Townshend levelled the... Read more... |
CD: Björk - BiophiliaThursday, 13 October 2011An album that encompasses pan-global collaborations, iPad/Phone apps, internet jiggery-pokery, art installations, live multimedia shows and even a tuning system, with the “Ultimate Edition” of the album coming complete with a set of tuning forks to... Read more... |
Interview: Peter GabrielThursday, 13 October 2011One of the problems with Peter Gabriel’s back catalogue for me, I tell him, as he is reclining in an office at EMI in London, is the sounds - some of them really are very dated. Gabriel would often pioneer a sound like the reverse-gated drum sound... Read more... |