Pain And Joy: A Life With NADJA Part One
The first of a five-part essay examining the making of Michael Almereyda s NADJA and the author s personal connection with that film.
By David Obuchowski · @DavidOfromNJ · May 24, 2021, 3:29 PM EDT NADJA (1994).
THE FACTS IN FICTION
This is the first in a five-part narrative essay that provides an in-depth exploration of the 1994 movie, Nadja,
as well as the deep personal connection has had with it since the film’s release. It details the lives behind some of the people in the film, as it leads the author to come to terms with his own struggles with self-doubt in his pursuit as an artist.
Ryan Alexander Diduck
, April 15th, 2021 08:46
Collaborations with Nik Void, Gazelle Twin, Simon Fisher Turner, and Astrud Steehouder make the latest project from Alexander Tucker all the more essential, finds Ryan Diduck
Information in the post-COVID world has assumed a curious characteristic of meaningless equivalency, one chart – one graph, one statistic – taking on seemingly no more nor less significance than any other. This latest fact attack is in addition to the regular broadcast news and social media cycles that plague our consciousness with unwanted and unnecessary infotainment: billionaires’ babies’ names, Royal families’ antics, dispatches from the vacant crania of celebrities’ children and grandchildren, stock selloffs and sports scores edging against today’s human death toll. (Up next, the weather.) In an attention economy, what we pay attention to is no longer relevant, so long as we pay rapt attention to
Robert Barry
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The second Claire Rousay release in as many months feels like a revelation, for Robert Barry
Photo: Dani Toral
A snowdrift of long, languorous organ notes. Whistling tones, like swallows arcing through the sky. A rustle of foley. There’s crackling, crinkling – it’s hard to tell exactly what is going on, but there’s a sense of activity, things happening – real things, somewhere in a real place. A flicker of light. Then the whole edifice collapses suddenly, like the air has been sucked out. There’s a breath, the music takes a beat. Then into the clearing – and I mean that literally: picture a forest clearing, or like clearing a desk, just sweep all that clutter out the way – a voice rises up. “I’m trying not to miss you.” It’s Rousay’s ‘own’ voice – but rendered alien, synthesised into virtual life with the familiar stepped trill of autotune software spinning gothic melismas from that third syllable: “not”. A
Patrick Clarke
, March 15th, 2021 10:30
With his new modular project Microcorps, Alexander Tucker blurs the lines between human and humanoid as he investigates how language can shift our perception. He tells Patrick Clarke the story of new album XMIT
The algorithms that dictate so much of our consumption – the next song you listen to, the next film you watch, the next person you go on a date with – are now so complex that they are approaching the point where not even their creators can comprehend them. “One of the biggest sources of anxiety about AI is not that it will turn against us, but that we simply cannot understand how it works,” wrote the Harvard Business Review in 2019. Algorithms now make so many decisions without consulting the people they effect, wrote Towards Data Science in a lengthy essay on the need for increased ethics in the field, that “they have become the decision makers, and humans have been pushed into an artefact shaped by technology.”