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A scene from Possibilia, an interactive short film by Daniel Kawn and Daniel Schienert |
From a revelatory story about film with a thousand storylines to a podcast about the productivity of adult boredom, RealTime editors recommend the week's best art reading and listening.
Keith is astonished by the vision, scale and complexities of the revitalised interactive cinema project extensively delineated in this article in The New Yorker.
The Movie with a Thousand Plotlines
Raffi Khatchadourian's account of the intellectual and aesthetic challenges and breakthroughs in developing interactive movies—their video clip and gaming origins, actors' accounts of juggling multiple plot trajectories and makers being thrust into meta-thinking about screen storytelling—is a thrilling read. Millions are being invested in these ventures to create a potentially unanticipated artform that goes far beyond audiences simply making plot choices.
Lauren recommends this article in Guernica about the link between experimental art and experimental spaces in New York.
Cranky, Creative, and Controversial: Recalling artists' collectives of the late ’50s and early '60s.
“[T]he downtown aesthetic, embedded here and there in co-op galleries and other short-lived experimental spaces, altered the artistic landscape, paving the way for a pluralistic arts community and for alternative spaces that survive today. Although booming real-estate prices resulted in most of the downtown galleries moving to Chelsea, some arts organisations persist, including The SoHo Arts Network, a consortium of non-profit spaces, Apex Art, More Art and the Gross Foundation.”
Listening in to Radio National's Future Tense, Virginia finds heartening philosopher and game developer Ian Bogost's ideas about boredom, curiosity and play for adults.
Time, play and a word from Lord Russell on Future Tense
Bogost, the author of Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (Basic Books, 2016), says that in an era of ever-escalating instant gratification (bored? turn to your phone, to Facebook) adults need to see "playfulness as a mode of living" that helps us build some control over but also "commune with the world." Boredom, he argues, is "a sign, an opportunity...for real work" and that we adults must run with our curiosity rather than see it as foolishness or "dismiss as [the subject of] poetry."
RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017 pg.
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