STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
ALGORITHMS have existed since the ancient Greeks and they are increasingly becoming a part of everyday life in the digital age.
We’re not just seeing their practical use in the realm of science, computing and mathematics but also in the arts – particularly in electronic music – and now, as the British Library’s resident artist Michael Takeo Magruder skilfully demonstrates, even in art installations.
Images and metadata from 18th and 19th-century maps of London, Paris, New York and Chicago have been used for the four works on display and, as Magruder explains to me on a guided tour of the free exhibition, the painstaking operation originally involved a bank of one million images of historic urban maps in the British Library’s online digital archive.
KEVIN DONNELLY accepts the invitation to think speculatively in contemplation of representations of people of African descent in our cultural heritage
LOUISE BOURDUA introduces the emotional and narrative religious art of 14th-century Siena that broke with Byzantine formalism and laid the foundations for the Renaissance



