MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Imaginary Cities, British Library, London
A groundbreaking exhibition shows how perceptions of futuristic urban environments are being transformed in the digital age
Imaginary Cities, British Library, London
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ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
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.
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