1. Futurism

Category Archives: Futurism

Greenaway Immerses Viewers in Art

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By Tim Misir

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: April 23, 2014 (Issue # 1807)

Greenaway entertains the press at the opening of his exhibition with Dutch director Saskia Boddeke in Moscow last week. Photo: Valeriy Belobeev / British Council Russia

The Soviet Union in early 20th century, a time of social and political upheaval, was also an artistic utopia, and saw the interplay of suprematism, constructivism and futurism separate but connected art movements.

Collectively known as the Russian avant-garde, theater directors like Sergei Eisenstein, poets like Mayakovsky and designers such as Alexander Rodchenko, composers, architects and artists like Kandinsky, Malevich and Lizzitsky were just a few of the many who tried to pushed the boundaries of culture and its possibilities.

A new exhibition in Moscow by Dutch theater director Saskia Boddeke and British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, The Golden Age of the Russian Avant-Garde dramatizes these characters and immerses viewers in the context of that period, exploring the lives and works of its key figures through the language of theater and cinema. Twelve pivotal figures from the period of 1910 to 1930, played by Russian actors, are used to tell the story of this period of cultural experimentation and innovation.

More than 1,000 artworks, sourced from galleries and private collections around the world, are displayed as part of the exhibit, but Greenaway and Boddeke add to that by showing the context in which these masterpieces were created, the exchange of ideas between artists and the debates that surrounded them, pieced together from memoirs, manifestos, newspaper articles, published works and personal artifacts.

The characters are shown on multi-screen projections fused with photos, film reels and film clips. They interact with each other, speaking and arguing across screens, and move from one screen to another. They are not presented in a fixed order, running in 15-minute loops, and one can move randomly from viewing one platform to another.

You may be surprised by this exhibition. It is very subjective, Greenaway said at a news conference prior to its opening on Apr. 15, adding that he hoped presenting the works this way would allow them to be viewed in a new light, and that other, previously hidden dimensions of well-known pieces, would be discovered.

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Greenaway Immerses Viewers in Art

Sd Laika – That's Harakiri

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Harakiri: a ritual Japanese suicide of disembowelment reserved only for samurai. Seems horrifying, but witnesses insist it was a profoundly impressive sight to behold.

Its an apt title for Milwaukee producer Sd Laikas long-awaited debut album then, as aural demonstrations of ultra violence are carved into something texturally exquisite.

Meshes (below) splits the seas: an Afro-futurism night terror that forces tribal rhythms into industrial hip-hop contortions. Throughout the album, he takes a dark, fast-paced and aggressive grime framework and expropriates it for his own brand of bastard brain-dance. Case in point: I Dont has those choppy, pitch-bending grime synths but batters them with pneumatic percussion thats as brilliant as it is brutal.

Sometimes these obscure noise releases with their morbid artwork and darkened press shots can mask their complete lack of listenability behind a protective black veil of excessive complexity, and the desperation of its listener to feel exclusive. Sd Laika defeats this. His music marries complexity with club-ready thump, resulting in a dystopian dancehall of morbid booty shaking.

8/10

Words: Joe Zadeh

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Sd Laika - That's Harakiri

New Nissan Frontier Promised For 2015, May Arrive With An SUV Sibling

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The Nissan Frontier is well-ripe for a redesign and the company says it's finally coming next year. I wouldn't expect Murano levels of futurism, but Nissan planning to prioritize styling while staying close to the current truck's dimensions. Since the Xterra sits on the same F-Platform, it's logical to assume the SUV will be reshaped soon as well.

Nissan's global marketing guy Andy Palmer told Australia's Drive; "one-ton pickups are fairly generic in terms of their overall dimensions. I think it's about what you deliver on fuel consumption, what you deliver on styling these are the key differentiators for that kind of pickup market."

So the next Frontier will stay small, look slick, and get good fuel economy. Sounds like they're on the right track.

With all the diesel teasers and spy shots we've seen at this point I think we're all getting pretty antsy about Nissan's future in trucks. The offerings from Ford, Ram, and GM are all stronger than ever and while Toyota is quietly crapping out the same Tundras, Tacomas, and 4Runners on the assumption that their badge will sell itself Nissan has been jumping up and down waving a Cummins flag for what feels like forever.

They've done a pretty good job delivering on their promises of wild styling with their SUVs, so I'll stay faithful for now. According to the Aussies, Nissan is going to tell us more about their small truck "in a few weeks," so stay tuned.

Whether the new Frontier's SUV accompaniment would be the next Xterra or another vehicle altogether remains to be seen. I suppose there's also the possibility that Nissan might castrate the Xterra into a monocoque as they did with the Pathfinder. But that would destroy the last truly off-road oriented SUV you can buy in America with a manual transmission that's not a Wrangler, and such an idea is just too much for my heart to bear.

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New Nissan Frontier Promised For 2015, May Arrive With An SUV Sibling

Kelis Serves a Soul Buffet From Space on Surreal, Tasty 'Food'

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Release Date: April 22, 2014 Label: Ninja Tune

Kelis has done a lot of (delightfully) strange things with soul music over the course of her career, from aggro-screaming "I hate you so much right now" over sugary Neptunes beats to examining motherhood from the perspective of a dance-pop cyborg. But Food may be her strangest move yet: it's an album of vintage funk and old-school soul cooked up by the queen of unconventional, sometimes otherworldly R&B.

"This is the real thing. This is the real thing," Kelis croons in that inimitable husky purr of hers on "Breakfast," a warm affirmation of earthly blessings and fervent horns that comes off like a sun salutation performed by a Motown girl group. It's a centered, grounded celebration of the small, day-to-day moments that nourish us, hosted by the one-time purveyor of "22nd Century" virtual realities and sugary "Milkshakes," with a guest appearance by Kelis' son, who invites us to come on over for some of his mom's home cooking. How can we resist?

Food is teeming with warm brass and chunky riffs, with heaping hunks of vintage soul and salty slabs of funk. "Hooch," for instance, walks a strutting, syncopated bass line ornamented with sighing backup vocals and punctuated with Afrobeat-esque horn bursts. The swaggering guitars, Spaghetti Western shimmer and call-and-response banter of "Friday Fish Fry" falls somewhere between rockabilly and blues rock. And lead single "Jerk Ribs" rolls through a funk-scape of belching baritone sax, jangling tambourines, swelling synths and a chugging triple meter that falls somewhere between Off the Wall and thiopiques. It's a new sound for Kelis, and it suits her, offering up new textures for her sometimes hard-to-place voice to spice up, like a collision of regional cuisines.

The "soul food" angle extends beyond the musical and the metaphorical for Kelis, however. There are those foodie titles, of course: "Biscuits n' Gravy," "Jerk Ribs," "Friday Fish Fry." They made for a pretty brilliant marketing campaign: Kelis literally sold food out of a truck at SXSW to promote the album (side note: is there anything more SXSW than a Kelis-helmed food truck?). But the literal culinary references are also rooted in the singer's own life and quest for soul-nourishment: Her mom was a chef, and Kelis actually went to culinary school in her downtime between albums. She also launched a line of jerk sauce and is getting her own cooking show: she's serious about this cooking business. Food is Kelis' attempt to address basic human needs, to nourish the gut in every sense with an album that emphasizes the organic and the authentic.

It feels initially like a far cry from the robo-worldof Flesh Tone, the kaleidoscopic futurism of her early work, even the candy-colored pop dream worlds of Kelis Was Here and Tasty. And in a sense, this album does seem like an effort to distance herself from her past work: an emphasis on grown and sexy music as a demonstration of how much she's matured and gotten back in touch with real life. But lest we think one of R&B's strangest sirens has gone completely terrestrial, Kelis took a fairly unorthodox route to her new organic sound: Food is released on her new label Ninja Tune, a British outfit known for putting out adventurous indie and experimental electronic music by the likes of Amon Tobin and Bonobo. And the album was helmed by Dave Sitek, go-to producer of envelope-dismantling sounds for artists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Santigold, and member of TV on the Radio, a group that knows from weird, disruptive soul. These are neither typical methods of cultivating a classic soul sound nor conventional choices for someone whose previous work includes beats by the Neptunes and a big hit like "Bossy."

On much of the Food, then, the vintage soul is couched in a kind surrealist haze. Tracks like the gauzy, lost-in-thought "Runnin'" and the paisley-hued "Cobbler" float away above the solid, dusty funk that anchors the rest of the album. Then there's "Change," a stylistically complex (Hare Krishna chant meets Moroccan Berber folk song meets Afro-futurism?) and structurally ear-boggling track anchored by the repeating line, "You can't escape the grips of desire" that's delivered like a curse. Kelis' strange, inimitable voice -- at once earthbound and alien -- winds its way into every wrinkle and crevice of these new sonic textures. Food is indeed "the real thing," a satisfying album grounded by familiar funk, rooted in classic soul sounds and focused on the everyday rituals of life: eating, playing with the kids, fighting -- and making up -- with the significant other. But it's still Kelis' vision of real life: a hearty take on soul foodthat still manages to shock your tastebuds.

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Kelis Serves a Soul Buffet From Space on Surreal, Tasty 'Food'

'Morgan Spurlock Inside Man': No bread, no pasta, no sugar, but wine is OK

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When Morgan Spurlock shot to fame, he was gorging himself on McDonald's three times a day to see what happens if he lived off only that -- and he ate the largest size that workers pushed -- in "Super Size Me."

In "Futurism," airing Sunday, April 20, Spurlock focuses on those striving for immortality. Since shooting that episode, Spurlock has lost 25 pounds.

He attends a party in California where people try various ways to extend their lives. Some take hundreds of supplements daily; others are on the paleo diet.

It would be a stronger show if Spurlock asked more questions such as: Why eat like a caveman? Why take so many vitamins? Spurlock has an incredibly thorough physical exam, and the doctor tells him to shed 18 pounds, take supplements and exercise.

Spurlock's goal is "to delve into issues that affect all of us, maybe in ways we don't even realize," he says. "A lot of times we see headlines and think they don't affect us. What the show does a great job of doing is showing how they do affect us."

Last week's Season 2 premiere was devoted to celebrity. Spurlock tried to be a paparazzo. Unless you're Angelina, Jen or a successful actor who dares to take the children to the playground, it's hard to see how paparazzi affect most people.

"What a lot of people don't realize is every time you buy a People, an Us, a Star, it does touch you," Spurlock says. "As you turn on the TV and watch 'TMZ' or 'Access Hollywood,' people are complicitly involved without recognizing their involvement."

Additional episodes look at religion, UFOs and paying student athletes.

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'Morgan Spurlock Inside Man': No bread, no pasta, no sugar, but wine is OK

Greenaway's New Exhibit Dramatizes Russian Avant-Garde

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Timothy Misir / MTLarge screens scattered throughout Manezh show projections of historical figures played by actors, who move from screen to screen and interact.

The Soviet Union in early 20th century, a time of social and political upheaval, was also an artistic utopia, and saw the interplay of suprematism, constructivism and futurism separate but connected art movements.

Moscow Manege

Anactor plays Sergei Eisenstein.

Collectively known as theRussian avant-garde, theater directors like Sergei Eisenstein, poets like Mayakovsky anddesigners such as Alexander Rodchenko, composers, architects andartists like Kandinsky, Malevich andLizzitsky were just afew of the many who tried topushed theboundaries ofculture andits possibilities.

Anew exhibition byDutch theater director Saskia Boddeke andBritish filmmaker Peter Greenaway, "The Golden Age ofthe Russian Avant-Garde" dramatizes these characters andimmerses viewers inthe context ofthat period, exploring thelives andworks ofits key figures through thelanguage oftheater andcinema. Twelve pivotal figures fromthe period of1910 to1930, played byRussian actors, are used totell thestory ofthis period ofcultural experimentation andinnovation.

More than 1,000 artworks, sourced fromgalleries andprivate collections around theworld, are displayed as part ofthe exhibit, but Greenaway andBoddeke add tothat byshowing thecontext inwhich these masterpieces were created, theexchange ofideas between artists andthe debates that surrounded them, pieced together frommemoirs, manifestos, newspaper articles, published works andpersonal artifacts.

The characters are shown on multi-screen projections fused with photos, film reels and film clips. They interact with each other, speaking and arguing across screens, and move from one screen to another. They are not presented in a fixed order, running in 15-minute loops, and one can move randomly from viewing one platform to another.

Moscow Manege

Anna Shepeleva plays Lilya Brik.

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Greenaway's New Exhibit Dramatizes Russian Avant-Garde

News : LIVE: Julian Casablancas and The Voidz Showcase New Material at The Roxy

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Last time Julian Casablancas debuted new solo material in Los Angeles, he played a four-night residency at the Palace Theatre downtown complete with resplendent moving backdrops and costume changes. This time around, he went a little simpler. Casablancas and his new band The Voidz announced Friday night's show at West Hollywood's 500-capacity Roxy Theatre just two days prior, and it sold out in minutes. Needless to say, those in attendance came ready to party.

What you heard (mostly new material) and what you saw (fuzzy-signal televisions, torn leather and black, stringy hair) carried the motif of post-apocalyptic retro-futurismsimilar to Julian's Phrazes for the Young but with a bit more bite. "Ize of the World"one of only two Strokes songs on the setis a good tonal touchstone for the new material. All this made for a pleasant surprise when Julian announced they'd have a go at an "old classic" and the band strung the opening chords of "Take It or Leave It," a song that has proven to retain its power and relevance over the years (the video of The Strokes performing it on Letterman for their network television debut is worth a Google).

Some may say that the golden age of The Strokes is behind us, but regardless of how you feel about the most recent output from the once (and future?) kings of rock, their commander-in-chief has always been more concerned with a different age, and what this new endeavor shows is that Casablancas, unlike so many others, refuses to repeat himself. His tireless pursuit of the Next and the New may not be popular, but he's pushing the ball forward, and for that we should be grateful.

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News : LIVE: Julian Casablancas and The Voidz Showcase New Material at The Roxy

It's Utopia Week at Gizmodo

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Utopia is one of the most loaded words in the English language. Utopia is perfection; utopia is unachievable; utopia is no place. Which is precisely what makes it so interesting. And why this week Gizmodo is taking a look at all things utopian.

Utopian thinking also happens to be the backbone of futurism. Why bother with half-measures? Why aspire to anything less than an ideal society? You may never achieve it on Earth, but that shouldn't stop you from trying, right? It's one of the most dismissive words we have at our disposal, and yet earnest utopian thinking is alive and well. It's a sign that people still have some kind of hope; some degree of faith that things can be better.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are believed to be a stepping stone to a free-market utopia. Some people think driverless cars are the key to a transportation utopia. Asteroid mining, building cities at sea, the prospect of living forever; these ideas are not new, but they're as popular as ever. And they all spring from this utopian drive to improve things in whatever special way we see as most crucial to our health and happiness on Earth. Sometimes people even advocate leaving Earth to find it.

From technological utopias to architectural ones; from yesterday's utopias to tomorrow's, this week we'll be exploring utopia in its many forms. Don't be surprised if they don't all seem like your idea of heaven; one person's utopia is almost always another person's dystopia.

You can find all of our Utopia Week posts here.

Image: 1975 illustration of a futuristic space colony for NASA by Don Davis

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It's Utopia Week at Gizmodo

Morgan Spurlock begins second season as CNN's 'Inside Man'

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PASADENA, Calif. Documentarian Morgan Spurlock has focused his cameras on everything from the fast food industry to education. The new season of his CNN series, Morgan Spurlock Inside Man, will deal with such broad topics as celebrity, futurism, pets in America, income inequality and college athletes.

Long before the public gets to see his work told through a serious investigative look accented with his dry sense of humor the process starts with an idea.

When the show got greenlit for a second season, we already had a list of things that we wanted to talk about. Its stuff we pull out of the headlines, newspapers, news reports, magazines. You name it, Spurlock says. We have a list of 10 to 12 ideas that we say to the network that they are the ones we are thinking about.

The network selects ideas they like. Then Spurlock and his team pick the ones they want to do. Once theres a general agreement, research starts to flesh out the ideas. The eight topics that show the most potential go into production.

He knows his stories will be seen around the world through the global news channel, but the one key element he keeps in mind when selecting topics is finding stories that primarily impact an American audience. Many people told him that a story on immigration in the first season of the CNN series didnt affect most Americans, but he showed how it touches the country by looking at the food a person buys.

What I wanted to do with this series is to get people to connect the dots to see how they are affected by these stories, Spurlock says.

It was 10 years ago that Spurlock made national news with his Oscar-nominated film Super Size Me, a documentary about the ill effects he suffered eating a diet of only McDonalds fast food. His first TV series was as executive producer of the FX series 30 Days, where he embedded himself with his subjects for a month. Spurlock also directed the 3-D concert film One Direction: This Is Us.

Once the ideas are in place whether it be for film or TV the final product will almost always be different than what was originally discussed.

When I was making Super Size Me years ago, a filmmaker friend of mine gave me some advice. He said if the movie that I end up with is the exact same movie you envisioned from the beginning, then you didnt listen to anybody along the way, Spurlock says. Whenever we film an idea in a perfect world if everyone had rainbows and unicorns it would work out the most perfect way possible.

Then you start shooting and everything gets thrown out the window because everything you have written down doesnt happen. Things go in a very direction so you have to go with the way the story takes you.

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Morgan Spurlock begins second season as CNN's 'Inside Man'

Damn Right 'It's Album Time': House Whiz Todd Terje Drops a Booty Bomb

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Release Date: April 8, 2014 Label: Olsen

For the last decade, Oslo DJ/producer Todd Terje has indulged scholarly fetishes for '60s lounge music, '70s disco/prog/jazz-fusion, '80s TV show themes, and '90s electronica, yet his buoyant output resists the weight of history: The dude rocks a party with rollicking flair. He's got the sensibility to impress serious music heads his 2012 EP It's the Arps was performed exclusively on vintage ARP synths, the sort favored by '70s jazzbos yet his sunny mutant grooves remain fundamentally fun. While much EDM keeps getting more automated and commoditized, Terje's countless singles, EPs, remixes, and re-edits have grown more articulated, better played, and, most importantly, increasingly individuated: Terje's particular house music emphasizes its humanity.

With one notable exception, his long-awaited long-playing debut It's Album Time is solely instrumental, but always feels as though Terje [pronounce it Terr-YEAH] is singing via his sounds. His compositional voice is playful, but exacting, like an eccentric, joke-cracking professor who nevertheless schools well. On track after track, Terje dances to his own drum not in that hokey put-your-hands-in-the-air way, but as if pop-locking breakdance kids had hooked up with Bob Fosse's Broadway babies to reinvent the funky robot for the 21st century.

Like Daft Punk, Terje looks to the past's version of futurism to transcend today's numbed-out consensus beats. "Intro (It's Album Time)" sets the tone with a sci-fi title sequence's sense of expectation and wonder as multiple synths tinkle, twitter, and ultimately soar to the heavens. He comically undercuts this auspiciousness with "Leisure Suit Preben," which starts out lumbering with a trudging synth bassline and scattered wah-wah quacks but suddenly turns lyrical and foreboding, as if a femme fatale had ensnared our spy hero. The harmonies grow lush and overripe, delightfully evoking a bygone European soundtrack composer's florid impression of African-American jazz not the real thing, for Terje never forgets that he's generations and oceans removed from his sources. With "Preben Goes to Acapulco," he sends his homegrown protagonist hustling south of the border via '70s-squeaky synths and tightly wound syncopations.

In the credits, Terje lists his equipment with a gearhead's glee "ARP 2600 with St. Eric Mods" (an old synth refurbished by a contemporary Dutch lab), "NI Abbey Road Drums" (new drum software engineered to sound old), and "my brother's double bass." He's both analog and digital, synthetic and acoustic, and playing most everything himself, but the result still swings. Taking a tip from his countrymen in Mungolian Jetset, he offsets psychedelic quirks with dazzling technique on "Svensk SAS," which features layers of scatting grunts intertwined with a deliriously tropical melody.

Terje's inspirations may largely be retro, but he's one of the leading lights of a current Scandinavian scene that's essentially neo-Balearic the 21st century version of '80s Ibiza's melodic, anything-goes DJ approach, the one that thrived before Brit jocks colonized the Spanish Mediterranean island. It's this dubby but joyous vibe that he brings to his fleet-footed numbers. He even calls one "Oh Joy," which re-imagines synth icon Jean Michel Jarre with a hi-NRG makeover. For three minutes he teases a suspenseful, sequencer-driven build out of keyboards soloing in harmony like the Miami Vice version of Thin Lizzy. Then, finally, those Abbey Road drums enter, and the rest just rockets into dancefloor ecstasy once again proving that as nerdy as Terje gets, the guy can jam the fuck out.

He nevertheless hedges his bets on It's Album Time by rightfully including some single and EP tracks that deserve a broad audience, one that doesn't collect pricey import 12"s and scattered mp3s. It's the Arps's "Inspector Norse" and both parts of "Swing Star" reappear in slightly tweaked form along with a condensed edit of last year's "Strandbar" that judiciously reduces its "disko" mix's nagging piano chords, thereby maximizing their impact. New cuts "Delorean Dynamite" and "Alfonso Muskedunder" strike with similar stealth: Terje spices up the former's space disco motif by riffing Nile Rodgers-style on his Fender Tacocaster (yes, that's a real guitar). On the latter's speedy samba, he lets his multi-instrumentalist skills fly and nimbly recreates the wordless vocal razzmatazz of bygone sibling harmony group the Free Design.

Nearly every EDM pan-flasher has launched their debut disc with a teen-accessible vocalist, typically with crass results. Terje takes the high road by enlisting Bryan Ferry, whose solo and Roxy Music classics he's already remixed. But whereas his re-imaginings of "Don't Stop the Dance" and "Love Is the Drug" emphasize rhythmic uplift, Ferry and Terje's cover of late crooner Robert Palmer's originally spritely "Johnny and Mary" is so willfully lethargic it resists both club and radio play.

Palmer's depiction of a woefully mismatched couple is that singer's career highlight, a canny distillation of the doomed love games Ferry still embodies. Here, the 68 year-old Casanova whispers it with a vocal apparatus so worn by cigarettes, late nights, and a bajillion supermodels that he can barely sigh the air out of his lungs. Terje casts Ferry in what feels like a Fellini dream sequence playing at a nightmarish fraction of its intended speed, as if Marcello Mastroianni can no longer leave his bed, much less lure vixens to it. Terje can make an aging gigolo's commentary on the folly of his misspent youth the centerpiece of his otherwise invigorating dance album because he's the rare crowd-pleasing DJ whose musical skills trump his proven ability to move butts.

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Damn Right 'It's Album Time': House Whiz Todd Terje Drops a Booty Bomb


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