This year’s Versions conference mostly encouraged a more sober, productive, and critical probing of the cultural landscape of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.
Michael Blum
Michael Blum is a freelance writer and designer. He is interested in books, video games, interaction design, virtual and augmented reality, movies from Taiwan, and sweet potato fries. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, Bookforum, and Brooklyn Magazine. He doesn’t live in Brooklyn, but he is on Twitter.
Posted inArt
A Multimedia Jungle of Moving Images
The Whitney Museum’s Dreamlands gathers a century of immersive moving image art, cutting across time and technology.
Posted inArt
Imagining the Possible Futures of Virtual Reality
“THE FUTURE IS NOW,” reads the header from the online bill for Versions: The Creative Landscape of Virtual Reality, a conference held earlier this month at the New Museum, co-presented by NEW INC and Kill Screen.
Posted inArt
Coming Soon to Manhattan, the First Independent Movie Theater in a Decade
It was August when news broke about Metrograph — the first independent movie theater to open in New York City in over a decade.
Posted inOpinion
The Virtual-Reality Future Is Here
Many expect 2016 to be the year that virtual reality (VR) finally takes off.
Posted inArt
Inside David Lynch’s Dream Worlds
David Lynch has been a stranger to the director’s chair for almost a decade now — since 2006’s Inland Empire, to be exact.
Posted inFilm
An Homage to Thailand’s History and Elegy for Its Future
The films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul are inspired by a poetics of everyday life poised between two extremes.
Posted inArt
Ingrid Bergman at 100: An Appreciation
Bergman was a vital, daring force both in the films in which she starred and — through her bold initiative, forging collaborations and instigating projects time and again — in the course of the history of cinema as a whole.
Posted inArt
Weather Report: Hito Steyerl’s Documentary Forecast for the Digital Age
For the last several years now, as the credits roll at the end of her films, artist Hito Steyerl’s name, rather than appearing alongside the typical “Written and Directed by,” is listed with roles (or non-roles) considerably more blurred and expressionistic.
Posted inBooks
A Poetic Record of Creations Lost, Missing, or Destroyed
Rarely has a book been so dizzyingly impenetrable while being, at the same time, so eminently readable. Les Unités perdus (The lost unities), by the French poet Henri Lefebvre, manages to both live up to this paradox and flourish within its idiosyncratic ramparts.
Posted inArt
A Documentarian of Memory
Chris Marker’s death two years ago, on the day of his 91st birthday, heralded a surge of renewed interest in the enigmatic French filmmaker. With an impressive retrospective centered on a digital restoration of the film Level Five (1997), the Brooklyn Academy of Music presses on with the project of rehabilitating the fringes of Marker’s career.
