{photography} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 825

Hexagon Sequence II (c. 1970) by Rosalie de Meric.

• Boards Of Canada obsessives have been in a frenzy this week following the appearance of mysterious VHS cassettes sent at random to a small number of users of the Warp Records mail-order service. The contents of the tapes look like this. With the group having been silent for the past thirteen years there’s been an understandable flood of wild speculation on the BOC Reddit page, the supposition being that the tapes (and now an equally cryptic set of posters) mean that a new record release is on the way. We’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, here’s DJ Food’s O Is For Orange 2025 (version 3), a Boards Of Canada-themed mix that I neglected to link to last year.

• “There is no artistic process that isn’t magical in that it’s an attempt to magically conjure an idea, something that is invisible and intangible, into material form…” Alan Moore (again) talking to Dominique Musorrafiti about art and magic. Also the comics business, which people really ought to stop asking him about when his reluctance to discuss his old work is so evident.

• “I’m not a commercial director—I’m not even a professional film-maker.” Jim Jarmusch talking to Amy Raphael about his career and his latest film, Father Mother Sister Brother. At Little White Lies, Claire Biddle examines the music in Jarmusch’s films and his collaborative albums.

• “Painting and sculpture influenced me greatly. You start to see the world, the outside, everything around you, the tone, with the eyes of seeing a picture that’s framed.” Irmin Schmidt talking to Adelle Stripe about his early life and Requiem, his new album.

• New music: All Clouds Bring Not Rain by Memorials; Afterlife Requiem by Those Who Walk Away; Where Light Pauses In The Silence Of The Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• At Colossal: Daniel Sackheim traverses Los Angeles’ noir side in The City Unseen.

• At Bandcamp Daily: Jim Allen on the sound of the ’70s French Underground.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Australian debut features.

• NASA Johnson

• Hexagon (1990) by Ruins | Octagon (1994) by Basic Channel | Triangles And Rhombuses (1998) by Boards Of Canada

Weekend links 823

“NASA’s Hubble revisits Crab Nebula to track 25 years of expansion.“

• Snakes and Ladders is a video adaptation of the one-off Moon and Serpent performance presented by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins at Conway Hall, London, in 1999. With visual samples from Eddie Campbell’s comic-strip adaptation of the audio recording, plus my artwork from the CD release. (Thanks to Francis for the tip!)

• The spring catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• New music: State Of Matter by Dobrawa Czocher; Plague Dogs by The Heartwood Institute.

• “Why we made a film about Mark Fisher called We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher.”

• At Colossal: “Ambiguity reigns in Olaf Hajek’s mysterious illustrations”.

• At Public Domain Review: Monet’s early caricatures (ca. late 1850s).

• At the BFI: George Orwell, film critic.

• The Strange World of…Ladytron.

• The Plague (1967) by Scott Walker | A Plague Of Angels (2007) by Earth | The Plague (2014) by Cosmic Ground

Weekend links 822

Untitled (2013) by Fred Tomaselli.

• The latest book from A Year In The Country is Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968–1995, an exploration of “a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet”.

• New music: After The Rain, Strange Seeds by The Leaf Library; Music For Intersecting Planes by Leila Bordreuil + Kali Malone.

• RIP airbrush artist Philip Castle. Steve Mepstead talked to Castle in 2011 about his work for Stanley Kubrick and others.

Strassman began to see patterns in these encounters and created a typology: aliens; guides and helpers; clowns, jokers and jesters; elves and dwarves; or reptilian or insect-like figures. Variations and outliers notwithstanding, this spectrum remains remarkably consistent with DMT studies today. Strassman also looked into the historical literature and found similar descriptions as far back as Szára, who wrote that one of his subjects reported meeting “dwarfs or something.” Forty years later and a continent away, one of Strassman’s participants put it succinctly: “That was real strange. There were a lot of elves.”

A long read by Joanna Steinhardt on the history and nature of hallucinated spirit guides and “self-transforming machine elves”

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Ben Cardew on the pivotal role of Stereolab’s Super-Electric.

• At Colossal: Pejac transforms basic graph paper into detailed, trompe-l’œil tableaux.

• Sixty finalists from the 23rd Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest.

• At BLDGBLOG: The landscape architecture of auroras on demand.

• Mix of the week: Float V mix by DJ Food.

• We Have Always Been Here (1995) by ELpH vs Coil | 5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyl- (5-MeO-DMT) (1998) by Time Machines/Coil | Machine Elves (2024) by Polypores

Weekend links 819

Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992), poster art by Noriyoshi Ohrai.

• At Wormwoodiana: Douglas A. Anderson on the first English translation of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, a multi-author serial that formed the basis for Ishirō Honda’s film about the giant moth.

• At the Library of Congress: “Lost 19th century film by Méliès discovered at the Library“. 45 seconds of Gugusse and the Automaton (1897).

• At Public Domain Review: The Blinkered Flâneur: Walking with Franz Hessel in 1920s Berlin by Paul Sullivan.

• At Juno Daily: Kevin Richard Martin lists ten albums that shaped his Sub Zero album.

• New music: And All The Clocks Ran Dry by Andreas Voelk & Scott Monteith.

• “Behold Belgium’s beauty in these 15 scenic photographs.”

• A Spoon and Tamago Guide to Tohoku.

• The Strange World of…Shane Parish.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Occults.

• RIP Éliane Radigue.

• Mothra’s Song (1961) by Yuji Koseki | Mothra (1984) by Frank Chickens | Mothra (2014) by The 5.6.7.8’s

Weekend links 818

The Bookworm (no date) by Arthur Paunzen.

• New Cabaret Voltaire: Nag Nag Nag (Live 2025 Single Edit). Good to hear they’ve reinstated the Patrick Moore dialogue sample, something that’s on the studio version but usually missing from live recordings. The single is a trailer for a forthcoming album based on the group’s recent anniversary tour.

• The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (1981), a wacky Czech comedy, one of many directed by Oldřich Lipský. With a story by Jules Verne, music by Luboš Fišer, and steampunk props by Jan Švankmajer.

• More new music: Butch’s Guns by Sunn O))); Sidings by Craven Faults; Frequencies In The Fog by Rod Modell.

What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call “containers for attention”—bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible—and those who haven’t. The distinction isn’t about intelligence or discipline. It’s about environmental architecture. Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook, listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively, read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind. They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.

What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem, says librarian Carlo Iacono

• At Colossal: “Striking photos by Peter Li capture the soaring majesty of sacred spaces.”

• At Public Domain Review: The Eight Horses of King Mu, Son of Heaven (ca. 1300).

• At the BFI: Brogan Morris selects 10 great political thrillers.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Roland Topor’s Brain.

• RIP Robert Duvall and Tom Noonan.

• The Book Lovers (1997) by Broadcast | Tiny Golden Books (2000) by Coil | Library Of Solomon Book 2 (2011) by Demdike Stare