Well thank GOD that's all done with - the culture wars are over! AHAHAHAHAHAHA NO THEY ARE NOT THEY WILL NEVER END! As we move into a new reality, one in which the ostensibly simple fact of a press conference can usher in a spittle flecked debate about the very nature of truth, it dawned on me this week that, more than anything else, it very much f...

Back when I was in high school in Sarajevo, my best friend was Zoka. We listened to the same bands, went to the same rock shows, found the same stupid things hilarious, played soccer together, skied on the same mountain, supported the same soccer club, confided in each other re: girls, got drunk in the park after school from the same bottle of toxi...

The global crisis of climate change is one of the most complex and wicked of problems we currently face. It is a physical, technological and economic challenge, and one that raises questions right at the heart of our relationship with the environment in which we live. In the light of the IPCC's most recent report , we face difficult decisions that ...

We recently covered Justin Kirby’s excellent new book The definitive guide to strategic content marketing . It is, genuinely, a pretty excellent book. So, why not have the author himself turn up for a talk in your office? Justin has launched a new service entitled Keynote in your office . Rather than spend a four-figure sum - per person, remember -...

​ I am a hybrid, of the halfway generation, neither a digital nor an analog native. My intimate life has coincided, almost exactly, with the arrival of digital connectivity. My wife was born the same month that Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf published A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication describing the TCP/IP, which defined the connections that...

Currently enjoying significant and deserved success on Kickstarter, The A-Z of The Designers Republic is probably the book you need this year. We don’t need to introduce Ian Anderson and TDR to you, do we? The graphic design studio behind The Orb, PWEI, Pulp, Supergrass, and many of the artists on Warp Records including Aphex Twin, as well as ...

It's quite a surprise, and certainly a rarity, to see one of the best brand executions of the year get together with one of the worst brand strategies of the year. To savour this special occasion, I'm going to take you to Wales. Over the years, transport in Wales has been the responsibility of a handful of different organisations. The UK loves gove...

When J.P. Barlow presented his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace  in Davos, cyberspace was idealized as a separate universe, detached from the 'real' world, with no government controls and no national boundaries. Twenty-two years later, this libertarian dream of the open internet has been buried with J.P. Barlow. The inte...

I know this has been a tricky week, with all sorts of stress and pain and difficulty and quite a lot of general 'wow, everything seems really quite messy and terrible, doesn't it?'-type vibes knocking about, but, well, I have spent much of it being a digital cowboy and frankly that's been enough to ensure that I've not really spent too much time th...

Whether this is the first event of its kind or not, Berlin recently played host to a gallery where the works were being made in front of its visitors. Generously, all  proceeds from the event went to sponsoring students at the Design Akademie Berlin. Held in the U3 tunnel venue (a disused railway station under Potsdamer Platz, conver...

​ Christie's recently sold for $432,000 a rather amusing portrait created by AI. Last Summer, (human) participants deemed that the artworks created by a computer system were more communicative and inspiring than human-made ones. A few years ago, an artist convincingly automated the kind of texts written by art critics. I could multiply the attentio...

In partnership with the Cyland media arts lab in St. Petersburg, Goldsmiths is unveiling a major new exhibition on the “twilight between human and machine creativity“. Entitled Creative Machine 2 , it is curated by amongst others, William Latham, whom we profiled back in 2013 . There are works within the exhibition in which Latham is involved;...

On May 25, 2018, a new law regulating the collection and use of the personal data of European citizens came into force in all 28 EU member states, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Compared to the previously applicable text (the 1995 Data Protection Directive), this new regulation further strengthens the protection of European citizens...

Obviously the Philip Green stuff comes as a TOTAL SHOCK, but can we not lose sight of the continuing insanity of the Saudi stuff, please? Not least the truly astonishing sight of the lovable Crown Prince openly making gags about disappearing people whilst onstage  - it's worth digging out the footage if you can find it, as the way he fist-bump...

Netflix believes, algorithmically at least, that I am the kind of person who likes to watch "Dark TV Shows Featuring a Strong Female Lead." This picksome genre is never one that I that seek out intentionally, and I'm not sure it even represents my viewing habits. (Maybe I fell asleep watching The Killing one night?) It is an image of me that Netfli...

Horror never dies, however many funerals it's given. It may be declared disreputable, but this only lends it the appeal of the forbidden. The British ban that uncut horror videos suffered in the 1980s simply rendered them collectible and created a clandestine market for them. Soon enough even these became acceptable, and nearly all the banned title...

I seem to have more and more reasons not to appreciate the BBC. Its over-reliance on well-tried entertainment formats, and not having the courage to end them before they are run into the ground . Its supine news coverage, with journalists around the world broadcasting nothing of any depth or with any gravitas. A complete disorganised mess...

1 ETH currently equates to around $200 USD. An "art-tech agency" believes that the art world will be responsible for pushing Ethereum's value by the end of 2018 to more than double. Ian Mcleod of Thomas Crown Art is, in our view, being rather ambitious. Nothing wrong in that, of course, but for a currency to more than double its value in eight week...

Instagram pulled out all the stops when it announced IGTV to the world in June. Though the platform's hub for longform video content — think YouTube, but with intentionally vertically-oriented video — was anything but a surprise given all the leaks leading up to its launch, Instagram threw celebrations around the world to introduce people to its ne...

Adriano Abbado’s new book Visual Music Masters examines the many connections between abstract images and sound, with the work absolutely chock full of references. The first chapter impressively examines the history of music and vision’s inter-relationship. From Plato and Aristotle through Ernst Chladni’s Sound Patterns of 1787, through the syn...