Author: Bijan Stephen

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Alan Turing’s enduring but complicated legacy (and timely message to EA)

We stand at the edge of a precipice: Six decades after Alan Turing’s suicide, we’ve found ourselves with access to the entire breadth of human knowledge, available anywhere, anytime, instantaneously. The light of progress burns ever-bright in the human breast, where hope also springs eternal; Turing’s formalization of the basic concepts of computer science—algorithms, his eponymous test, the idea of computation itself—have helped us get here. Technological advances have far outstripped social ones, and, if Turing were alive today, I’m sure he’d be ecstatic at our computing prowess. As a gay man, though, I don’t think he’d be quite so…
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Chris Milk toys with interactivity in a nonlinear playground

Back in the ‘80s—when MTV really was music television—music videos were just infiltrating mainstream America’s consciousness: video hadn’t yet killed the radio star. It was innovative, pioneering work; like all sui generis art forms, it eventually became ubiquitous. The zeitgeist is necessarily fleeting. Chris Milk is the guy that’s quietly bringing music videos back from the brink of inescapable triteness, remaking them according to whatever creative visions torment him at night. Aside from sharing a wonderfully offbeat aesthetic, all of his creations—and there are quite a few—showcase a flair for depicting pathos in delightfully weird new ways.  Milk’s latest music video projects play…