Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
New York City’s legendary, and recently much-beleaguered, subway is one of the largest, oldest and most heavily trafficked urban commuter systems in the world. In her collage video Underground Circuit, the Chinese-born, Chicago-based artist Yuge Zhou brings a very unusual – and highly fantastical – form of order and reliability to the New York commute. Stitching together a multitude of subways scenes in concentric squares, Zhou turns the transit system into a subterranean labyrinth at the centre of which is a street performer pounding on a drum. Multiplied four-fold, this drummer is, for Zhou, ‘the controller of the movement, inspired by the concept of the Four-faced Buddha in Chinese folk religion, the god who can fulfil and grant all wishes of its devotees’.
Director: Yuge Zhou
video
The environment
Photographs of rainforests dissolving in acid strike a beautiful note of warning
10 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Adaptive technologies have helped Stephen Hawking, and many more, find their voice
5 minutes
video
Ecology and environmental sciences
Experience the dazzling displays that fireflies create when humans are far away
5 minutes
video
Stories and literature
Solaris and beyond – Stanisław Lem’s antidotes to the bores of American sci-fi
7 minutes
video
Ecology and environmental sciences
To renew Yosemite, California should embrace a once-outlawed Indigenous practice
6 minutes
video
Music
Before the Beatles dropped acid, a BBC workshop was creating far-out sounds
6 minutes
video
Philosophy of language
For Ludwig Wittgenstein, language is a game, but not a frivolous one
43 minutes
video
Art
Is paying with hand-drawn banknotes artistry or forgery? The knotty case of J S G Boggs
10 minutes
video
Human rights and justice
Portugal stole Goa’s lands and narratives. Can they ever truly be returned?
19 minutes