Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers.
A commute is often judged good or bad by how long it takes, but sometimes getting from one place to another can yield wrinkles in our experience of time. The Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Kondo explores this phenomenon in his often breathtaking video Multiverse, layering time on itself to create a hallucinatory vision of countless scooterists flowing through Taiwan’s capital Taipei. The result is a vision of a city and its people that takes an ordered freneticism and manipulates it to create a sense of time speeding up and standing still. People are momentarily discernible as individuals before morphing into strange amalgams of humanity. As the piece progresses, the pace becomes increasingly dizzying, until finally the crowd melds into an amorphous blur of light and motion. For another surreal take on the urban world from Kondo, watch his video Eye Know (2014).
Director: Hiroshi Kondo
Music and Sound design: Himuro Yoshiteru
video
Neuroscience
The brain repurposed our sense of physical distance to understand social closeness
5 minutes
video
Consciousness and altered states
You need to make friends with pain to run through the Grand Canyon and back
5 minutes
video
Art
Grotesque imagery meets religious conservatism in Hieronymus Bosch’s art
51 minutes
video
Architecture
Why a sculptor pivoted from gallery installations to big-box stores design
9 minutes
video
Physics
Spectacular fractal patterns emerge when electricity meets a wooden surface
4 minutes
video
Wellbeing
A tender poem doubles as a guide to sitting comfortably in one’s own company
3 minutes
video
Values and beliefs
How a God-fearing Jewish woman found atheism – and bacon – in her later years
9 minutes
video
War and peace
Before he leaves to go to war, Artem, 18, says goodbye to the man who raised him
12 minutes
video
Art
A mindbending trip that summons the forgotten women of surrealism
17 minutes