Finland, Milan and Vilnius

For the past month and a half I’ve been quite busy, travelling to Finland, Milan and will be heading to Vilnius at the end of this week for a one month artist residency. I’ve visited lots of exhibitions, have been applying to a bunch of opportunities, put together a new funding proposal for a curatorial project that I’m organising and vaguely settled in to living outside of London.

After working on and finishing a bunch of projects at the end of last year I’ve been trying to pin down a new focus for my practice. I do this through research (watching TV, reading books, new articles and visiting exhibitions) and by applying to open calls. The open call process enables me to spend time digging into concepts and conducting a little bit of research, enough to write and application and to kickstart the making of new work. So for the past month and a half I’ve been doing just that, applying to opportunities and exploring new ideas. One of the new areas of interest is non-player characters (NPCs) in video games. NPCs are characters in video games that are controlled by the computer. They have a predetermined set of behaviours programmed by artificial intelligent software. The lives of these characters revolve around the player. They are stuck in the game world, doomed to repeat the same day for eternity, waiting to be interacted with.

The above video is a tiny test and fragment of a new video I’m currently working on that explores and imagines what NPC enemies in various video games think about their role within the game worlds they inhabit, the player and the infinite loop they reside within. The full video is going to see a number of video game enemies falling and breaking apart, to be cleaned up and recycled at the end of the piece. It’ll be about ten minutes, with a variety of different voiceovers speaking about experiences of enemies within video games. As part of the video, and to expand the project, I also thought about making a couple of new paintings and sculptures. Below is a life-size painting of a guard from Skyrim, quite famous NPCs known for their lack of depth and nuance. The work is called I Used To Be An Adventurer Like You, sized at 200 x 82 x 2 cm.

I’m just beginning with this body of work but think it would be great to develop a series of these, thinking about NPCs, complete with sculptures and other elements. I’ll see how it progresses as time moves forwards.

Another thing I’ve been working on is the 3D printed frames. I’m slowly improving with these, learning how to build the frames using 3D software and making sure the print is going to be perfectly fitted for each painting. I’m yet to experiment with making large frames, as those will have to be printed in parts and glued together, but will get around to that as currently my frame size is limited to 30 x 30 cm. Below is a frame I made for one of the small versions of the paintings for my show in the Czech Republic.

And here’s a slightly more elaborate frame I made for an older work of mine that I remade as a smaller painting. The frame is quite complicated, taking some inspiration from the Mediaeval & Renaissance frame designs of the past. I still want to experiment a lot more with these, making them more 3D and full artworks within themselves, but for now I’m happy with how it’s all progressing.

This is a little simpler, but still works well, made for a friend’s birthday with a tiny version of one of my police officers with drone paintings.

Another body of work I’ve been exploring is based around patents. I’m thinking about patents, and how they are a way of observing and predicting the future whilst simultaneously holding back the human race. The work that I’m currently thinking about would consider the repercussions of living within a world built around patents and intellectual property. A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing a disclosure of the invention. The United States Patent and Trademark Office currently receives about 650,000 patent applications annually and issues grants to about 350,000 of those. Patents were once a way of ensuring that your new invention couldn’t be stolen from you. As time has moved forwards how patents are used have changed. The big four tech companies now file thousands of patents every year, most of them detailing useless, completely speculative, future technology that may or may not appear in the future. It no longer matters if the invention is good, only that you were able to patent it before anyone else was able to, and in doing so preserving yourself a slice of one of a million potential futures.

Currently I’m only drawing and reproducing already made patents, but would be interested to start drawing my own, entirely elaborate inventions, alongside looking into how the patent process occurs. Although I assume that it is somewhat costly to submit one. We’ll see how it goes.

I had a painting of mine included in S.P.A.M. Spreads 2, a publication and re-imagining of BALTIC's annual Self-Publishing Market. I was part of the first iteration in 2020, so it was nice to be selected again to be a part of the second iteration. The publication includes work from 24 artists, exploring the politics and future of food production and consumption, ideas of hospitality and acts of eating together, and methods of sharing practice and preserving cultures. The work of mine included, Find Your Favourite Groceries, depicts an Ocado warehouse robot, the online company that specialises in delivering your shopping. The robot is one of thousands used within Ocado warehouses. They operate on a grid system, picking up items using a complex grabbing mechanism, with some of the newer models packing up orders in less than 15 minutes. The robots are much faster than their human counterparts and, as Ocado continues to expand its operation, in-person shopping will soon be swallowed up by the online marketplace.

Digital versions of artworks, originally produced for my recent solo exhibition Digging History, were included in The Zium Gallery, a Museum Exploration Game filled with artwork and installations from artists around the world, working in various mediums and styles. Included in the show is a large-scale replica of one of the 3D printed dogs from my recent exhibition Digging History, accompanied by several paintings and the video work originally included in the show, titled The Dance. A lot of my work begins in the digital space, so it was interesting to have this particular body of work return to its original form. Download and play the game by going to https://theziumsociety.itch.io/the-zium-gallery. Here’s some screenshots.

Another replica of one of the works from the show was included in a different digital exhibition, seen here - https://www.wetdovetail.com/2-1. This was a little more point and click, and a little less structured.

Alongside this I’ve been writing an ACE application for a new curatorial programme that I’m organising. For it I’ve been speaking with a bunch of artists, galleries in Suffolk and an institution about providing mentorship. I should be submitting the application soon, which would mainly fund a 6-month programme on the isthisit? site, alongside a physical exhibition too. More on this in a few months when I hear back from ACE about it.

The biggest and most exciting news is that I’m going to Vilnius for a one-month residency at the beginning of April at SODAS 2123. It’s quite a simple residency, with no fixed outcome, which I have decided to utilise as an opportunity to finally force myself to get back into video game software, specifically Unity. Back in 2020 I was interested in getting back into game development and have since not really pursued it. So for the next month or so I’ll be working on a new interactive artwork, focused on a village that has been long abandoned due to unknown reasons. I’ve never been to Vilnius so am really excited to explore and learn about the city whilst meeting new people and living for a month in a new environment.

I think that’s pretty much everything that’s been going on with my art making, just applying to a bunch of opportunities and trying to nail down things for the future. I have a solo show planned that’ll be in London early next year, alongside a museum group show too, although those feel like a little way off.

I’ve seen quite a lot of shows recently, in Finland, Milan, London and Suffolk/Norfolk, far more than I have done over the past two years with covid. It’s been somewhat nice to get back into it. Let’s begin with the Finland shows; the Ars Fennica 2021 exhibition at the Hämeenlinna Art Museum. Ars Fennica is Finland’s most prestigious art award, so it was really cool to discover that the town I was staying in was holding this exhibition. It featured the work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Viggo Wallensköld, Anne-Karin Furunes, Magnus Wallin and Jesper Just. All the work was pretty good, with highlights including Just’s Corporealités multi-channel video installations utilising LED panels and performers responding to electric impulses being forced into their bodies. This was a favourite of mine, whilst Ahtila’s Horizontal – Horizontal (the winner of the prize) was quite simple, a multi-channel video installation capturing the scale of a tree in Hämeenlinna. Either way it was really nice to see high quality work in an unexpected space.

Also at the museum was a large show featuring a bunch of work from their collection, curated by 15 - 20-year-olds. One of my highlights was a Finnish artist, Juhani Linnovaara, whose paintings were pretty wild, featuring figures who look like subtle jellyfish people. He’s 88 now, although his work feels very current.

I’ve been to Finland a few times in the past, all of which occurred over the summer months when all the shows are usually closed. Happily this time I went during the winter season so lots of things that were closed before are now open. So it was fun to explore Helsinki and actually choose what to see. Aki Turunen’s The Dragon Tamer at Helsinki Contemporary was interesting, with the tempera painting style inspired by medieval manuscripts. Some of the work’s imagery was odd and interesting, in a very painterly style.

I enjoyed Jenni Hiltunen’s Purple Grass at Galerie Forsblom, a series of self portraits with the artist looking outside of the frame and off to the side, seemingly uninterested by the audience and their gaze. For an all painting show I quite liked its playfulness. Some of the larger works were very refined, whereas I really liked this smaller, blockier work, reminding me of early 3D video game characters.

Eeva Peura’s Little Moon at Galerie Forsblom was a little messier. I liked some elements of the paintings, the subtle references and signifiers, but I wasn’t so into the overall image.

Stig Baumgartner’s Assemblies at Galerie Forsblom was sadly old and dull.

Kari Vehosalo’s Unknown Pleasures at Galerie Anhava was okay. I didn’t feel like the press release text really lined up with the paintings, alongside there being a really meshing of styles within the work. The paintings were very well made and beautifully detailed, but the content felt a little off. Either way it was very impressive work, landscapes with black dots overlaid.

Aaron Heino’s There's Always One Banana at Galleria Heino (does he run the gallery, or is it run by his family?) was very odd. The art was marble and aluminium sculptures, but for some odd reason they were painted in bright pop colours, transforming these subtle objects into grotesque forms resembling different fruits. Not for me.

I really enjoyed Eva-Teréz Gölin’s Speed at Hippolyte Studio, although felt like the work was very crammed in to such a small space. It featured photographs taken within Google Maps of spaces where we as human beings drive in circles, wasting fuel and overconsuming. I really liked the work, visually and conceptually, but wish I’d seen it in a better exhibited context, in a larger space with better, more thoughtful curation.

Milja Laurila’s Woman. With more than 1,000 illustrations in black-and-white and seven colour plates at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte was a complex show about women and how they have been presented in scientific journals, particularly the 1885 book Woman. An Historical Gynæcological and Anthropological Compendium, basically showing them akin to sex objects. The exhibition featured images from the book, with the people’s bodies hidden with only their eyes showing, alongside a sound piece taking small extracts from the book. It was well presented and highly researched work, a powerful show.

I enjoyed seeing Tove Jansson’s frescoes at HAM. The technique just feels incredibly difficult, alongside there being lots of lovely details and references built into them. They were one of the first images to include Moomins, and the works feel full of life and spirit, even if they look like they are ever so slowly crumbling away.

Between Objects at HAM presented a number of works from their permanent collection acquired over the past 10 years. I was a fan of Edith Karlson’s work, life size sculptures of birds, where the moulds were taken from dead birds. After looking at Karlson’s other work I’m definitely a fan, ancient, apocalyptic and relic-like animals in various scenarios.

There was one more show at HAM, featuring the work of Greta Hällfors-Sipilä and Sulho Sipilä. It was a real range of old-style work; I particularly enjoyed the early cubism work.

Jonas Karén’s Everything smells of cigarettes at Sinne was interesting, with the titles spanning entire paragraphs. Each title was a different memory that the artist has about his late mother. I liked this element, and the way the paintings were displayed, but the actual work wasn’t my thing. A bit too abstract and subtle.

Sara Bjarland’s Deposits at Galleria Sculptor was fun, visualising dirt and waste, from the display of hundreds of mops transformed into an overwhelming tapestry to textile works made up of heavily worn leather sofa fabrics. It was well executed.

Double Worlds, a group show at Galleria Rankka, was quite an odd experience. It was very weirdly curated, with a lot of odd and very random feeling work. The whole space felt quite unhinged, something that you rarely encounter within art spaces anymore. This was a piece by Mirza Cizmic, all focusing around the dinner table and slightly worrying encounters.

Eevi Rutanen’s Fuzzy Logic at Galleria Huuto was fun, an interactive experience where you could pick up a phone receiver and listen to an audio work, turn a tap and control light levels or twist a key in a toilet to activate the lid, revealing an elaborate cake. It was an enjoyable show, full of humour and 90s nostalgia.

Sirkku Rosi’s A fourth round of applause at Galleria Huuto was watercolours, bodily images and fleshy scenery. I liked it.

Paavo Paunu’s The Burning Bush at Galleria Huuto was a little wild, large scale wood sculptures affecting trees with magical elements. It was very impressive and very odd.

The final show at Galleria Huuto was Susanna Autio’s Airy-Fairy. It felt very simple, living up to the title.

Mari Pihlajakoski’s A Little Oddities at tm galleria included a number of blurred paintings, scenes including birds and witch like moments.

I think that’s it for shows in Finland. I was there for about a week, but only spent one day in Helsinki. The rest of the time I was enjoying the snow, cross country skiing, going on walks and visiting an observatory.

Next up is Suffolk and Norfolk, with a couple of shows. The first was a very well organised exhibition called Undisclosed at Norwich Cathedral. It was about modern slavery, and had lots of texts in the accompanying book, from the reverend of the cathedral, curators and PHD writers. The work, however, was pretty awful and, in my opinion, had very little to no connection with the incredibly important theme. A lot of the work was incredibly subtle and abstract, and overall entirely disappointing. Also, no photographs for some weird reason. The space, however, was beautiful, so that’s something.

Next was the Sainsburys Centre to look at their collection, which is always a nice experience. The building is beautiful and, I imagine, great to explore and be a part of if you’re a student at the accompanying university (UEA). I kind of loved this display by Richard Slee of a bunch of ceramic swans. Simple but quite lovely.

Another, more impactful display, was Sethembile Msezane’s Nibizwa Ngabangcwele, a video installation featuring subtle hand movements, asserting Black ancestry.

I went to Old Jet in Bentwaters, an old air force base which has various businesses and artist studios, to see a duo show by Darren Lynde Mann and Adam Riches. It was nice to see the space and experience the art scene in Suffolk, which I don’t have too much connection with.

Debby Besford’s The Art of Roller Skating at Primeyarc was quite good, a very historical show about roller skating in Great Yarmouth, a beachside town that has kind of died over the past 40 or so years. It’s a wild space, based inside an old Primark store, with the show featuring a roller skating rink and a series of photographs of roller skaters. These were of primarily or young women, photographed in various skating positions, in their bedrooms and front rooms. This was the art of the show, with these people feeling very alien and odd in these spaces.

I also went to a few performances at Snape Maltings, one by Rapasa Nyatrapasa Otieno, whose a Kenyan born multi-instrumentalist and singer songwriter. It was fun, with the main instrument being a Nyatiti, an eight-string lyre from the Lüo community. Every time he made a sound it affected the projection behind him, which was cool.

Another performance was by Leon Clowes, and was a little too odd for me.

Next up was a bunch of London shows, starting with Thomson & Craighead’s No Escape at IMT. It was a show full of distress and rage for the future, billionaires and the apocalypse. I liked the conceit, but the work was a little too bland for me I guess. I wanted more from the distress. One of the elements I really enjoyed was the purchase of a barrel of whiskey. It’ll take 10 years or so to be okay to drink, and obviously in that time the world will change drastically. It’s a performative artwork that looks into the future.

Gala Porras-Kim’s Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing at Gasworks was interesting, a very complex show that investigated the institutional frameworks that define, legitimise and preserve cultural heritage. It featured various copies of artefacts and letters to institutional departments. Heavy work.

One of my favourite shows of this period, and maybe for some time, was Pedigree by Patrick Goddard at Seventeen. Goddard is known for darkly comedic films that, in the past, I have really loved. The main feature of this show, a new 40-minute film called Animal Antics, was no different. It sees a talking dog and its owner wandering around a zoo in a future world where there is no such thing as an environment or “the wild” anymore, thanks to climate collapse. The talking dog is fascistic, continually speaking about how, because it’s a pedigree, is far superior to all the other animals. It’s a darkly comedic film, putting forth important and timely ideas via the vehicle of a talking dog. I went back to watch the whole thing again I liked it so much, which I don’t know if I’ve ever done before – especially not with a 40-minute video work. Really great work and I would highly recommend it to everyone.

Isamu Noguchi’s A New Nature at White Cube was pretty beautiful. Far more design than art, it was full of subtle bits of metal, jutting from the ceiling and floor. Very beautiful work that I would happily have in my house if I was a millionaire.

Damien Hirst’s Natural History at Gagosian fell a little flat for me, an exhibition that featured a bunch of his formaldehyde works, spanning from 1991 – 2021. I think I was a really young child when I first saw them, so have very little to no recollection of how it felt, but to me these works just seemed a little bland. Perhaps the advent of the internet/CGI has softened these once awe-inspiring works. When I see the shark, I’m like it’s a shark, so what? Rather than oh my god it’s a shark. I liked the smaller works featuring tiny fish, but the larger pieces just felt like an Instagram pit in today’s world, even if they’ve been built many years before social media even existed. It’s big and unexciting.

Steph Huang’s Everything and Nothing at mother’s tankstation was fun, although I didn’t truly understand these subtle, assemblage like, works made of glass, found and created objects. There were some beautiful elements.

I liked Morag Keil’s Free Like Only Animals Can Be at Project Native Informant, making me think about the installation of paintings. It was a show of 9 paintings of different animals, each installed onto pegboards and surrounded by various forms of broken technology. I liked it for what it was, animals installed in different ways, and didn’t feel the need to dig any deeper.

I couldn’t connect with Roger Hiorns’s Wartime farm at Coriv-Mora, especially with no press release.

I couldn’t connect to the show at Greengrassi either, which was even more obtuse. It seemed to be a selection of artist mix tapes, accompanied by stickers and other bits and pieces.

Jill McKnight’s A room in which many of the parts of our lives were placed at Vitrine Gallery felt a little bit of everything, a bit haphazard and (dis)connected.

Max Petts and Robert Orr’s FLOWERS at Xxijra Hii was nice, very subtle flower-based work.

I enjoyed Liam Fallon’s Hotspot at Castor Gallery. I’ve seen his work a lot on Instagram, made primarily from jesmonite, and it always looks incredibly slick and beautiful. I was kind of glad to see that this wasn’t the case at all in the physical world, with jesmonite having many layers and fallibilities. It felt very handmade, kind of like when you see abstract paintings that you’ve seen a lot online, with perfect lines and colours, but in reality Mondrian’s composition’s were all incredibly handmade and imperfect. Anyway, I enjoyed the show, it was playful and cartoon-like, complete with part of the wall being ripped apart like a set.

Derek Mainella’s Too Much Fun, also at Castor, was much simpler. Smoking figures with pills and drugs for eyes.

Aggregate at Freelands Art Foundation was okay, a very busy group show with artists from various cities in the UK. I enjoyed a number of works on show, including James Clarkson’s Stack Group Integrate and Mona Yoo’s Pause Patina which directly interacted with the building and its history. It was a good show, just very busy.

A show I thought I would love was Among The Machines at the Zabludowicz Collection, featuring the work of Rebecca Allen, Ian Cheng, Simon Denny, Aleksandra Domanović, Jake Elwes, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Joey Holder, Marguerite Humeau, Keiken, Lauren Moffatt, Tabita Rezaire, Theo Triantafyllidis and Anicka Yi. I’m a big fan of pretty much all these artists, but the show just felt a little dated in the work that it was exhibiting. A lot of it was from 2016, and most of it I had seen already. Plus Keiken’s work (pictured), a wearable technology, was broken at the time, so overall it felt a little bit of a miss for me. I went the day after the PV, so surely it should have been operational. A lot of the work was video based, some of which had okay seating and others – work that was over 20 minutes – had nothing, which felt a little unconsidered. I’ve said it many times before, but if you expect me to watch a long video you need to have good seating. Some of the work was also connected to an AR app, which only worked for iPhones and, as an avid Android user, I felt like this was a bit of an oversight. The work was great, but just felt a bit of a miss for me. Maybe because I’d seen like 90% of it before, I dunno. I really wanted to like it far more than I did. The press release, though, was very well written and produced.

Darya Diamond’s Invites show at the Zabludowicz Collection was interesting, although quite sparce. It was all about Diamond’s experience of being a sex worker, destigmatising this form of labour by documenting personal, unexpected encounters with clients. It was good, but I wanted more from the actual work on show.

I think that’s it for London, the final location is Milan. Let’s begin with Marco Reichert’s of ants and bees at Ribot, which was fine. The work, which was described as being “created with a machine” (but not actually telling you what this mysterious machine was) was paintings of head like figures. It was a shame really, as I really like their programming, but it seems like the show I visited wasn’t really for me.

Giulio Scalisi’s Like a True Gentleman at Case Chiuse HQ was really good, all revolving round a CGI video about how, in the future, we’ll all live in penis shaped houses and have our conversations monitored and edited by individual AIs. It was packed with references, like HAL 9000 and Jeff Bezos’ rocket. Upstairs there was a faux salesroom, where you could see promotional material for the house. I thought it was a very good show and will definitely research further into Scalisi’s work.

I wasn’t so into Gianni Caravaggio’s The Sun filtering through the leaves at kaufmann Repetto. The work was nice, all about plants and light, but the press release was just a bit too wanky for my liking, which made the work falter a little. I wanted more.

I spent a lot of time at Jon Rafman’s Arbiter of Worlds at Ordet. It features a series of video works and a painting, all of which I had not seen previously. The short film, titled Punctured Sky, is a narrative-based work that sees Rafman exploring the idea of memory loss and video game wormholes. The animation style was super creepy, with the whole video seemingly made of found footage photos and video, pasted together in a 2.5D style. Truly odd. Another work, Minor Daemon I, was kind of a continuation of Dream Journal. It was very narrative heavy, full of the same weird CGI as before. It was good, enjoyable work, but I definitely like the narrated works in Rafman’s oeuvre better. They feel far more structured and considered. A very good show.

Jasmine Gregory’s Mommie dearest at Istituto Svizzero was okay, a weird mix of painting techniques.

Visiting the Fondazione Prada was pretty wild. It’s such a massive complex, with huge buildings and very slick design. It was an experience within itself to visit the space.

The permanent exhibition, Atlas, was fun. I’d never seen Carsten Höller’s Upside-Down Mushroom Room, which was quite an experience.

It was great to see Thomas Demand’s Processo Grottesco too, a grotto on the island Maiorca that he recreated out of cardboard. It’s like a film set of sorts, and very impressive to see.

I really enjoyed the Haunted House, a permanent installation by Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois, set within a golden building. The highlight was, at the top, a bronze drain by Gober that was embedded in the floor and featured running water and a red, slowly beating, heart. Here’s a link to a YouTube video to give you an idea - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMBAr5bMgNE

I also went to see the group exhibition Role Play at the Osservatorio Fondazione Prada featuring work by Meriem Bennani, Juno Calypso, Cao Fei, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Beatrice Marchi, Darius Mikšys, Narcissister, Haruka Sakaguchi & Griselda San Martin, Tomoko Sawada, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, and Amalia Ulman. It was a good show, although I felt like there are potentially better examples of artists who invent alternative identities which could have been included here. It was good, but felt very film heavy with, again, not great seating. The curation was heavy, with the space full of blue lighting and big mirrors, forcing you – I guess – to reflect on your own fabricated identity. I enjoyed it, ish.

The final place I visited was Pirelli HangarBicocca, another monumental space further out of the city. It had a survey show by Anicka Yi which was pretty great. Her practice is very science and biology based, with many of the works actively growing and changing as the exhibition continued. Particular favourites were a group of works that looked a bit like ant farms, but were in fact growing organisms, alongside a scent that she had developed. You smelled the work by opening up washing machine doors and dipping your head in. Very good and incredibly complex work.

On permanent display is Anselm Kiefer’s The Seven Heavenly Palaces, a huge installation of towers made from concrete and shipping containers, weighing around 90 tonnes each and varying between 13 and 19 meters high. It was a truly wild experience, just the scope of this work, very symbolic and scary.

Now that, I think, is the 56 shows I have seen since last time, pretty much one a day! Let’s move onto films, TV shows, games and books. I watched Murderville, an interesting-ish idea where a celebrity guest tags alongside Will Arnett in a murder mystery show. The guest has no idea what the script is and, at the end of the episode, has to guess who the murderer is. It very much depends on the guest, but a couple are very amusing, especially Conan O'Brien. It’s an interesting conceit which I – kind of – enjoyed.

Bigbug, a film set in future France where everything is run by robots. It’s kind of like what the 60s thought the future would look like – a little bit steampunk. It’s got some very odd humour, and not the best Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, but I enjoyed myself while it lasted.

It didn’t take me very long to catch up with all 9 seasons of The Blacklist. It’s one of those American TV shows where, whatever happens, each episode is kind of similar, based around a different criminal that the FBI take down with the help of their informant, a man who is on the top of their most wanted list. That’s the premise, and it’s a fairly enjoyable one. Not great, but you know what you’re getting.

Arcane, on the other hand, was very well done. It takes the characters and world of League of Legends – a game I have never played – and fleshes them out a little more. There are a lot of known elements, like the sky city being a utopia and the underground being a dystopia, but they build the world really well and adequately flesh out each of the characters. I’m excited for season 2.

The Power of the Dog was full of suspense and unspoken violence. I didn’t enjoy it per se but liked it. I’m not sure how you could be confused by the ending though.

When Space Force first came out, I watched two episodes and stopped, branding it as boring and unimaginative. Two years later and I’ve come back to it, enjoying both seasons. It’s still a bit trash but, I think after watching Don’t Look Up, I was more inclined to watch things featuring terribly inadequate leaders.

I really liked The Worst Person in the World, a drama following four years of a young woman’s life. She self-destructs relationships and fluidly moves between jobs, utilising the city of Oslo as a backdrop. It’s a very good film that has definitely inspired me to dig through the directors back catalogue.

I enjoyed Crashing, a show created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and released in the same year as Fleabag, featuring her (again) as the main character. It’s about a group of young people living as guardians in an old hospital in central London. It’s dysfunctional and funny, although doesn’t have quite the bite as Fleabag. Definitely worth a watch though.

Kimi, starring Zoë Kravitz as an agoraphobic tech freelancer, was great. It was Rear Window for the modern age, or something like that aha. The world it portrays, one which we’re pretty much living through, is very well developed and scary. I would definitely recommend.

A show I’ve been loving is Twenties, focusing on three young Black women living in LA created by Lena Waithe. It features very real conversations and relationships that these women have and embark upon. I would highly recommend watching, as it’s both very enjoyable, sad and funny, all in one.

I thought Sing 2 was a good time.

Cat Burglar, an interactive 30-minute experience by Charlie Brooker, was a bit of a let-down. It felt very simple and a bit tedious by the time you finished. You basically answer trivia questions to move forwards. It was fine.

I found Vacation Friends to be very funny, about a very straight couple who meet a hectic couple on holiday. They have a great time and think the experience is behind them. This is, of course, not the case. A good, simple time.

I detested the new West Side Story. Just so dull, slow and annoying. It was basically a remake of the original, with no consideration for the world we currently live in. What was the point of this remake? Compare this to, for example, the 1996 adaption of Romeo + Juliet, which actually added something new to this well-worn story, and there’s no comparison. I really hated the entire experience.

I enjoyed Starstruck, a comedy about a woman living in London who, unknowingly, begins a relationship with a famous actor. It’s very funny and has some good conversations. I would definitely recommend it for anyone who enjoyed Shrill and Dollface.

Blade Runner: Black Lotus was fun, an anime set in the Blade Runner universe. There’s very little care for main characters dying, and Brian Cox plays the main bad guy, so I thoroughly enjoyed this. The beginning soundtrack is very good too.

I was expecting Pirates to be a lot funnier than it actually was, focusing on three 18-year-olds celebrating the turn of the millennium. It was okay, but not funny enough to justify watching.

Nightmare Alley was bleak, quite predictable but bleak nonetheless.

I did like My Octopus Teacher, although the whole thing felt incredibly sensual and quite predatory. It’s about a filmmaker pursuing a friendship with an octopus. It’s basically a film about a man stalking an octopus, being weirdly obsessed with this creature. Like I say, good, but when you put it into perspective, it’s a pretty weird premise for a film.

Inventing Anna was a terrible show, full of painful acting and a really annoying plot about a reporter. The whole show, focused on the real story of Anna Delvey pretending to be a German heiress, was painfully seen by the eyes of a reporter, played by Anna Chlumsky, who seems to be putting on the worst performance of her life. I really didn’t see why we had to be fully inserted into her life, and how that added to this experience. Bad writing, bad acting, good real-life story.

The Cuphead Show!, a TV show spinoff of the game, was trash.

After Yang was a beautiful, subtle film, exploring what it means to be an AI in the near future and how ingrained they will become into our daily lives. A very good film with quiet dystopian elements. I would highly recommend it.

I found Belle: The Dragon and the Freckled Princess to be a beautiful film, although kind of a repeat of Mamoru Hosoda’s previous (and superior) film Summer Wars. It’s about a virtual world that enables you to have a fresh start, although the “world” felt incredibly dull and simple, with no worldbuilding at all, alongside the film being full of flaws and a very badly written in sub-plot about child abuse. In spite of all this, I still enjoyed the film, but just not as much as I wanted to.

I thought Dog, directed by and starring Channing Tatum, would have been funnier than it was.

I wanted to like Turning Red more than I did. It’s an animation about a 13-year-old who turns into a red panda whenever she gets excited. I enjoyed the animation style and the world that the people inhabited, but felt the portrayal of the mother was a bit harsh, showing her as a pretty terrible controlling person, with very little redemption. I liked the group of young people, the 2000s setting and the boy band, but just wanted it to be better.

Spider-Man: No Way Home was also not great. I guess the main part of the film was kind of spoiled for me, so I went in with my mind pre-blown. I did like the multiple crossovers, but in reality, it’s a Marvel film and I shouldn’t have expected huge things.

I was very disappointed by South Park: The Fractured but Whole, the 2017 South Park game that directly follows the 2014 game South Park: The Stick of Truth. I really loved the first game, it’s battle system, story and RPG elements. It was also developed by Obsidian Entertainment, famous for its layered writing and well-made RPGs (see Fallout: New Vegas). The newer game fell flat on a lot of these elements, the updated battle system felt painfully boring and long, the story was tedious and interactive world felt super empty. It was also developed by Ubisoft, rather than just being published by them, a studio known for its tedious games with RPG elements. Anyway, as you might get, I would definitely not recommend this, even if you are a South Park fan.

I’ve played a few other games over this time, but haven’t finished any others, so will wait until next time to update this. I’ve also been reading a couple of books, one of which was The Every by Dave Eggers, a follow up to his 2013 novel The Circle, focusing on a grotesque corporation that’s slowly taking over the world. The follow up has made me even more worried about the future than I already was, mixing climate awareness with surveillance in a very clever and distressing way. I ploughed through it in a couple of days and would highly recommend it.

I’m now reading a couple of others, including Sex Robots & Vegan Meat by Jenny Kleeman and Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, but am yet to finish. I’m trying to read at least one book a month this year in a bid to read more regularly. Hopefully I manage to keep up with this – sort of – resolution. Anyway, I think that’s it for this post. In a few days I’m heading to Vilnius and am thoroughly looking forward to it, exploring a new city, seeing shows and making new work.