News

A new documentary feature about Lynn Margulis, a scientific rebel who challenged entrenched theories of evolution to present a new narrative: life evolves through collaboration.

Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis rocked the boat and started a scientific revolution will premiere worldwide in March 2018 at Oxford University on March 3, the Museum Blau of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona on March 7 and the David Brower Center in Berkeley on March 18. The premieres will launch a worldwide series of community screenings.

Symbiotic Earth is the story of a scientific rebel. A model of female empowerment, Lynn Margulis fought the male establishment and, through her persistence and triumphed.

As a young scientist in the 1960s, Margulis was ridiculed when she articulated a theory that symbiosis was a key driver of evolution. Instead of the mechanistic view that life evolved through random mutations and competition (the Darwin model of “survival of the fittest”), she...

Alvin's Harmonious World of Opposites.

Australian filmmakers are largely missing in action at Sundance this year.

Fortunately that's not the case at Slamdance, Sundance's younger sibling, which runs concurrently in Park City..

Slamdance will screen Sydney-shot The Tail Job, the debut of Bryan Moses and Daniel Millar, as well as Alvin's Harmonious World of Opposites, a charmingly batty surreal comedy from first-timer Platon Theodoris.

Both will screen in Slamdance's Competition.

Alvin stars Sydney-based artists Teik-Kim Pok and Vashti Hughes, as well as Indonesian gospel-queen Dessy Fitri, and was shot in Sydney, Kalgoorlie and Jakarta..

Slamdance's programmer, Aaron Marshall, describes it thus:

"Alvin hasn.t left his tiny apartment in 18 months. He.s holed up, hiding from the stressful outside world behind a collection of stuffed pandas and vintage knickknacks. But no matter how hard he tries, society.s chaos keeps oozing back in. Part grounded comedy, part magical allegory, Alvin...

Could we have heard that name correctly? Sounded like the guy on the television said that a nasty killer was named “Szasz.” Well sir, I knew of only two Szaszes. One was an upstate New York psychiatrist with some controversial ideas, and the other was a comic book character. Since the television program I was watching when I heard the name (I did hear it, didn’t I?) was based on comic books, it seemed logical that the teevee folk were paying some sort of homage to our fictitious hero. But our Szasz wasn’t a killer; our “Szasz” was the birth name of the guy who later called himself “Vic Sage” and later still adopted the identity of a masked vigilante, The Question.

Why call him Szasz? Um… I liked the name. I’d seen it somewhere, probably in the New York Times, and when my man Vic needed (another) moniker,...

On the occasion of Joseph Nechvatal's upcoming exhibition at Galerie Richard in New York (April 12 through May 26), the recent publication of his new book Immersion into Noise, and a concert of his remastered viral symphOny in surround sound. Taney Roniger is an artist and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn.

Bradley Rubenstein: We really want to get into the new book, as well as the upcoming show, but can you take a minute and give us a little backstory? You have always slipped in and out of categories: actions, painting, sound art, writing....

Joseph Nechvatal: Well, when I was going to undergraduate art school at Southern Illinois University (Siu), I was making drawings and little gouaches and smaller-type paintings on paper, generally. And they were well-received. I was not so interested in painting on canvas at the time. You have to put it in the perspective of the...