PSYCHOTRONIC BERLINALE: LOST / FRAGMENTED / CULT
THIS YEAR’S BERLINALE Festival—the 67th—featured a wide-ranging selection of curiosities from decades past, from thwarted epics to camp relics to vast, inscrutable psychedelia.
THE ART OF ATARI
GROWING UP, I had a closer-than-usual relationship with Atari’s games: with a close family member who worked at the then-young Silicon Valley company, I had access to dozens of games, sometimes even in pre-release builds. With most of the games I played existing only on floppy disks, this mind-bending cover art (not to mention any sort of packaging, background info, or instruction manual) was totally absent from the experience. This meant contending not only with the games’ built-in learning curves, but also figuring out the frequently bizarre lore and background stories of the games only through their totemic, rudimentary pixel art.
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF BERLIN TYPOGRAPHY
Berlin Typography is a project dedicated to celebrating the incredible range of sign-based type that proliferates throughout the German capital. It reveals an astounding range of typefaces, ranging from traditional blackletter to midcentury sans-serifs to a bewildering spread of outliers (with a particular soft spot for cursive neon, a signature Berlin aesthetic if there ever was one).
The project’s tagline, “Words and the City”, evokes the corporeal nature of urban signage, with numerous pictures revealing the particular detail given to punctuation, umlauts, and the uniquely German Eszett (ß).
PHOTO GALLERY: YOYOGI STADIUM, TOKYO
IN THE SUMMER of 2020, Yoyogi Stadium (also known as the Yoyogi National Gymnasium) will come full circle, playing host to the Olympics for the second time in half a century. Built for the 1964 Tokyo games, the stadium’s striking combination of viking-ship roof and brutalist concrete is the work of acclaimed architect Kenzo Tange, who also designed the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
PHOTO GALLERY: KRAFTWERK CHARLOTTENBURG
Built at the turn of the 20th century, when Charlottenburg was still independent from Berlin, the Kraftwerk Charlottenburg sought to meet the robust electrical needs of the wealthy, growing city. Large pipes transported most of the power across the Spree, which built into the structure of an elaborately-ornamented stone-and-metal footbridge, the Siemens-Steg. Over the following century, its output expanded to include hot water and natural gas, and was able to emerge relatively unscathed from the Second World War.
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: BEN CATMULL
BEN CATMULL IS an Oakland artist who works in various combinations of ink, watercolor, and scratchboard. He is currently branching out into metal plate intaglio printmaking and combining handmade miniatures with filmmaking (no, not stop motion). His letterpress prints (including the moth image below) started as simple pen-and-ink drawings and were printed by Volta press.
Ben’s published works are Ghosts and Ruins (2013) and Monster Parade (2006), both from Fantagraphics, and Paper Theater (2001, Xeric Grant). Physical copies of Monster Parade are sold out, but it can be read online here.
PHOTO GALLERY: GAME ON EXHIBITION, TOKYO
GAME ON IS A massive exhibition spanning the entire history of videogames, from Tennis for Two to home consoles, and from massive arcade cabinets to VR headsets. Originally curated by the Barbican Centre, the exhibition came to Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Spring 2016.
FLASH GALLERY: JELLYFISH AT THE BERLIN AQUARIUM
Tiny dancers at the Berlin Aquarium, Summer 2016.