In resistance to the current U.S. of A. figurehead’s ban on Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Libya and Yemen, UK producer Four Tet has added music from those very same nations to his Spotify playlist. Musician include Rahim Al-Haj (Iraq), Omar Souleyman (Syria), Martik (Iran), Naji Barakat (Yemen)–musicians who are now barred from entering and performing in the US. The story behind the playlist is poignant: Four Tet, real name Kieran Hebden, was inspired by his experiences working with Souleyman a few years ago in Brooklyn–a partnership now prohibited.

Already reputed “the grossest movie” to grease the silver screen, Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus’s first film Kuso is extreme. Perhaps only the basest images can accompany such a starry soundtrack–the film features music by Flying Lotus as well as Aphex Twin and Akira Yamaoka. While descriptions of the synopsis does repel, body horror and grotesquerie does have a storied history in art film, including filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Matthew Barney, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Sion Sono, and David Lynch. Whether Ellison’s film can withstand the test of time and the taste of the public is still up for debate.

“I want a president,” by activist and artist Zoe Leonard, recited by Myyki Blanco. As relevant now as in 1992.

Our pick for today is Looo.ch, an enfant terrible of art sites. When just 3-years old, the website was launched into infamy for their 2013 satirical primers Homosexuality for Kids: A Textbook With Pictures and Lesbianism for Kids: A Textbook With Pictures, which prompted Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare to completely block both the site and their blog platform Squarespace from all Russian ISPs as gay propaganda. Since then, the founders, Ukranian artists Natasha Masharova and Anatoli Ulyanov have relocated to New York and continue to provide and produce radical literature, photographs, and short-form film and VICE-like documentaries on topics polarizing, esoteric, and humble. In case you were wondering, their 2013 titles are available to download from their website.

To quote the artists:
“We don’t care for “social decorum”, “matters of national security”, “copyright”, “ideology”, and other grounds for repression of culture evolution.”

One of the most exciting components of the current Dreamlands show at the Whitney Museum is Terence Broad’s autoencoding of the film Blade Runner. An extension of Broad’s autoencoding works in which a computer watching reconstructs through what roughly amounts to artificial memory, his Blade Runner version is a particularly potent expression of the movie’s underlying themes of AI. In some ways, the visualized autoencoding portents the projection of the incipient machine soul, like the foggy memory of an infant human.

One of the finer cinematic offerings you may have overlooked this past year is Anna Biller’s lavish third wave production Love Witch (2016). Building on the retro camp meticulously constructed in 2007’s ambitious Viva, Love Witch follows the witch Elaine as she pursues love through sorcery and leaves a trail of her romantic victims. With it’s magical elements, celebration of femme sensuality and power, and sixties maximalism, the film mysteriously links to elements of today’s internet youth feminism. A comforting film in the face of recent political phallocentrism, perhaps.

For your consideration, Cabinet Books’ Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations by poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum.

Notes on Glaze collects Koestebaum’s “Legends” columns for Cabinet. From 2010-2015, he wrote captions for photographs selected by the magazine’s editors, provided he was not acquainted with the image beforehand.

What results resembles a sophisticated Pictionary, in which the caption describe less the actual photographs than Koestenbaum’s projections unto them.

Whether a Berghain purist or not, none is unscathed from the disappointment and subsequent bafflement at the club’s door policy. For equal frustration without the queue, take this simulation, created by Fabian Burghardt and Vinzenz Aubry. With a mix of questions and facial expression analysis technology, “Sven,” your Berghain trainer, will judge whether you are worthy, or more likely, not. One wonders what experiences and trade secrets Burghardy and Aubry culled for their algorithm. In any case, Berghain has subtly commented on the matter by ousting their logo from the website, leaving behind a pixelated rectangle icon in its absence–a entrance that might not exist, one might say.

Teaser_The_Park_Randa_Maroufi from Randa Maroufi on Vimeo.

Bottles, bare torso, a mosaic on a pair of eyes. Moroccan filmmaker Randa Maroufi’s The Park imagines the antics of local youths as reconstructed from Facebook images. The film seems to question the agency of the physical body in the age of digital information and challenges the viewer’s curiosity–or complacence–when faced with such explicitly limited information.