Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Los Santos: a city of four ecologies?

    Los Santos: a city of four ecologies?

    The title of this essay is obviously a misnomer. Los Santos, the fictional city in which Grand Theft Auto V is set, does not operate ecologically. The Foothills, The Plains of Id, Autopia and Surfurbia are all here in image, but the drivers and pedestrians that populate them so convincingly are connected to no social Read more

  • A record to have and eat

    A record to have and eat

    If you read their website bio, Sanguine Hum have a convoluted creative background, balancing a wide range of interests and demands. A need to experiment, a commitment to accessible, melodic songwriting, an interest in ambient abstraction… somehow it all came together in time for their first full-length release in a way that sounded completely coherent. Read more

  • Food as illustration

    Food as illustration

    In Western Europe we take holidays on the Mediterranean, we hear about migrants attempting to cross it, we imagine our histories as entwined with it—the cradle of a Roman Empire that impinged on the continent’s most distant fringes, bringing olives, wine, and dozens of other markers of its cultures and lifestyles. It defines our continent Read more

  • Forty-three years well-spent

    Forty-three years well-spent

    When I was seven years old, I passed into another world, and I have never fully returned to this one. That world, or more accurately those worlds, are to be found in a galaxy far, far way, and although everything you could say about them seems utterly lacking in credibility, they are realised with such Read more

  • Animal friends

    Animal friends

    Putting animal heads on the characters in cartoons is a widespread and long-established device—as I very recently noted with respect to Bryan Talbot’s Grandville. Through this device, the cartoonist, who aims to visually communicate any number of observations that couldn’t emerge through mimetic representation, is able to access a smorgasbord of expressive effects and opportunities Read more

  • A public meditation

    A public meditation

    Charlie Cawood is going places. I mean, I certainly hope he is going places in his career, but that’s not what I mean. I mean I’m going places. When I listen to Cawood’s music on Blurring Into Motion, I go places. It’s an album of place and journey, of concrete atmospheres rooted in the sensory. Read more