Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Sexy stabby

    Sexy stabby

    Illustration is a word that usually implies instrumentality, a visual work that’s auxiliary to something else. More broadly, you might illustrate a point, which implies one utterance in support of another. But illustration also suggests an approach to drawing (or potentially to any kind of picture-making) which locates its meanings in the objects it represents. Read more

  • A dark, involute surface

    A dark, involute surface

    Monstress is pretty much the only commercial comics series I’m following, other than 2000AD and its associated properties. I enjoy it basically for Marjorie Liu’s straightforward fantasy storytelling and Sana Takeda’s absolutely sumptuous art: it’s something I can enjoy as entertainment without having to think about it too hard. Its aesthetics are more or less Read more

  • A new loop

    A new loop

    I’ve been lucky with Star Wars games. I played X-Wing and Tie Fighter in the early 90s. both of which are now regarded as classics of their genre, and when it made it onto Mac I played the RPG Knights of the Old Republic, which is sometimes cited as one of the best games of Read more

  • Tilting at reality

    Tilting at reality

    I’ve read a lot of popular science books over the years, but never until now have I felt a real urge to go and learn the maths I’d need to properly understand the work. I feel as though, if I had read this book twenty, or even ten years ago, I might have done just Read more

  • Narrative serving violence

    Narrative serving violence

    The experience of being the protagonist of a story, rather than simply the player of a game, became a characteristic form of engagement with videogames with the arrival of the first-person shooter, I guess. I recall reading a prediction by Gary Gygax, the co-author of Dungeons & Dragons, sometime around the mid-eighties, that role-playing games Read more

  • Oblique unfolding

    Oblique unfolding

    The world of stable objects and simple, obvious relations between them is not the real world. It’s one we like because it’s easy to think about, but it’s a fantasy, lacking in both beauty and truth. Truth emerges in art when it makes its way obliquely between the big colourful blocks with which the cognitive Read more