Laurie Anderson has unveiled her massive Park Avenue Armory installation in collaboration with former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammad el Gharani — who was imprisoned between ages 14 and 21, and who now appears in a live feed from a studio in West Africa, projected as a human sculpture onto a Lincoln Memorial-like screen four times his size. (It’s interspersed with pre-recorded footage of him detailing his experiences.) Oddly, just beyond this, the room is filled with dotted light from a disco ball.
Anderson spoke with The Creators Project about the work — and yes, the disco ball’s purpose is somewhat straightforward: “Out of really negative experiences, war experiences, you can also create an enormous amount of love…The dark stuff can generate images of freedom and happiness and joy. That’s why we’re ending the story with a dance party every night.”
Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer has been enlisted to create ident bumpers for Britain’s Channel 4 rebrand. (You can watch them here.) The channel’s logo used to be a “4” made from yellow blocks, and now, Glazer has made a series of strikingly bizarre vignettes to represent it. According to the Independent, “echoes of the [4’s] blocks can be identified, for those who look for hard enough, buried in the new ‘idents’ or rearranged in a playful manner behind individual programme promotions.” So in lieu of a logo, for example, you get whatever that hirsute figure is above, dancing in a cave. “We didn’t want to tell people what channel they’re watching. We wanted to tell them why they’re watching it the first place,” said Chris Boville, joint head of 4Creative, to the journal.
Also regarding mesmerically nonsensical branding, Homeland‘s surrealistic credit sequence has always seemed a little at odds with the political thriller. With its 5th season (sees Carrie having moved to Berlin) set to premiere this Sunday, Claire Danes stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and admitted she didn’t really get the credits either. Similarly, The Leftovers is also beginning again this weekend, and has likewise switched locations — from upstate New York to the small town of “Miracle, TX.” Creator Damon Lindelof said that he drew inspiration for the new season from Friday Night Lights. He told TVLine, “Despite the fact that there is a genre premise that is underlying the world of The Leftovers, we really looked at it structurally more like Friday Night Lights, where it’s sort of the continuing condition of these people living their lives.” And, speaking to Variety, he said, “The ideas we tend to get excited about most as writers are the ones that others may describe as batshit, but I like the high degree of difficulty.” So… good luck figuring out which drama-with-mixed-reviews-that-used-to-take-place-somewhere-else to watch on!