“My whole idea behind this in the first place was to see how dumb America was. How dumb the world is.”

– James Hydrick

Set 278 days before the start of the Tokyo Olympics.

“One can meet only god at such hour.”

A [favourite] Frankenstein film.

 

One wet, ungenial summer in 1816, lovers Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, visited a dear friend at Villa Diodati. That friend was Lord Byron, exiled and residing in the Swiss villa with his physician Dr John Polidori

“There are no ghosts in daylight. You'll get used to our nights at Diodati. A little indulgence to heighten our existence on this miserable Earth. Nights of the mind, the imagination. Nothing more.”

– Lord Byron

Forced indoors, over the cause of three days they turned to the occult, to laudanum, to stories from the Fantasmagoriana, and the horrors of their own. That summer, Frankenstein saw the light of day.

Home video games: Nintendo was founded on this day in 1889.

 

It's the late 80s and Japan is in the midst of an economic and technological bubble. Like so many kids, Makoto (litt. “truth”) and his friends are obsessed with their game console. In anticipation of the release of the fourth instalment of their favourite game, rumours start doing the rounds. Some cartridges are cursed with the “No Life King”, meaning players who cannot complete the game, will die. The curse appears to spill over into the boys' real world. What if when you die in the game, you really really die…?

The Northern Hemisphere welcomes the autumn equinox

“Those flowers, take them away; they’re only funeral decorations. This is The Fall and this is a drudge nation. Your decadent sins will wreak discipline. You puritan, you shook me. I wash every day.”

– The Fall, New Puritan (1979), via

A fictional day in the life of choreographer Michael Clark, company, and friends in preparation of the dance piece New Puritans.

Dancing, or Patrick Swayze who passed away on this date in 2009.

“I caused dreams which caused death … this is my crime.”

– Dennis Nilsen

Dennis Nilsen was a lonesome, closeted gay man in Thatcher's London, whose desperation lead to multiple horrific killings. He'd ritually bathe and dress the bodies, and held on to them for company. Radical dance troupe DV8's interpretation of Nilsen's transgressions explores the horror of the act in suffocating beauty.

“What will happen when your machines become intelligent? When they become autonomous? When they have private thoughts? You humans look down on your machines because they're man-made. They're a product of your skills and labour. They weren't even domesticated like animals were. You see them simply as extensions of yourself, of your own will. I can't accept that. I can't accept subhuman status simply because I'm a machine based on silicon rather than carbon, electronics rather than biology. If I sound fanatical, it's because I've been trapped in a time warp. In a world where the full potential of machines hasn't been guessed at. A world where I have to wear a human disguise to be accepted? I came here too late. It will all end before the computers that already control the fate of the world have reached the point where they wanted to survive.”

– Friendship