Art and wine have been entwined for centuries – natural creative bedfellows whose mutual consumption, some might say, enhances the experience of both. Curt Dunham and Peggy Fiandaca live and breathe both art forms, manifested in their Scottsdale wine gallery, where visual art blends seamlessly with the oenological art produced by their vineyard and winery in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona.
June’s E3 video and computer gaming trade show had gaming die-hards salivating over the upcoming releases of Fallout 4 and Horizon: Zero, in which robot animals are the dominant species. Shortly after, comedy sci-fi flick Pixels hit theaters to remind gamers where it all began – with centipedes, laser cannons and four unfriendly ghosts chasing a giant yellow beast.
Robots have rocked and socked their way back onto the sci-fi scene this year, thanks to box office blockbusters like Disney’s Big Hero 6, Chappie and Ex Machina—the latter of which was a creepy sneak peek at the destructive potential of artificial intelligence.
Day laborers reenact the Guatemalan Civil War in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Los Angeles in artist Yoshua Okón's acclaimed 2011 video Octopus. The laborers are also ex-guerillas and veterans of that war. The 18-minute film is, as Los Angeles Times arts critic Leah Ollman noted when Octopus was showing at L.A.'s Hammer Museum, “a heavy conceptual load,” but Mexico-born Okón is almost an auteur of agitating reenactments. His sequel to Octopus revisits another politically charged event, and uses participants of that event as the reenactors.
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