Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
The world has lost some 11 per cent of its tree cover since 2000, mainly due to agricultural expansion and wildfires. This shrinking is especially alarming given forests’ vital role in removing carbon from the atmosphere, which helps to curb climate change, and in maintaining biodiversity, which can help to prevent future pandemics. In Deforest, Grayson Cooke, an artist and associate professor of media at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, explores deforestation in a beautiful yet distressing work of audiovisual art. A series of monochromatic photographs of an old-growth rainforest in subtropical Queensland are dissolved in a corrosive sulphuric acid bath, serving as a visual metaphor for our destruction of nature. As these images are erased, sounds from the forest’s animal life mingle with a somber piano score, creating a powerful reflection on how humanity burns the past to fuel the present at its own peril.
Director: Grayson Cooke
video
Film and visual culture
‘Bags here are rarely innocent’ – how filmmakers work around censorship in Iran
8 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
8 minutes
video
Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes
video
Anthropology
Why are witchcraft accusations so common across human societies?
4 minutes
video
Wellbeing
Born in China, Zee seeks a gender-affirming life in the American Midwest
11 minutes
video
Chemistry
Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?
12 minutes
video
Rituals and celebrations
A whale hunt is an act of prayer for an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle
8 minutes
video
Cosmology
Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse
11 minutes
video
Astronomy
The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t
34 minutes