When forty-six year old Hosu Mausi first saw the map of Makoko, Lagos in Nigeria, he was full of excitement. Makoko had not been mapped so extensively before, and now the position of the Oluwatosin Mosque was marked at its exact place, clear on his daughter’s smartphone. The terminal where Mausi disembarked from his fishing […]

Hannah Uguru looks to understand the phenomenon of online fixations on, and nostalgias for, pasts never experienced in the current cycle of social media. Pointing to resurgent Y2K fashion trends, Tumblr nostalgia profiles, and more concerning aspects like radicalisation via right-wing ideas of a ‘forgotten past’. In an interview with author John Koenig, writer of […]

“Dad I wanna go, Dad I wanna go, Dad I wanna go.” Is part of the audio chorus that accompanies my experience of Squidsoup’s ‘Beyond Submergence’ at Propyard in Bristol. Visiting the “immersive exhibition of light and sound”, a retrospective of works by the established installation art collective from the past few years, at 10am […]

A set of prompts to think about how video games have been disposable, are not separate from infrastructures involved in the destruction of ecosystems, are part of our futures and the potentials in futures and economies of loss. To be played, to be thought upon, to be enacted and to be altered. These were created […]

Effendi Buhing remembers seeing his home, Kinipan, rendered on a map for the first time. Ink black lines on paper marked sacred groves, halted at streams, and curved around ancestral hunting grounds. Neighbours and kin lived in the same forest, but on the map, some were divided into villages, others by revenue blocks. The 54-year […]

Play Élan Vitale A version with reduced animations is available here “In this situation, you’ve got yourself into a place where you shouldn’t be.” Uma Breakdown’s atmospheric, wry, gothic science-fiction text adventure Élan Vitale is the result of their residency with Container Magazine. A broken into flat. A pile of old machinery and energy drinks. […]

‘Maybe that’s the first experience of the Internet: that moment it stops being “the Internet” and just becomes another thing/part of living.’ Hamishi Farah, in Towards a New Digital Landscape I was 14 years old when the image of Sandra Bland in police custody began to circulate on Twitter back in 2015. She later died […]

“Big companies use technology to make money off us, macho computer scientists make it feel exclusive and untouchable, and governments use it to silence and control us. Historically, new technology has always been a source of fear. It’s time we turn the tables around and use these tools to empower ourselves instead. It’s our turn […]

I consider myself as being born and raised by the internet. Born and raised by hidden IRC chatrooms. By message boards about special interests. By writing to friends late into the night about everything from favorite TV shows to our innermost feelings. This formed my understanding of community, quite literally — writing with those strangers […]

Play Élan Vitale A version with reduced animations is available here “In this situation, you’ve got yourself into a place where you shouldn’t be.” Uma Breakdown’s atmospheric, wry, gothic science-fiction text adventure Élan Vitale is the result of their residency with Container Magazine. A broken into flat. A pile of old machinery and energy drinks. […]

In 1940 a cave at Lascaux, in South-West France, was discovered containing almost two thousand paintings and etchings from around twenty-thousand years in the past. A majestic and expansive vault of prehistoric art, Lascaux is one of the oldest examples we have of human creative ancestry. Exhibiting at Bristol Museum in 2023, The Cave Art […]

In collaboration with Control Shift, Container is excited to present this discussion between Russel Hlongwane and Mark Mushiva covering broad topics spanning creative origins in hip-hop, the relevance of cyber punk to Africa, and the conditions and theories of making futurisms from within the continent. The podcast forms part of Russel’s aims to convene a […]

You think you’ve private lives Think nothing of the kind There is no true escape I’m watching all the time Electric Eye, Judas Priest, 1982 Judas Priest’s Electric Eye is a four decade old example of a thread ever-present in art with tech in mind — surveillance technology and the implications that it has for […]

From pre-internet to the present day, Container speaks to artists and technologists based in Bristol who have been experimenting with technology in interesting ways from the beginning. Our guests — Ralph Hoyte, Constance Fleuriot, Tarim and Fanny Eaton-Hall — joined host Jon Dovey for a wide-ranging conversation about the past, present and future of art […]

In 2020, Container published a long read on the pandemic’s effect on live performance. We spoke to people involved in theatre, music, and across cultural events about the breakneck evolution of live events, the pace at which new models were tried and adopted and the innovations that emerged under pressure. Two years on, we’re going […]