Initially a vital component of experimental black film culture, the Black Audio Film Collective quickly arrived at retrospective respectability. Josephine Berry Slater enters the memory space of their recent show at FACT and retrieves the radical yet 'still born' possibilities from its multi-media memorial

Let them bear witness to the process by which the living transform the dead into partners in struggle, Handsworth Songs, BAFC

No other group has had such a catalysing influence on the new political forms and tactics espoused by the anti-globalisation movement, yet there has been too little critical analysis of the Zapatistas' politics and the relationship of western activists to their guerilla icons. Melancholic Troglodytes review Mihalis Mentinis' book Zapatistas: The Chiapas Revolt and What It Means for Radical Politics and discovers some ugly nationalist features behind the mask

At industry pop’s polar opposite, improvisers are involved in a musical praxis which resists formulated goals, ready-made forms and final outcomes. Here, Mattin extrapolates the politics from the tactics of improvisation

For a while now, old, long outdated video game consoles of the 80s such as the Atari 2600 or the Vectrex have been enjoying something of a renaissance. They've found their way into the canon of good taste; a multitude of records and T-shirts are testimony to that.

Revolution@ISEA98

Universal Plastic Surgery: The Right of Man?

II The revolution shall not be criticised?
In response to ISEA98 Micz Flor, organiser of Revolting temporary media laboratory, asks "why now, why revolution?" Is the current popularity of the term and its associated icons anything more than Middle Youth talking to itself in the latest of a long line of fashionable lingos?

IV Net.Politics Q&A

Shopping and Financing

Until quite recently, you didn't need to be a hardline feminist to testify to the mind-numbing boredom associated with the weekly supermarket shop. Now, however, things are changing: backed up by a plethora of TV shows and numerous restaurant spin-off recipe books dedicated to ever more exotic ingredients, food has become sexy. As a consequence, our shopping lists have become more adventurous and the supermarkets are proving quick to take advantage of our latest obsession.

Since the late 80s, Lettre International, the 'European Magazine for Culture', has represented a network of independent magazines from a variety of cities, including Madrid, Rome, Bucharest and Budapest - all of which work on a file sharing basis.

God games are a genre of video games which position the player as an invisible controller/manager/all-seeing-being of a simulated real-time world. From the early days of pixellated three-quarter view landscapes with tiny bit-mapped creatures running around, to today's slick, beautifully rendered, near-photographic 3D panoramas with convincing creatures and stunning special effects, the task remains the same: to nurture, coerce and assist the inhabitants or bully, maim and generally subject your populace to a lighter shade of Armageddon.

Simon Worthington sings the highlights,Totally Out Of Tune

The Internet is having interesting effects on the laws of supply and demand, says moonlighting grave-spotter Josephine Berry

For all those who walk London's streets wondering whether brekky has been spiked; for all those who think the millenniumdome is really an enormous hallucinogen; for all those who think the mayoral candidates are from Mars, Matthew Fuller has a surprise. If you see scary surrealism in today's London, wait for the magic realism of tomorrow.

Textual time travel courtesy of Mute contributors' heroes The Human League, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, John Milton, Félix Guattari, Toni Negri, Jacques Attali, Martin Heidegger, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Michael Bakunin, John Jesurun, Confucius, John Cage, Martin Heidegger, Antonin Artaud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nikola Tesla, Joe Denver and Gary Chalk, Ibn Al-Haytham, Danilo Kis and Imamu Amiri Baraka.

The British press is increasingly prepared to identify a new American imperialism in the global arena. When it comes to related domestic subjects however, even its liberal left seems incapable of expressing anti-imperialist interpretations. Analysed together with the generalised hysteria over Islam, the outlines of a new racial ideology start to emerge. By Ali Nobil Ahmad