If an annual award for the ‘hottest digital image format online’ existed, this year’s winner would be the Graphics Interchange Format or gif: an eight-bit, 256-colour bitmap picture file that can composite a series of stills into an infinitely loopable, silent moving image.

This article is for frieze subscribers only. To access this article, the entire archive, and receive 8 issues of frieze a year, take a subscription from only £29. Subscription options.

In the work Once upon a Time (2004) McQueen presents a slide show of 116 of these images installed to make them seem to float in space: about two-thirds of the way to the back of a very dark room a large screen is suspended from the ceiling, but without touching the floor. The projector is behind the screen and is set to show each slide for around half a minute before dissolving it into the next. The cycle of images lasts 70 minutes and the installation includes sound.

The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools

The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’.1 During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external

Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs.