In a self-directed analytical session, Anna Plowden writes about all that is making us increasingly susceptible to the charm of dolls of all kinds, from puppets to humans as dolls. Being controlled; wanting control; and surrendering ourselves with tenderness. The more dolls circulate within contemporary creative practices, the more desperate our need proves to be to exorcise the powerlessness that grips us, almost to the point of making room for a sick desire to be dollified.

In South East London, you can find an algorave or two most months, in pubs, churches, clubs and universities. When there’s no algorave on, you can almost certainly find a coding club, game jam, hackathon or permacomputing meetup. More and more of these events are popping up between New Cross, Peckham and Camberwell, with some artists approaching mainstream appeal and developing closer ties with London’s academic world. Here, a range of emerging computational arts courses combine coding with the arts, creating a heavy crossover with the London algorave scene.

Nollywood was not born in a studio system, but in the streets, markets and informal networks of Nigerian cities. As cinemas disappeared during the country’s economic crisis, filmmakers and distributors turned cheap video cassettes into a new cultural infrastructure, with places like Surulere, Idumota, Alaba and Onitsha becoming engines of production and circulation. Wale Oloworekende looks at Nollywood through the places that made it possible, tracing how a deeply local ecosystem transformed everyday Nigerian stories into a shared African language and, eventually, one of the continent’s most powerful cultural exports.