Who someone is taken to be, and who gets a say.
Great Expectations argues that class shame is internalised before it is acted upon—and that true worth is measured in loyalty, not lineage. The brief isolates Joe’s moral centrality, Jaggers’s ritualised power, and Magwitch’s redemptive love. It tells you which chapters reveal Dickens’s design and which dilute it.
Dick's 1968 novel sets up the century's central question about AI and consciousness. The brief covers Deckard's hunt for androids, the problem of empathy, and why the book never settles the question it asks.
Kafka's 1915 novella in seventy pages of exact prose. A man becomes an insect overnight. The story is not about the transformation; it is about what comes after, and what it reveals about work, family, and obligation.
Born This Way is Lady Gaga’s second studio album, released on May 23, 2011. It explores electronic rock and techno-pop. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 1.1 million first-week US sales. Its title track sold over one million copies on iTunes in five days.
Germfree Adolescents is X-Ray Spex’s 1978 debut album. All twelve tracks were written by Poly Styrene. Five had previously appeared on singles’ A-sides or B-sides. The core band was Poly Styrene (vocals), Jak Airport (guitar), Paul Dean (bass), Rudi Thomson (saxophone), and B.P. Hurding (drums). Rudi Thomson played saxophone on the album.
How Will the Wolf Survive? is Los Lobos’s major label debut (October 1984), composed informally at Louie Pérez’s brother-in-law’s home, drawing lyrical inspiration from a National Geographic article about survival and identity; musically, it fuses Mexican traditions with R&B, country, and blues, and centres immigrant experience in songs like 'A Matter of Time' and 'Will the Wolf Survive?'.
A record built around voice and string arrangement — sparse, deliberate, unadorned. No filler. No myth. Just what was played, who played it, and what the material says it means.
A Seat at the Table is Solange’s third studio album. Writing began in 2008. Recording spanned 2013 to June 2016 across Long Island, New Orleans, New Iberia and Los Angeles. It was released 30 September 2016. Its sound comes from hour-long improvised tracks built around bass and synth lines, later structured in Louisiana and finished in LA with Raphael Saadiq and Troy Johnson. 'Cranes in the Sky' originated from a 2008 Saadiq instrumental — drums, strings and bass only. Master P narrated interludes drawn from real conversations. Themes include identity, empowerment, grief, healing, rage and self-care. All lyrics were paired with images in a digital art book.
ANTI is Rihanna’s eighth studio album, released exclusively on Tidal on January 28, 2016, after her departure from Def Jam to Roc Nation. It is eclectic by design, blending pop, dancehall, psychedelic soul, lo-fi beats, soul, and trap — shaped by creative struggles and emotional turmoil — and it became her second number-one album on the Billboard 200.
Arular is a debut shaped by constraint: one machine, one room, one voice. Its power lies in what it excludes — space, polish, convention — not what it adds.
A first-person document of Sheffield nightlife, recorded at Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire in January 2006 with Jim Abbiss producing. Every track uses observational, first-person narrative. Four tracks examine nightclub behaviour. Three draw from real Sheffield locations and figures: bouncers, taxi queues, and sex workers near the band’s Neepsend practice space. Genre blend includes indie rock, garage rock, post-punk revival, punk rock, alternative rock, and post-Britpop. Title quotes Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and reflects loss of control over public perception.
Robert Altman’s 1977 film 3 Women follows the uncanny merging of identities among a timid young woman, her garrulous roommate and a silent, pregnant artist in a sun-scorched California town. Built from a dream and shot with deliberate, unhurried precision, it uses repetition, reflection and improvisation to explore how selves are borrowed, performed and abandoned.
After Life (1998) is Hirokazu Koreeda’s gently speculative film set in a way station between life and death, where the newly deceased must choose one memory to carry into eternity. Shot on grainy 16 mm and 8 mm film, it blends scripted scenes with real interviews, treating memory not as fixed truth but as subjective, evolving reconstruction. With understated performances and deliberate pacing, it explores how identity forms through fragments — a dress, a breeze, a letter — and how meaning accrues in quiet, relational moments rather than grand events.
Being John Malkovich (1999) is a surrealist comedy-drama written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. A down-on-his-luck puppeteer discovers a portal into actor John Malkovich’s mind, sparking a chain of ethical and existential complications among his wife, co-worker, and employer. With precise writing, restrained performances, and a singular conceptual rigour, it explores identity, desire, and control without resorting to explanation or sentiment.
Marlon Riggs’s final film is a sprawling, urgent essay on Black identity in America, built from hundreds of unmediated testimonies, performances by Bill T. Jones and Essex Hemphill, and commentary from Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Cornel West. Framed by Riggs’s own illness and unfinished work, it treats Blackness not as a fixed category but as a contested, embodied, intersectional practice—resisting homogenisation, patriarchy, homophobia, and colourism while insisting on solidarity without uniformity.
Wayne Wang’s 1982 debut is a black-and-white arthouse comedy-drama structured as a search for a missing Chinatown taxi broker. As two men interview locals, each offers a contradictory portrait of him — revealing not Chan, but the fractured, polyglot reality of Chinese American life. Shot on location with non-professionals, it privileges ambiguity over exposition, sound over subtitle, and absence over answer.
Close-Up (1990) is Abbas Kiarostami’s reconstruction of a real 1980s Tehran fraud case: Hossein Sabzian, a print-shop worker, posed as filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to gain entry into a family’s home, promising them roles in a film. With full participation from Sabzian, the Ahankhah family, the journalist who exposed him, the judge, and Makhmalbaf himself, Kiarostami films their trial and re-enactments of key events — all playing themselves. The film treats identity, cinema, and justice not as abstractions but as lived, contingent acts of attention and consent.
David Cronenberg’s 1988 film follows identical twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle as their shared professional and personal life fractures under drug dependency, ethical collapse, and blurred identity. Jeremy Irons plays both roles with uncanny precision, supported by Peter Suschitzky’s austere cinematography and Howard Shore’s unnerving score. Based loosely on the Marcus twins and adapted from Bari Wood’s novel, it is a tightly controlled psychological drama that prioritises behavioural realism over exposition, clinical space over emotional catharsis, and structural inevitability over narrative surprise.
A former Tamil Tiger soldier assumes a dead man’s identity to claim asylum in France, posing as husband and father to two strangers. As caretaker of a troubled Paris banlieue, he finds himself drawn back into combat — not on a battlefield, but in stairwells and flats. Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or winner treats migration as embodied habit, not political argument.
Geronimo, a Bedonkohe Apache medicine man rather than a hereditary chief, led repeated breakouts from American reservations over decades before surrendering to General Nelson Miles in 1886, then spent the rest of his life as a prisoner of war. His own dictated 1905 autobiography, delivered under his tight personal control, directly contradicts the American military's official account of an unconditional surrender. Even as a prisoner, he became a public celebrity exhibited at expositions and parades, and his name later entered American military and popular culture, most controversially as the code name for the 2011 operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
Prey (2017) is a first-person immersive sim set aboard the Talos I space station. You play as Morgan Yu, a scientist surviving a Typhon outbreak. You begin with a wrench and gradually unlock weapons, Neuromod abilities, and environmental tools. Talos I opens in stages—from linear missions to free exploration—and supports multiple solutions via systemic interactions: oil spills, turrets, explosive canisters, and the Gloo Cannon. It draws inspiration from System Shock and Arx Fatalis. It shares only its name with Human Head Studios’ earlier Prey series. It was developed by Arkane Austin under Raphaël Colantonio’s leadership.
AI: The Somnium Files is a branching adventure game developed by Spike Chunsoft in 2019. It alternates between first-person investigation and timed third-person dream exploration ('Somnium'). Players use an AI assistant named Aiba to analyse scenes and augment vision. Progress requires completing multiple routes via a flowchart, with each route withholding key narrative information until all are finished.
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is a first-person action-adventure game developed by Arkane Studios in Lyon. It is a standalone expansion concluding the Kaldwin-era arc of the Dishonored series. Players assume the role of Billie Lurk and use conventional weapons, gadgets—including a wrist-mounted crossbow, land mines, grenades, and a new hook mine—and fully unlocked supernatural abilities such as Displace and Semblance. Energy for powers regenerates automatically, eliminating consumables. The Chaos system is removed, and optional Contracts serve as side missions.
The Epiphone Sheraton is a thinline semi-hollow body electric guitar introduced in 1958 under Gibson’s ownership but exclusively manufactured by Epiphone. It was reworked from Epiphone’s Century archtop and shares its body design with Gibson’s ES-series. Key spec changes include the 1958 twin-pickup configuration, 1961 switch to mini-humbuckers, and 1970 shift to full-sized humbuckers and Japanese production.
