“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” opens William Gibson’s Neuromancer, set in Chiba, Japan (while generally accepted as a reference to the novelist’s home in Vancouver). A similar pall intermittently lingered over the northern Portuguese city of Porto during the city’s Porto/Post/Doc festival. The pallid grey and smoke were reminders of the devastating fires that have engulfed northern regions of the country since the summer, claiming many lives. The cinematic image of smokey cobblestone streets — with a knowledge of the real, if unseen forces behind them — provided a somber and […]