If, for some lovers, the future starts slow (or so The kills would have it), it’s already way beyond for the doomed and divided duo (she, an archeologist, he, an explorer) of Paul bush’s brilliant speculative fiction “report” from the urban frontier of a future city. The allure of the vertical sprawl, that which can “soon be built faster than a man can travel,” is offered as temptation, perceived as threat and articulated as gospel. Babeldom is a scavenger hunt, both thematically and formally, as it presents the most terrifically bizarre found images of daily life from the present, culled from Bush’s handheld digital adventures in cities (his native London, Osaka, Barcelona, Berlin, Dubai, Shanghai) and clips from the present, whose center just may not hold. These include architectural dystopias, mapping technologies, gaming platforms and surveillance camera tapes, to name just a few, all of which serve to posit the city as its own ghost in the machine. bush is a most compelling collagist, and he succeeds in his attempt to forge a type of borgesian cinema of the future-present. his tower of images speak of truth and fantasy to yield an incredibly alien and beautiful work of the here and now. — Madeleine Molyneaux