UP CLOSE ON THE IPAD

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 25th 2012

If you download the new iPad edition of our May/June issue, and flick through Tim Flach's remarkable photo essay of animals, you can enjoy a feature that isn't available to readers of the magazine. Switch between landscape and portrait modes, and you'll see some of Flach's portraits—of the great grey owl, orangutan, capuchin monkey, giant panda, gorilla and others—in even greater detail. The iPad edition gives you a choice of perspective. 

Other extras that aren't in the magazine include "Joyful Reunion", a track from the new album "Crown and Treaty" by Sweet Billy Pilgrim, a little-known band from Buckinghamshire. Intelligent Life's editor, Tim de Lisle, who moonlights as a rock critic, says the band could well win this year's Mercury music prize for its new set of art-folk songs that are "subtle, intricate and deliciously soulful".

There's also a harrowing clip from David McVicar's production of "Salome" at Covent Garden, which returns to the Royal Opera on May 31st. McVicar sets his version in Nazi Germany, and our blood-soaked clip shows the moment Salome is confronted with the head of John the Baptist. Another highly atmospheric clip, this time of young men in Bihar, India, comes from "Copper: Acid and Dust", a short film by Mike Paterson from his series "94 Elements", which examines how the elements familiar from the periodic table are used in real life. In Bihar, the men submerge circuit boards in acid baths to reclaim the valuable copper, and risk clouds of toxic fumes as a result.

An exhibition of late Raphael paintings opens in Madrid in the summer and then Paris in the autumn. Our preview of the exhibition carries a short slideshow of Raphael's paintings. Five hundred years separate the serene mood of some of his portraits from our clip of the high-tech swashbuckling excitement of the new game Mass Effect 3, where Commander Shepard takes on a race of alien monsters intent on wiping out all organic life.

If you have any questions about the iPad edition, please go to FAQs. If you have any comments on the iPad edition, do let us know. Thanks to Stephen Kelly for nice comment at the App Store: "By far the best executed and designed app on the iPad."  

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life