“For the past four years Matmos have been re-enacting experiments into telepathy that were done in the 1960s. They were basic sensory deprivation set-ups in which the experimental subjects were unable to hear or see. The subjects were asked to recognise different shapes being transmitted to them from a table of graphic sigils. In Matmos’s experiments, they tried to transmit the concept of their new album into the minds of their experimental subjects. For this performance, each collaborator recites different transcriptions of the psychic experiments that are played through their headphones.
The performance took place at London’s Auto Italia space 19 May, 2011, organised in collaboration with Upset The Rhythm.”
My research has been running off of the vague idea of ‘edutainment’, that being a mixture of entertainment with education, a kind of sugar coated pill to help people learn more effectively; going by the reasoning that if one enjoys an experience, one will remember it more effectively. This term is used predominantly for television programmes and films, generally documentary works.
It’s been pointed out to me that this category, or genre (or whatever it is) of ‘edutainment’ might fall apart as I pursue my research. For now, it has its most defined usage in industrial communications products; architectural showreels, sexual education films shown in schools, lifestyle magazines built around product placement, and the like.
So, in different words (and possibly leaving the term ‘edutainment’ behind) my interest lies in television shows and films that aim to be intellectually engaging while also entertaining – anything with supposed ‘mass appeal’ that purports to be about reality and attempts to gloss or translate reality/matters of fact, into engaging and entertaining shows. Further than that, they are generally dramatic narrative works that are part of a wider educative remit that is directly or indirectly linked back to 19th century notions of literacy, public life and responsibility. Hopefully the clips I’m going to show next give a general idea about what I’m trying to get at:
The first clip is of Carl Sagan in an episode of his 1980 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, is endearing, funny and open seeming, a more discursive approach to communicating. While the second is of Kenneth Clarke in his 1969 series Civilisation: A Personal View is a fairly austere approach to teaching (though I find it appealing, it is somewhat anachronistic). Both of these shows had quite explicit motivations behind them. Cosmos was concerned not only with science education, but science education as a way to rally against nuclear proliferation, the cold war and ecological disaster. Civilisation was concerned with cultural education as a way of defending civilisation against what Clarke saw as a forgetting of history, a devaluation of Western culture and so a potential return to barbarism. (It was also largely concerned with introducing higher definition, colour TV to Britain, and to a lesser extent, North America). The last two clips are much more recent: the first is an excerpt of Jim Al-Khalili’s Everything & Nothing and the second is the trailer for Brian Cox’s Wonders Of The Universe. In essence, both Al-Khalili and Cox are concerned with updating Sagan’s Cosmos series. Now the screens have become higher definition, each shot processed through the Adobe Creative Suite After Effects and edited in a seamless and confident pace, the tracking shots smoother, the music shimmers in reverberation. In short, the shows have the glossiness and high production values that are currently expected across the board in broadcast.
But despite this wholesale adoption of what you could call the language of Hollywood, these shows are still part of an educative remit. This remit not only goes back to Lord Reith and the birth of the BBC, backed up by government quotas of public service broadcasting which are still in effect here in the UK, they have a history which links them to the birth of the modern school curriculum in the 19th century – a system created to deal with an exploding population, universal suffrage and notions of the moral responsibilities of individual citizens. But rather than communicating their message in the tone of flat, sober, assured authority one would expect from the representative of government and authority (or at least one acting as a representative – such as the cliche of the strict schoolmaster), their message is transmitted in a personable and passionate way by human voices, like yours and mine. These programmes are carried by the passion of their presenters. Whether they are warm and inviting like Sagan, austere and sober like Clark, or excitable and chatty like Cox, these practiced on-screen personas have a crucial role in getting a message across. A central figure provides a single unifying voice for a wide field of knowledge, the persona drives a narrative of culture, history and science clearly and determinedly along, and through their performances they avoid the gaps, bumps and false starts of reality, and the horror above all else for broadcasting: an awkward ‘dead air’. Further than that, there’s an aspect of hightened and acute emotion to a lot of these shows. Brian Cox perched on top of a mountain has obviously Romantic influences, even Lord Clark’s well postured delivery has a well-paced, stoic drama to it (well, I think so, at least).
It’s challenging to get across the grandness of a cathedral on a small, standard definition screen, let alone the whole sweep of European history. Science television has a hard task too, especially when it comes to the goal of picturing everything. Roger Silverstone has noted that it’s possible that the tools of conventional popular media might not be up to the challenge, that the discourses and narratives of science and those of everyday life do not, he says, meet eye to eye. In a way this is accurate – that some things cannot be told as a conventional story. But it is an impractical idea. These subjects will be told in different ways, no matter. And anyways, when has everyday life met ‘eye to eye’ with anything on television, let alone our expectations or desires? For shows like these, where the ambition is to image unimaginably complex systems and movements, there is an aspect of reaching too far or an excess of ambition. Here I think that it ‘s useful to look at the vein of melodrama which runs through these programmes, especially in more current series like Wonders Of The Universe. In their construction, these shows have a heightened drama, and – to paraphrase Peter Brooks speaking about the modern novel – an excess bound up with their effort to signify. They take the flat realism of science and natural history and inject acutely focused melodramatic passions into them, mixing the real world with a super real moving emotion.
Here, I’d like to jump across genre borders and look at how TV and film can look at another public institution and field of knowledge. Namely law, and law enforcement.
I think that cop shows, or police procedurals and courtroom dramas are similar to natural history programmes not only in that they share the highly infectuous language of ‘Hollywood’, but also that they come out of, at their core, a concern with the civic and wider public life. Of course, these cop shows are distinct in that they came out of a specific American context (distinct from British detective stories). But they both address an audience in the same way: they ask for us to participate along with them: to discover the universe, to discover the guilty. They ask an audience to believe the same things, whether it’s about justice or physical laws.
Apart from tracing a history of middle class fears, what’s interesting about police procedural drama is what’s been called the CSI effect: there are reports that some jurors have seemingly unreasonable expectations of forensic science. Or the Law & Order effect in which people have an almost fantastical idea about what happens in a court room, that it is a stage for melodramatic outbursts and admissions… In Law & Order each show follows a crime from its committing (or commission) through to conviction. A favourite game I discovered with fellow Law & Order aficianados was during the courtroom segments you try and predict what the judge will say: for example, ‘Objection your honour!’, and then the judge’s response: ‘over ruled’ or ‘sustained’! In essence TV like this creates a fantasy of crime and law, if not public service funding and human relationships… Or maybe put another way, it’s a kind of public space to play along to. It’s a space that is never resolved.
The next clip I think is something of a combination of all of the above. It’s the introduction to an episode called ‘You Have Used Me As A Fish Long Enough’ from Adam Curtis’s 1995 documentary essay series The Living Dead – a series that looked at how science and history have been used by politicians and bureaucrats.
I think his work contains all of the aspects which I’ve sketched out above. It’s concerned with transmitting a story of history, science and politics in a dramatic and engaging way. It’s subject matter is ambitious, but using staple cinematic devices; soundtrack, montage. It’s also very funny throughout, as if history is both a form of violent mind control and a type of silly dance. But a core difference which makes his shows unique on screen is the level of critique built into his narratives of bad ideas and their catastrophic results. The level of gloss in the work reflects upon itself; Curtis provides an authoritative voice that one can be seduced by, but also the niggling feeling that the gloss is too neat, that one needs to find out more. In short, he provides good arguments.
Alongside being a film maker, Curtis is also a journalist and one can tell from the authoritative language that he uses throughout… There’s never a ‘seems to be’ or ‘maybe’ unless it’s meant sarcastically. His language presents his research as thorough, well thought out and authoritative. This type of writing (or speaking) is both about authority and about clarity. Also, it’s important to note that Curtis never appears in his own films, rather his insistent (and almost correcting) voice is the backbone connecting together his collage.
I think there’s an interesting effect that happens when this authoritative, journalistic approach that attempts to present facts clearly and concisely is put to the soundtrack of John Carpenter’s Night Of The Living Dead or a track off of Brian Eno’s Another Green World. It emotionalises the content. Something that was spoken in a calm, neutral, objective, trustworthy register is backed up by a chorus. It becomes very moving, but it’s not always that clear where it’s moving towards, or why we’re being asked (or told) to feel a certain way about what’s being said and seen.
But it’s not the movement of journalism into drama and the realm of cinema which is how I understand this, or what makes it interesting. Nor is the movement of drama towards fact or reportage. I think it’s more interesting to look at it from the point of view that fact and fiction have always had a fruitful relationship. That they combine or conspire together and make up a strange reality that involves quite a lot of people. This is what interests me here, the way that TV and popular media offers a really powerful type of public realm, but maybe one that’s always about to fall apart into fantasy… or really that this virtual public space is dependent on stories and non-facts for its existence. It’s a very pervasive realm but almost completely inconsistent and faulty. Something that is constantly being renegotiated, where the spaces of this reality/realities is made up of fragments of stories that are both factual and fictional, that these elements of different types of truth or fact are shared by all the stories.
The ending sequence from episode 11 of Jacob Bronowski’s excellent 1973 series, The Ascent Of Man. It was commissioned for the then new BBC Channel 2 by David Attenborough as a scientific counterpoint to 1969′s Civilisation
“[Paul] Scheerbart’s Das Graue Tuch Und Zehn Prozent Weiß: Eine Damenroman (The Gray Cloth And Ten Percent White: A Ladies’ Novel) (1914) [...] is the story of a “glass architect” [Edgar Krug] and his new wife, Clara [Weber], who travel the world in a dirigible or “airship.” At the beginning of the book, Clara signs perhaps the oddest prenuptial agreement ever proposed: she promises to wear only gray clothing with a maximum of ten percent white detailing, in order not to detract from the color schemes in her husband’s creations. In a typical Scheerbartian move, the fascistic nature of her husband’s demand is undermined and then left ambiguous: halfway through the story the contract falls apart but the marriage itself survives. It is unclear where Scheerbart stands on this; here again he creates a picture of progress toward a better world, an attempt that he proposes is both necessary and impossible.”
Josiah McElheny, The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart’s The Light Club Of Batavia, (Chicago and London, The University Of Chicago Press, 2010) pp 5–6
Bruno Taut, The Spheres! The Circles! The Wheels! (from Alpine Architektur, 1919)
“He kissed his wife politely on the hand.
A thunderstorm started up, and they returned to the heated cabin.
The sea roared violently.
Herr Edgar commanded the airship to fly higher.
And at an altitude of one thousand five hundred meters, the air was very still.” (pg 87)
I’ve written an article on artist Matt Stokes for the new October 2010 issue of The Wire… It follows his (mostly film) work from the early 00s through to his forthcoming installation at Stratford Underground Station, entitled The Stratford Gaff: A Serio-Comick-Bombastick-Operatick Interlude.
I also spent a week travelling around southern Hungary with the folks from UH Festival. It was a study tour organised by UH fest where a group of artists (who’ll be taking part in the festival in October) gave workshops in percussion and circuit bending in small communities, with mostly Gypsy/Roma populations:
Sound artist Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the Turner Prize this year . It reminded me that I shot some footage of an installation of hers at the ICA back in 2008.
The Internationale was shown for two days at the ICA in central London off The Mall, a wide boulevard leading from Trafalgar Square up to Buckingham Palace (monarchs use The Mall to impress during state visits and other ceremonies). To experience the piece, a small group of visitors were led to the rear of the ICA and up a ladder onto the bare roof terrace. A single loudspeaker attached to the façade of the grand building broadcast Philipsz’s voice softly warbling its way through the anthem of international socialism, blending with the background drone of city traffic. Philipsz’s work takes the form of a series of cover versions; studies in how particular songs can mutate, displacing them from their own time, projecting them via a different voice (usually her own), and mixing them into different spaces (usually public, transient ones). Filter, one of her better known works, has the artist singing pop songs by Radiohead, The Velvet Underground, The Vaselines and The Rolling Stones through the public address system at a supermarket in East London. An earlier version took place in Belfast’s main bus station, both installations eliciting a wide range of responses, from interested to irritated.
Philipsz has presented several versions of The Internationale. The first was in a pedestrian underpass in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1999. Another took place in 2000 at Berlin’s Friedrichstraße Station, a notorious border crossing between East and West Germany during the Cold War. Both of those installations, situated in the former Eastern Bloc, would seem to turn the song into an elegy for a time when international socialism was a reality. It’s less certain what’s happening in this London version though. Situated in the heart of the old British Empire and current capital of finance, the displaced Internationale has either lost an authoritative voice or is just being drowned out by the city’s noise.
The Internationale was made as part of Out Of Bounds, a short series of artists interventions in the private spaces of arts institutions around central London.
