Paradise Project 1: Watching the future happen

In our 30 minute spoken word stand-up comedy astrophysics lecture 600 People (I'm explaining what it is because for some reason* it doesn't have its own webpage yet), I talk about how astrophysicist Dr. Simon Goodwin (99.5%) convinced me that there are no other extraterrestrial civilisations in our galaxy. I won't explain how he does that as we're doing more with the show next year, but one of details of his explanation (back in 2006) was:

In 100 years, human beings will have the technology to launch a spacecraft that will be able to intercept an asteroid, or meteorite, land on it, drill into it, mine it for ore, and fuel, build a replica of itself, and then take off again.

So this week, I had the sensation of that future starting to arrive, as we were able to follow the landing of Philae on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on our laptops and phones. The first step towards the future that Simon described to me in his office 7 years ago.



This week we've been back in the making process for The Paradise Project, our new collaboration with our good friends mala voadora. We're often asked about our making process, and our regular answer is that the making process for every project is different. And again that has been proved true. This process has been expansive and exploratory, and has been marked by the fact that each week (or couple of days) of working on it, has been a slightly different collection of members of both companies - in Warwick, Lisbon, Beirut, and Sheffield. This week has been Rachael and I from Third Angel, and Jorge Andrade and David Cabencina (the team will double next week).

This smaller group of us has allowed us to focus in on the structure and world of the show. The very nature of the theme mean we have many strands of exploration open at the moment, and we're at the point where we're picking out which strands we want to weave together. Seeking a simple structure that can exist within the field of research we've been doing.



One of the themes of the show is, well, we're wary of saying time-travel, but more about cause and effect of actions through time, and the passing of knowledge forwards through time, and what would happen if some of that knowledge slipped back through time.

The wariness of saying "time-travel" ties in with one of this weeks conversations about whether all fiction set in the future automatically becomes Sci-Fi* or at the very least speculative fiction, by virtue of it containing technology that we don't have yet.

As ever, we're simultaneously making several possible versions of the show (I'd say 3 different structures) in play. They're not entirely disconnected from each other, they overlap, but they have different focusses, and different audience relationships. There are texts that could be in any version of the show, some that contain an idea that would add to any version, and a couple that only exist in - or for - one particular version.

Each morning, it seems, one of us comes in feeling we have cracked it, with a proposal to put to the team. Project solved. Then slowly, under the scrutiny of our colleagues, we come to realise that there are now new problems with this structure, new questions demanding answers. Or things that seemed so clear at home, or in the cafe, that now seem a bit wooly...

Some of these thematic/formal discussions are now getting reframed as potential material for the show.



A strange bit of time-travel is that we're back working at The Workstation in Sheffield, for the first time in a long time. The Workstation hosted our first ever show, Testcard, and we made and showed several other pieces there (The Killing Show and Shallow Water to name two), so it's been really nice to be back. At some point on Monday we realised that the room we were working in - Conference Room 5 - used to be the home of the production offices for the northern media school, where I did my MA, and where, arguably, Third Angel was born. And when we oriented ourselves, we realised that the corner we had gravitated to work in was the corner where I had my production desk for both Testcard and With The Light On, our first two pieces of work, back in 1995/6.



*I haven't done one yet.
**I'm also vaguely aware from my teenage years hanging out at Andromeda bookshop in Brum, that there is, for the purists, a difference between Sci-Fi and SF; and another thing that Simon talked to me about was the range of soft Sci-Fi and hard Sci-Fi, but that's a discussion for another time...

What I Heard About The World: Video Trailer

A video trailer by Lauren Stanley
What I Heard About the World by Third Angel & mala voadora
On tour now, full tour dates here.

TEDxYork Inspiration Exchange talks

Here are videos of the two presentations I gave at TEDxYork earlier this month, as detailed previously. These are the two six(-ish)-minute talks that bookended the Inspiration Exchange I ran during the day.

Part One:



Part Two:



Thanks to Marcus Romer and the Pilot Theatre team for taking such care in getting them up online. The whole day was full of inspirational speakers, and I can really recommend checking all the talks out on the TEDxYork YouTube playlist.

Inspiration Exchange: Phoneboxes

I was invited by Marcus Romer to present at TEDxYork last week. It was a great and inspiring day, and I was pleased to get a chance to talk about the Phoneboxes, as part of an Inspiration Exchange.

First off, here's a [slightly longer] version of what I said about the phoneboxes.

---

I'm inspired by telephone boxes. Now I know that 'inspired' might seem like a strong word when it comes to something as everyday as phoneboxes, but they intrigue me. They make me feel, well, a bit excited, when I come across one.

And it started here.

 

          01369 870 212

This is Glen Striven in Scotland, on the western shore of Loch Striven. (No doubt you've recognised 01369 as an Argyll and Bute area code.) It's actually the end of the public road - the gates, and some others you can't see, are to private estates. When I took this photograph about 12 years ago, it seemed to me that the main users of the phonebox were the three-man crew of the LNG Lagos, which at that point had been laid-up there for eight years. Chatting to one of the crew, I found out that each morning one of them would take their small motorboat across the loch to check their postbox and make a few calls. They did have a mobilephone on board the Lagos, but this was back when mobile calls were very expensive and they weren't allowed to use it for personal calls. So I took a photo of the phonebox and wrote down the number. I don't know if I imagined I was going to give them a call or something.

Of course, in some ways, it started before this. It started with a phonebox on Glossop Road in Sheffield. One evening I was on a bus: it was dusk, the phonebox was lit up, and there was a man inside. I obviously couldn't hear what he was saying, but in the six or seven seconds it took me to pass him, I could see from his body language, and his hand gestures, that what he was talking about was important.

And it started before that in a phonebox at Nether Edge crossroads in Sheffield. It was a Friday morning, and I was standing inside it, whilst my girlfriend stood outside, watching me make calls, rearranging my weekend plans, making new travel arrangements. Because half an hour earlier I had got a phonecall on our incoming-calls-only-landline in our shared house, 5 minutes walk away, telling me that I needed to go home to the midlands, and that I needed to do it today, to go to the hospital today, in case any later was too late.

And it started before that on Milking Stile Lane, in Lancaster, where I lived as a student. Because we were poor, and our landlord was crap, we didn't have a phone. So we would give out the number of the phonebox outside our front door as our own phone number, thinking that Greg or I, who had the front bedrooms, would hear it ring. But of course we never did, and we would sometimes open the door to slightly bemused knocks from passersby telling us that we had a call. Our friends and family were only sporadically successful in getting though to us, often finding themselves saying, "Yes, I know it's a phonebox, will you please knock at the door of number 1 for me?"

And on a teenage camping trip with my dad, I remember pausing each night on the way back from the showerblock to look at the telephone box, now free of its tea-time queue, lit up and surrounded by insects.

So the interest started in all of those places, but there in Glen Striven, is where the cataloguing started.

          0114 270 0008

          0207 278 5424

          01298 85211

          01663 762073

          0114 236 0387

          PAYPHONE REMOVED

 

          0114 236 1184 

          0114 236 6550

          01369 870245

          01904 643310

          01298 871395 

I like their potential. I like the fact that with the right combination of numbers and enough loose change, you could, potentially, speak to, what, 80% of the world's population?*

And I like the fact that they are located, not by a map, but just by their own set of numbers. On Flickr I just tag them "red" and " phonebox". You can work out where they are from the area codes if you want to. Sometimes people tag them with their location, but I quietly remove such geographical information. 

But of course I am also aware that there aren't just any phoneboxes in this collection. None of your modern, flimsy phonebooths. I'm mainly interested in classic K6, red, cast-iron phoneboxes.  I like their solidity, their permanence. When I come across a new one, I have a sense that it has been waiting. When I picture them, I often picture them in the rain. Thinking about them this week, I have realised that one of the things I admire about them is their loyalty. They're always there.

So, yes, I'm inspired by telephone boxes. 

---

*a bit of research tells me that this was quite a good guess.

---

This talk was the kicking-off point for an Inspiration Exchange, that I ran throughout the rest of the day, in one of the great Pods that are part of The Ron Cooke Hub, where TEDxYork was held.

I swapped Inspiration cards with visitors, and then at the end of the day I reported back on what I had been told.

I swapped: 

EMPTY BENCHES for 

DOGS WITH SQUASHY FACES

SOMETHING MY MOM SAID TO ME WHEN I WAS 19 YEARS OLD for 

A SILENT APPLAUSE

DEAD JELLYFISH for 

RACING PIGEONS ON SKYE EDGE

BOTTLES OF MARBLES for
A BOX OF MARBLES

VOYAGER 2 for
PICTURES OF EARTH - WATCHING EARTH FROM THE SPACE STATION

MY GRANDAD SITTING LOOKING AT THE SEA for
"CAN'T GET USED TO LOSING YOU" BY THE BEAT

A SWIMMING POOL AT NIGHT
for
BEYONCE

A VENN DIAGRAM OF ALL MY FRIENDS
for
NEVER TOO OLD TO LEARN

THREE PINTS OF GUINNESS
for
"DON'T ACT POSITIVE FOR MY SAKE, BE POSITIVE FOR YOUR OWN SAKE."

AIR CRASH INVESTIGATION
for
THE MISSING RUG

COMIC BOOKS, INEVITABLY
for
I'VE GOT SOME PIES

Thanks to everyone who came to hang out in the Inspiration Pod, you were brilliant.