Monthly Film: TECHNOLOGY

This is a film we made at the start of 2009. Originally the intention had been to film a semi-improvised, five minute speech that I performed in the show Parts For Machines That Do Things, about the fact that I don't really understand any of the technology that I encounter on my journey home from work, until I reach my doorbell. (We wired up door bells in physics at school).

On the day of filming, though, Chris suggested I re-improvise the speech as the walk to the room we were filming in (our old space at Brookfield Yard). This opened up the subject up somewhat, and I ended up talking for over an hour, I think. Chris made this 10 minute edit and we were really happy with it.

After the first screening, someone wondered why we would want to listen to someone not know stuff. And this is a fair question, I suppose. Though for me, the film is more about the act of attempting to understand, about admitting that in fact the world around us is more complex than anyone of us could make or invent on our own. Admitting that we don't know, that we're not sure.

Then our friend Chloe Bezer saw a screening of several of our sci/art films and she wrote a lovely response (you can read all of it here), including this:

Watching the man at the blackboard trying (and failing) to recall or understand a hypothetical experiment, I’m not sure which was more heart-breaking: the belief that it mattered so much, or the faith that, in spite of it all, it was true.

I'm really interested in Chloe's reading of faith and belief in this. The hypothetical experiment she's referring to, that I try to explain, comes from a much longer conversation with Dr. Simon Goodwin, which has more recently inspired the spoken word piece 600 People, which becomes a meditation on our need to believe.

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Third Angel presents
TECHNOLOGY
Digital Video. 10 mins.
Performed by Alexander Kelly
Camera & Edit: Christopher Hall
Sound: Cristabel Horne
Special Thanks to: Dr Simon Goodwin, Jeremy Killick, Gillian Lees, Chris Thorpe and Rachael Walton

Premiered at the Showroom, Sheffield, and also screened at the Iron Mule Comedy Film Club, New York, and as part of the Hybrid Exhibition, Sheffield.

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This is the first of a number of our film and video pieces that we're going to put up over the next 12 months. Big thanks to Chris Hall for all his behind the scenes preparation for that.

Some Responses to the Work

Andrea Ochsner's new book, Lad Trouble, is a reassessment of the Lad Lit genre - 'the male confessional novel' as she calls it. I met Andrea a couple of times whilst I was touring The Lad Lit Project in 2005 - as she was interested in our response to genre in performance. Lad Trouble includes an epilogue/chapter about The Lad Lit Project - and it's really interesting to me to see the show positioned in relation to the books that it was (partly) a reaction to. I haven't read the whole book yet, but I know that the Lad Lit Project chapter also includes some extracts from the show text and my notebooks.

It's pretty pricey as it's an academic book, but perhaps you could get your library to order it if you're interested...

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Alex Herod has written a really nice response to seeing Class of '76 at Manchester's greenroom last month - it's on her blog, Bees on Toast, here.

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I had an interesting and inspiring chat with Andy Field, joint artistic director of Forest Fringe, last week, about the influence of gaming on his and our work - specifically Homo Ludens - and on the work of others, of course. We've talked about that before, but the specific timing of this chat was in preparation for the British Council's UK Connected showcase in Tokyo. Andy wrote this really nice blog post as a result. His whole blog for UK Connected is really worth checking out, exploring the work of some of the most interesting companies & artists around at the moment.

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Chloe Bezer sent us this response to seeing the short film Technology at out Hybrid screening last month. Introducing the film I said that Chris Hall had chosen, in the edit, the bits from a much longer improvisation that made me 'look the most stupid'. I was being flippant, and don't really mean that - but as Chloe has picked up on it, that'll teach me to think slightly more carefully about making jokes when introducing the work.

Thanks to Chloe for letting me quote some of her response here:

From hearing his various creative or critical points of departure (the three men he mentioned), I thought for Chris [Hall] to go on to make a short film like Technology was quite beautiful. You said that he chose the bits that made you look the most stupid – I’d say the most honest (always that word).

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The man in the film makes a journey from trying to explain the everyday technology that we use (that perhaps we ought to understand; a battery or gravity) ending by attempting to demonstrate how we can bend time itself.

Chris seemed to set out to try and explore humanity’s need to organise, rationalise, to understand and catalogue our lives and our history so that we can make sense of it on a personal level. The fact that he chose to do that by filming this man, unable to explain how a microphone works, was both hilarious and touching.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never understood why people have a problem combining faith and science. Not that I’ve nailed either, but I can’t see why the two can’t co-exist in the same paradigm. Share the same sandpit. Play nice together in the painting corner. And I wonder if actually, the problem lies in what we invest in those words. Why did we start saying that if we could explain something, that was Science, and when we couldn’t explain it, that was Faith?

As history advances we will come to understand more and more, be able to explain phenomena that we haven’t even encountered yet. Science will keep evolving as long as we have questions that need answering. But I might also say the same about Faith. It changes with our understanding of what Faith actually is.

I fully concur with the Underground Man: I want the choice to believe that ‘two plus two equals four’ is all very well, but sometimes ‘two plus two equals five’ is nice. Perhaps it comes back to freedom - irrational, illogical.

When did a mug become a piece of technology? It happened when the man in the film started using it to explain what was (or rather wasn’t) happening to its contents. It becomes what we need it to be, in order to explain what we need it to explain. Otherwise, it’s just a mug.

Science and Faith are like the dark knights of our human understanding; to know them conclusively (I think) will always elude us. Why are they running? Because we have to chase them.

Watching the man at the blackboard trying (and failing) to recall or understand a hypothetical experiment, I’m not sure which was more heart-breaking: the belief that it mattered so much, or the faith that, in spite of it all, it was true.

I had to ask Chloe who the Underground Man was. He's the eponymous character from a Dostoevsky novel who argues for the right to believe in two mutually exclusive viewpoints.