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.

Is There Anybody Out There?

I'm excited that today I start (well, technically, pick-up) work on a new show, 600 People. It's a short piece, premiering at Is There Anybody Out There?, a new spoken-word event at The Orangery in Wakefield, on 23 March at 8pm - featuring some great spoken word artists.

Here's the blurb about 600 People itself:

“We step out of our solar system, into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship...” 

So says the message from the human race on the Voyager spacecraft. But is there, y'know, anyone out there? Alex really wanted to know so he went to speak to an astrobiologist to find out. This is what he learned: Stellar Wobble. Light Clocks. The Mirror Test. The Distance Ladder. And murderous dolphins.

The conversation with Dr Simon Goodwin that inspired 600 People is touched upon in both 9 Billion Miles From Home and Technology, but this is the first time we've really got to explore what Simon told me and how it affected the way I think about the universe.

I'll be talking to Simon some more, and attending a couple of his lectures about astrophysics. No doubt I'll be tweeting about how much of that I understand, hash-tagged #600people.

But if you're in Yorkshire, come along and see us in Wakefield.

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.

Explaining (or trying to) in New York

Our most recent (completed that is - A Perfect Circle is almost signed off) short film, Technology, is screening at the Iron Mule Comedy Film Festival in New York on 6 June.  Full details here.

So far Technology has been shown at Third Angel screenings at the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield and the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, where it went down really well with audiences.  At each of those events I was able to demonstrate, after showing the film, that I had actually learnt something from the experience of making it, and was able to (almost) properly explain how the idea of light-clocks work (with a big debt to Dr Simon Goodwin at the University of Sheffield). As we won't be accompanying the film to New York (sadly), there will be no such second chance this time.

How Gravity Works

In our new short film Technology, I have trouble explaining the phenomena of lightclocks and gravity. After the screening at NRLA last week, after much more successfully explaining lightclocks (I think), I also claimed to "know how gravity works".

An email from Pete Harrison, an artist working on The Lightswitch Project, pointed out to me that this is quite a claim. He's right of course - *how* gravity actually works is disputed, or rather, not known, and there are several theories about it. What I meant to say was that I have done my homework since we shot the film and now think I understand the Newtonian Theory of Gravity (the gravity between two objects is directly proportional to their combined mass and inversely proportional to the distance that separates them). Very different to knowing "how" it "works".

Pete goes on to say that:

A disputed phenonema such as this, in which science has agreed to stop looking into what it is, and to focus instead on what it does, is called a black box.

From Wikipedia: In physics a black box is a system whose internal structure is unknown, or need not be considered for a particular purpose. Sometimes black box is used as a synonym for black body.

He also points out that there is a certain poetry to this for those of us working in performance, (as we refer to certain theatre spaces as black boxes).

Even though it was the point of the film, the making of Technology has amazed me at how much I don't know.