Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Today, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - The End

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035161/

Harley Byrne vs. Success

“Whichever way I turned, nothing appeared but danger and difficulty… I had no alternative, but to lie down and perish…

I reflected that no human prudence or foresight could possibly have averted my present sufferings.” 

(1795)

"I shall set sail for the east with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt. Though all the Europeans who are with me should die, and though I were myself half dead, I would still persevere, and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least die on the Niger." 

(1805)

- Mungo Park, adventurer, idiot.

Harley Byrne makes his screen debut in A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear at this weekend’s Abandon Normal Devices festival – where the festival theme is ‘Success’. Given that Byrne’s seemingly impossible mission is to record and make available for download all the world’s music ever, and given that across countless episodes of the UNIVERSAL EAR time travel adventure serial he always gets his track, we at the Institute have put together an 8 point guide to success, Harley-style. A shorts-wearing, trans-dimensional loner he may be, but many of these rules are adaptable to our own lives here, and now, whenever that may be:

1. Never learn. Byrne’s career can be defined in terms of what Debord referred to as ‘cyclical time’ – but what we might think of as ‘sitcom time’. Every episode of UNIVERSAL EAR is a reboot. We have no idea what order the episodes are supposed to be in because there is zero character development. Byrne is good at his job because he does the same thing again and again without getting any big ideas. His unwavering self-confidence is rooted not in a superiority complex, but in his faith in himself as the right cog in the right machine. Envy the man who doesn’t even know how stupid he is. He doesn’t know what he is missing, or that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know what he’s missing.

2. Never doubt. Life is such a varied and wonderful thing that it is easy to find examples to prove whatever argument you started out with at the beginning. Byrne has an infinite number of cultures to visit before he can complete his mission: if he doubted for a moment the validity of his own perspective, what ‘self’ could he truly expect to represent in the social sphere? A robust personality is like a non-lossy file format. If the you that’s here today, reading this, wants to prevail, you will zip yourself up and change for no-one.

Also, avoid listening too carefully.  People have a lot to say and you’re not going to like much of it.

3. Never mind the paradox. Physics is a pretty subjective affair and you’d be a fool to let it stand in your way. In the great imperialist tradition, Byrne considers his own time and place to be sacrosanct, and to be the definitive watchtower for all human history (and future). It is Manchester, 2012, where the definitive catalogue of all music ever is being created and consecrated. Therefore, if he drops the odd causality wrapper elsewhere, leaves behind the occasional empty tin of paradox, well, people should just be glad he’s graced them with a visit and preserved their music forever – even if, on occasion, they themselves no longer have access to it.

4. Align your modern wants with your primal needs. However sophisticated our personal mission statement might be, we’re all fundamentally in this for the same thing: a good meal, a tussle in the long grass, and perhaps the reciprocated emotional affections of one or more objects of our obsessive fascination. This is the man that kissed Turing after the arrest; played love games with vegetables in ancient Greece; and caressed killbots to ecstasy in the year 2019. As a lone field agent far from home, Byrne draws little distinction between executing a task and R&R. The world is his music studio and he’ll create the right recording conditions by whatever means necessary. Further, he conducts his work with two key sexual principles in mind: that you win someone’s trust by taking off their pants, and that when a woman is rescued, she expects to be kissed.

5. Rationalise, don’t compromise. Harley Byrne would never knowingly go home with anything less than a pure recording of the track he’s set out for – captured in perfect conditions and with the appropriate phonic and metaphonic settings.  But he is quite capable, without any sense of cynicism, of reconsidering what it is that he should consider a ‘pure recording’. Such is the malleable beauty of the human mind. As the great thinker Costanza once said, “it’s not a lie if you believe it.”

6. Good manners will only get you so far. Byrne is a gentleman of the old school, but as a time traveller his personal code is not always appropriate to the situation he finds himself in. Thus, a quick analysis of the UNIVERSAL EAR episodes available to us reveals that over and over again, he is forced to scale down his etiquette until he gets results. Why not try applying Byrne’s 3-tier back-up plan next time you have trouble at work or in your personal life? --

Plan A: Ask nicely.
Plan B: Seduce the antagonist.
Plan C: Tie everyone up, get your recording and go home.

7. Abandon normal devices. If you want to achieve something unique, you’re going to need unique tools. Byrne’s shed-built recording device, the Universal Ear, is more than a microphone. The Ear – a kind of gun-shaped sound vagina – can be used to interface with dumb computers, pick locks using complex wave arguments, and has a flashlight function with three different settings. Byrne has even used the warmth of the Ear’s hard drive to fry an egg in order to avoid starving to death. Whilst stuck in a tree.

8. What did we achieve today? What went wrong? This one’s not from Byrne but from our production process. At the end of the day at Universal Ear Studios, before the doors are unlocked, everyone sits down and discusses how the day went in the above terms, while panicking about what we’ve left ourselves to achieve the next day. Apologies are shared; excuses spluttered. It is important to always end on a What Went Wrong – because if you’re not going to spend all night staring at the ceiling, dwelling on your failures, how do you ever hope to succeed?

UNIVERSAL EAR: A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear plays at Manchester’s Cornerhouse this Friday at 1pm as part of AND Shorts Programme 1.

Harley Byrne: Library of Postures and Expressions

Readymade emotions

It is not uncommon, in the world of television and the cinematic serial, for the producers of a new show to create libraries of their main characters’ tics and poses, in effect "backing up" a serial's stars in case they should become lost or disfigured before the end of the run. We certainly believe this to have been the case with the original UNIVERSAL EAR, for not only did director Francis Dove place no value on authenticity of emotional performance, he planned to create entire unofficial episodes using just off-cuts, bad takes and whatever other footage he could get his hands on without alerting Harley Byrne (who played himself in the original) to his scheme.

So it is that, one week into the Institute’s short-lived Universal Ear Studios venture, I opened the day’s work with a brief lecture on the science of facial expressions, ahead of a planned afternoon of filming stock emotions for the UNIVERSAL EAR-remake library. Truth be told, I had pretty much thrown the speech together in a bar whilst waiting for Lockwood to get home with the keys the previous night, but all the same I was somewhat put out that he failed to take Duchenne seriously until the latter’s name cropped up in the former’s Acting Basics book a few days later.

There is clearly far more work to be done on this subject, and it is one of my great regrets of the Universal Ear Studios era that we did not have time to spend more days like this – speculating and creating standard parts, rather than zealously pursuing the completion of entire episodes. (A transcript of our ‘therapy’ session from that day’s end is available on request).

The lecture was open to the public without entry fee, but only Lockwood attended. I positioned myself between him and the door:

Faces, Electropuncture, and the Actor’s Craft

“Whilst facial expressions are thought, with a few ambiguous exceptions, to be universal (cross-cultural), the different proportions of an individual’s face can cause confusion. For example, somebody born po-faced might not necessarily be miserable – it’s just the way their nose came out.

As such, we calibrate our own minds to read the faces of people we know – to make minute personal adjustments to the rules their faces generally play by - and this also applies to the familiar stars of a regular adventure serial. We know, as it were, what they can achieve with their face, and we understand their feelings within those parameters.

There are three alternative processes, to my knowledge, to elicit a facial expression:



Above: polished-up diagram of 3 methods for eliciting a facial expression (terms in brackets refer to what can go wrong with each process). Below: two charts to each be considered synonymous with the above.

Concerned as we are here with controlled methods of production, we shall naturally consider following the ‘science’ route, as pioneered by Monsieur Duchenne, who would isolate and faradize the facial muscles of his heroic volunteers in order to learn more about the mechanics of emotional manifestion – face-wise. Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875) believed that one could not read moral character from facial expressions - only emotions. However, we can posit that a series of such emotions – frame by frame – in the context of a particular narrative and aesthetic surroundings, allows us to at least attempt a moral or dynamic emotional analysis: and this is Cinema.

The danger, though, is to assume that cinema – or rather, photography – is Truth. It is not. It is  re-presentation, pixels or photons splattered onto a 2-dimensional screen. As such, this is what gives us license to manipulate the human face-image as a collection of symbols that hint at a real human face whilst referencing broader visual codes, from colour and geometry to landscape or circuitry. But we only have so much time today… and given that Mr Lockwood is interpreting Harley Byrne’s reinterpretation of Byrne’s own real-life experiences, we might do best to adopt (however multiply-filtered) verisimilitude as our aesthetic priority.”

So the lecture ended: and indeed, without verisimilitude of circumstances, verisimilitude of emotional expression was no picnic. My attempts to inspire Lockwood’s emotions with a range of condiments (salad dressing &tc.) or with carefully chosen images from a favourite book of mine were controversial at the time and remain a bone of contention between my muse and I to this day. However the results – if they do not speak – sneer, cower, spasm and thrust for themselves.

Please note the music is not our own work but has been shamelessly checked out from Pietro Grossi's Electronic Soundtracks library music LP.

Cheese, Cube'd: Breaking Out and Breaking In at McHale's

Breaking Out and Breaking In is a distributed film festival co-ordinated by the ever-inspiring BLDGBLOG. Taking as its theme "the use and misuse of space in prison escapes and bank heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you’re looking for", the festival encourages geographically dispersed cinephiles to watch a series of set film texts and respond online (there will also be a bit of a do in New York when it’s all over).

On Friday 24th March, we participated with a screening of Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997) at Old McHale’s Mantelpiece Cinema, the Institute’s pocket picturehouse in south Manchester. The McHale’s way of doing things involves various rituals and etiquettes, such as the preference for a double bill (to draw out unexpected connections between tentatively linked films), a thematic cheeseboard (with contributions from proprietors and audience alike) and projection onto the textured wallpaper of the McHale’s chimney breast. Although discussion is encouraged at McHale’s, the Breaking In/Out event marked the first time we’ve set aside specific slots for group speculation. These breaks doubled as convenient moments to revisit the cheeseboard.

As co-proprietor of the cinema, I shall herein attempt to summarize our architecturally-oriented findings. Spoilers will abound.

Clumsy heroics

Following a last-minute revision of the evening’s program, we open with two escape-themed episodes of The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) – Crossed Trail and Devil’s Noose. The opening escape from a temple where our hero is about to be executed/sacrificed is more about low-scale genocide than the exploitation of architectural ambiguities:



But this particular incarnation of the E.R. Burroughs adventure is more fascinating for its semi-developed, yet semi-decayed, cinematic grammar than its reflections on real-world spaces. Shaped by the naivety of its early talkie form and eroded by years of material neglect, the show seems to be put together from a mix of surviving prints. The result is a curiously compressed space-time of the jungle, where people are closer than you think and emotions can be rebooted with a cutaway:



The taming of our environment through technology and architecture has both intended and unintended results, malicious and accidental. Thus it is a series of accidents (and a neat symmetry of the elements) that results in Tarzan being suspended in the air by an animal trap (the Devil’s Noose) even as he tries to rescue love interest Ulla Vale from the firy prison of a flaming cabin.

Theory of remains

Next on the bill is Jean Rollin’s short Le Pays Loin (The Far Country, 1965). A young man meets a young woman in a nameless town and they search for a way out, through a maze of ruins and micro-enclaves. It is the dérive as nightmare, the cosmopolis as isolation cell. Nobody they meet speaks their language, and the exotic (urban) cultures they encounter remain insular, however harmless. They meet another couple who are, on reflection, probably in the same situation as our heroes, but who of course don’t speak French: the mutual frustration leads to violence. You aren’t trapped by society, as Cube will later reinforce: you are society.

If Rollin ultimately settles on truisms (love is the answer; we’re all of the same flesh), Le Pays Loin remains of interest for its contemporaneous alternative to the Situationists’ take on urban planning and cultural homogenization. Rollin’s prison-city is not the modernist rat maze the Situationists would critique and subvert: it is closer to the organic, irrational playground they idealized. Again, this dichotomy will be echoed in Cube: is civilisation a conspiracy or a series of accidents and inevitabilities?

Le Loin Pays at McHale's

Cheese Cubed

We prepare for the main feature by topping up our glasses and plates. There are thematic cheese cubes and olives on sticks (the latter rationalised by the claim “the pimento wants to break out”), and Breakaway bars for the sweet-toothed (which British delicacy proves a revelation to Colorado-reared guest – and sound designer on the Institute’s UNIVERSAL EAR project – Mr Cacioppo Belantara). There is wine.

Our initial response to Cube is to identify it as a massive game – a scaled up Mousetrap, pick-up sticks or, of course, Rubik’s cube (some recall there being a Mousetrap movie, but when do we get a Jerry Bruckheimer pick-up sticks blockbuster?). Just as the trials of life are scaled down in the toys and games with which we are socially trained, the apparatus and the stakes of these games are scaled up for our heroes, who must think, perform and behave with guile and agility to win survival. (It also recalls Natali’s Cypher (2002), where in order to prevail, Jeremy Northam’s character must play dumb and fit in with a virtual community while privately plotting his own escape).

The social agenda of the cube revolves around the idea that we each have a function to perform if our home, village or metropolis is to thrive. Whether the evil mastermind behind the cube (or his/her casting director) chose prisoners with complementary skills as an over-zealous experiment, as a demonstration, or as a cynical joke, is never revealed: the prisoners include a policeman (to direct the human traffic), a mathematician (to crack the codes), and an autistic chap - Kazan - with the spark of genius the group, and society, needs to progress. (Ms Kipling, in the audience, suggests that the special skill of the short-lived bald guy, killed off early to demonstrate the cube’s lethal logic, is ‘exposition’). The acknowledged irony is that life outside the cube is just the same: Worth, who designed the outer walls of the cube, admits to never having met the "door guy" or anyone else involved in the construction. Yet the cube is complex, rational, and continues to function.

Cube: co-operation

 

What the cube lacks, and what makes our mutual dependency in real life a little more palatable, is horizons. (The cube also lacks toilet facilities, and although the prisoners turn their noses up when Kazan pees in a corner, the subject is not brought up again during their lengthy incarceration - where do the others go?). Each of the six inner-faces of every cell is identical, these cells’ frustrating, alien omni-directionality made more absurd by the repeated image of a boot flying forlornly through the air. Each boot is tossed ostensibly to trigger booby traps, but figuratively it is searching for gravity, a firm footing, orientation, an absolute.

The vaster space of the cube as a whole is hinted at throughout the movie by its peculiar sonic life: distant, echoing creaks and moans which the characters seem to ignore and which therefore remain ambiguous to the audience – are these the sounds of the cube or are they non-diegetic, a film score of tones to pull the audience along without the comforting familiarity of rhythm or melody? A third alternative is that the sounds are subjective: half an hour in, as Holloway loses her composure, the cube groans and creaks as though its very frame is straining to keep itself together. The big reveal to characters and audience alike is that the first idea is closest: the noises occur as a side-effect of the cube’s sporadic reshuffling of cells.

We turn to Mr Hill, McHale’s guest engineer (and also the inspiration for the Institute’s 2009 choreographic exploration of mental space) for a technical take on the cube. Hill postulates on the use of rails or runners on which the inner cubes would need to slide and points out that the magnetism involved in heaving such massive blocks of metal around would likely have physio- and psychological effects on the prisoners. For that matter, the lack of oxygen could account for Quentin’s descent into psychopathy – is there not something of the submarine movie in Cube?

And so we wind up back at psychogeography, or more accurately psycho-ambience. If there was, indeed a ‘door guy’, the characters are so preoccupied with survival that they don’t have a moment to give the ‘wallpaper guy’ a nod. The inner panels of the cells are decorated in something between an art deco flourish and 1980s, Tron-esque circuit board chic. This could be Natali flagging up the need for everyday folk to build our online universe with tolerance and co-operation. But more pertinent to our characters are two particular aspects of the panel design: firstly, that the backlit walls give the impression of daylight offering hope as through a stained glass window; and secondly, the use of coloured light as a mood modifier. It would take an audience soberer than the present one to trace any consistent emotional program in the cube’s colour scheme: the autistic Kazan cannot abide the red rooms, but any effect on the others remains subliminal and unremarked upon by the prisoners.

Foreground: cheese cubes, Background: circuit board wallpaper

 

The program winds to a close, the crowds disperse, and Mr Hill and I accompany Ms Cookson back to her Withington digs, spotting on the way this most portentous sign:


It is our hope that the maze is not snapped up by evil hands. In the meantime, our Breaking Out night is deemed a success and we look forward to a Breaking In night or two: Rififi on March 19th, and perhaps Inception, which concept is made more palatable by the idea of a thematic cheese within a cheese within a cheese within a cheese.

Psychotransitionary datamoshing on parade, with MC John Cage (apologia)

nb: If you are not trained in the interpretation of psychogeographic metering I recommend you start the video and let it play while reading the notes below. It is not meant to be entertaining.

Technical Notes

I AM SO SORRY

It is often said that a film or video should stand up on its own, unsupported by the post-rationalisations of its progenitor. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but anyway in this case the movie is a mistake and I feel I owe you an explanation.

COMPRESSING/DECOMPRESSING EMOTIONAL VALUES

Last week I set out to edit our short film of the Nexus Art Café float at the Manchester Day Parade 2011. The footage had been shot on Super 8 film and transferred, out-of-house, to digital, and I had watched it back in the latter format without any problems. However, when I then imported the same digital file into the Institute’s post-production engines for editing, I was confronted with the images you see in the above video. Something had gone wrong. I assumed it was me.

My first instinct was to delete the file. But since a lot of my work here at the Institute involves the recovery of lost films, I took pity on whatever future-me might have the job of reconstituting the canon of ‘unintentionally datamoshed parade movies of the early twenty-first century’. I saved him or her a job by saving the corrupted file. Anyway, when one ‘deletes’ a digital file it is not actually erased, but only marked for overwriting - and so, if data-energy is never truly destroyed but only restructured, might I not learn more from my mistakes by taking responsibility for restructuring the file's raw information myself?

I set about charting the binary ruins of the video, and it was not long before I began to notice a familiar pattern. Having seen the uncorrupted rushes of the parade, I recognised amongst the rearranged pixels a visual echo of the route we took. There, through the luminous video-fog, could be made out the streets and buildings and the dancers and even some of their moves. But, in addition, the newly fragmented pattern seemed to channel the conflicting feelings I felt on the day:

• The pride I felt in representing with my Nexus comrades and celebrating my adopted city, shattered by self-consciousness and crowded-room loneliness into neat rectangular shards.
• The particular dismal brand of existential emptiness I’ve only previously felt during extended periods of inactivity while playing left-back for the GM Hurricanes, punctuated by the giddy euphoria of eye contact with this old friend or that sworn enemy in the crowd.
• The desire to dance and the fear of falling over, expressed through neurotic video jitter.
  

Somewhere between committing the images of that day to film, and translating it into a digitally manipulatable form, it seemed that the movie had become corrupted moment-for-moment by the emotions I felt on parade. How?

You will remember (and it doesn’t matter if you don’t) that for three months over the summer of 2010 we were asked to vacate the Institute while one of the major search engine companies mapped the dynamic emotionality of the premises for its latest online cartography resource: a (still) unnamed(*1) psychogeographic atlas of the known universe. It so happened that, as they worked in our absence, several expensive pieces of their psychocartographic machinery were irreparably blown due to incompatibility issues with the Institute’s wiring. The workmen dumped the remains in the Institute’s gardens before they left, and since that summer our IT manager(*2) has frequently raided this abandoned equipment for spares. I asked him: was it possible that some kind of ghost codec had hijacked the parade file and decompressed its latent emotionality? Some frustrated algorithm designed for compressing psychogeographically-metered video, now released from its silicon purgatory by the integration of its motherboard into the Institute’s hardware infrastructure?

He told me No, it was not possible, but that as emotion is a matter for the heart and meaning is created in the mind - and if it would make me feel better - I could certainly ‘read’ the video as some kind of pseudo-scientific videograph of the emotions I felt on parade. This did in fact make me feel a bit better. Then he pointed out that nobody else was going to see the corrupted video anyway, which made me feel worse again - yet more determined to salvage the thing.

PIANO HACK

The moving images were saved by mere fact of their re-contextualisation. By considering the broken video from a psycho-transitionary angle, it had meaning again, without even needing to be ‘restructured’. But it still wasn’t much fun to watch, and it needed some sound. It would be dishonest to create and sync up a psychogeographic soundmap after the matter, and besides I didn’t have the processing power to facilitate such an endeavour. Instead, I thought about a song.

The idea of chance discovery and the turning of unfavourable circumstances to one’s creative advantage called to mind John Cage’s invention of the hacked piano, or ‘prepared piano’ as it was known at the time. It is a story that he recounts on Indeterminacy, a recording of 90 one-minute tales ranging from composer-clique gossip to Zen parable. Cage was the most important composer of the twentieth century but he died without hearing the word ‘Pro Tools’. So I decided to rip/sample/steal this most pertinent anecdote of his and add a beat: time, rather than tone, being the fundamental index of music; and beat music being an instant fix for unwatchable movies.

In the original recording of the story, Cage solves a technical problem - how to create percussive music in a room where there is only a piano - by opening up the piano and attaching objects (a pie plate, a nail) to its strings. I decided to hack the narrative so that in the remake he solves the initial problem but creates a new one, accidentally inventing Dance Music (rather than music for a dance) and being unable to un-invent it. This unhappy ending, this punchline of undesired creative productivity, brought the anecdote closer to my own experience.

The audio facilities at the Institute are less than ideal. The track was put together using Audacity 1.2.6 on an iMac with a 600 MHz G3 processor and 256MB RAM for your listening pleasure, though it might have been easier to use tape and scissors. Bring on the interface city where a gesturally operated Protools XI will be embedded in the ambience of bus shelters! In addition to the Cage number, The John Cage Bounce (as the new song was christened) samples The Rose by Nine Circles and Martin Denny’s March of the Siamese Children. There is no original sound.

TRASH BIN

(*1) I suggested they brand it [search engine company name]Hurt. But by the time they read my email, they had apparently lost interest in building a personal rapport with the Institute’s staff and the series of cold but suggestive replies I received seemed to have been generated by a bot or similar
(*2) whom I detest

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Do You Understand?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026772/

The revolution isn't finished - it's at home watching TV

The revolution in Manchester lasted barely three days, but it gripped the nation’s undernourished imagination and laid the groundwork for a new utopia founded on tolerance, economic equality and cha-cha-cha. I was there - or nearby - and this is my testimony.

Tuesday 9^th August, 2011

Manchester erupts in a frenzy of erotic wanting and violent taking as the disaffected, the dispossessed and the dizzy plunder city centre shops of plasma TVs, training shoes and ‘high-end’ gadgets. Listening in on the wireless, I experience a sense of liberation at the thought of the ordinary, ordered folk of Britain turning on their heels and telling the powers that be: "you say it’s like that, but we say it’s like this." I am particularly inspired by a live report on looting at the Argos, where enterprising rioters have instinctively split into four teams and are working together to obtain the objects of their desire, one team filling in the little order forms, a second processing them, a third team fetching the loot from the storeroom and the final team operating the collections desk. Of course, no money changes hands, but several of the youths involved find the work so enjoyable that they naively leave their CVs behind upon leaving. Before the night is out, they will be arrested, tried and jailed.

Switching off the radio to instead mentally map the chaos by the direction of passing sirens, my mind starts to wander: those first few successful revolutionaries will already be home by now, wiring up their plasma TVs. But is there ever anything on? And besides, aren’t these front room monoliths in fact the inherently exploitative cornerstones of the very capitalist pseudo-democracy we’re up in arms against, pumping out constant reminders of what else we don’t have and why the system to perhaps, eventually, get it all, works? Destroying our environment and our hard work as they break down at a time pre-allotted according to the standard practice of planned obsolescence? And the warrantee isn’t even valid when you stole the telly in the first place.

These thoughts prey on my mind, and it is while I am cooking my tea that I decide to become a revolutionary leader. Seeking encouragement, I text my mum (neither of us has a Blackberry):

This is me: Viva la revolución!

This is my mum: O.K. xx

Wednesday 10^th August, 2011

All night I dream of shooting men in top hats, garrotting bankers with the strings of their own squash rackets and laughing freely but seriously in forest idylls with lank-haired revolutionettes. When one’s very dreams are shaped by the presumption and disinformation of the media one should not sleep in. I rise early and head into town to confront and inspire my people, but most of the other revolutionaries rise late, no doubt tired by a night of rioting and phone-in Bingo on the wide-screen.

An early blow is dealt to the revolution when David Cameron appears on TV to calm the nation and disparage the rioters. Several revolutionaries, seeing our glorious P.M. in high definition for the first time, immediately repent and break back into the very shops they’d previously looted in order to return their plasma TVs and ‘high-end’ gadgets. They are quickly arrested, tried and jailed.

I identify a small band of revolutionaries in Piccadilly Gardens and make myself known to them. I have deliberately not shaved so as to be taken seriously. Robbing the tools of our own oppression, I tell them, has to stop. By stealing such status symbols, we highlight the arbitrary retail value of the desired items and so reinforce our own economic subservience. One of the revolutionaries starts crying and his sister takes him home. I am pleased my words have had an impact but disconcerted when I see a ‘fed’ who has been listening in gives me a nod of approval.

I break for lunch, gazing around the shopping centre at capitalism’s last stand as the red burrito juice of revolt drips down my chin and onto my overcoat.

Despite the electric atmosphere of a town where everyone’s waiting for the punchline, the insurgency fails to materialise. The word on the jealously guarded screens of our communication devices is that it’s "too rainy" and that many of the revolutionaries would prefer to stay in with their new plasma TVs. There are some skirmishes around 10pm when they pop out to loot some snacks but all in all it is a quiet day for the revolution.

Like many of those who returned empty-handed from the previous night’s riots, I start to wonder if maybe I waited too long to move and somebody else got all the best ideology.

Thursday 11^th August, 2011

I rise late having stayed up trying to subvert all manifestations of the mass media as found in my digs. I short-circuited my radio in the sink (partly by accident) but had less success with my record collection. You can’t detourn Cugat - he’s just too good.

The last of the sirens fades into the distance. The morning is spent drawing up plans for the new world order, although to be honest my heart is no longer in it. Most ideas are either self-defeating or too long-term to really get excited about. I settle on the following four-step revolution:

1. Wait for new model of plasma TV to come out. Mobilise comrades by exploiting their desires.

2. Hold pre-riot meeting (new tie?). "This time we won’t steal plasma TVs, we’ll steal MediaCityUK."

3. Non-violent, non-burny revolution.

4. Some kind of lengthy mass indoctrination process for revs and counter-revs alike. Elimination of mutual suspicion, one-upmanship, fetishisation of luxury goods, bourgeois post-industrial concepts of "quality", and television gameshows; and the propagation of mutual respect and empathy, selflessness, slowing down a bit, art as leisure, leisure as art, robot slaves and Cugat.

As I now have no means of following the aftermath of the first, failed revolution, I pop over to the paper shop to buy an MEN. The shopkeeper is in good spirits, boasting about the deterrent power of our "vigilant community": I tell him that "one man’s vigilant community is another man’s vigilante community" but he doesn’t seem to appreciate the nuance and I pick up a TVTimes to change the subject.

The MEN predictably tows the counter-rev line, mocking the revolutionaries for not fully understanding the nature of their own misery and condemning them for rioting in a confusing and ungentlemanly fashion. I mention this to a neighbour as she wheels in her recycling bins, and she sagely replies, "let he who has never lashed out irrationally due to a lifelong build-up of undefined frustration cast the first stone." She is immediately arrested, tried and jailed for incitement to riot.

(In other news, privileged NatWest customers are invited to buy a £12 ticket to a promotional screening of the latest Anne Hathaway flick at Heaton Park. It is not clear where the big screen came from. Bring a picnic. Bring your friends.)

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: The Great British Gangster

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065469/

Do you have any idea how this might have happened? and 47 other questions, with no answers, in alphabetical order

It is something of a cliché, or better said “truism”, to state that a film or a piece of art that one has created does not attempt to provide any answers (“I wouldn’t be so bold”) but only to ask questions.

As a filmmaker and pre-maker, it’s an excuse that I unashamedly subscribe to. I’m dim but curious, so I think I’ve got things the right way around.

In the name of transparency, and of self-justification, I thought it might be time to share a few of the key questions that emerge in the work produced here at the Institute, plainly and unobfuscated by the convolutes of aesthetics or narrative.

Here, in strict semi-alphabetical order, are 48 of the most pressing questions that our work raises:

Am I in your way?
Are you some sort of idiot?
Couldn’t we just try?
Does this bother you?
Do I have to get up?
Do you expect me to touch that?
Do you have any idea how this might have happened?
Do you think I’m some sort of idiot?
How do you work this thing?
How far will you go to stop me?
How much is too much?
How the hell am I going to get out of this?
How the hell did I wind up in this?
Is doing that going to hurt more or less than not doing that?
Is that supposed to be funny?
Is this ever going to end?
Is this your dog?
Shouldn’t we give the whole thing up?
Shouldn’t we stick together?
What are the chances of getting out of this alive?
What are the chances of retaining my dignity?
What are you doing with that thing?
What are you trying to say?
What do you think that behaviour’s going to achieve?
What’s it worth to me?
What’s on your mind?
What’s that look for?
What’s the big idea?
What’s the worst that could happen?
What the hell were you thinking?
What time’s the last train?
Where am I?
Where did you go?
Where is it?
Who am I?
Who are you?
Who do you think you’re talking to?
Who’s going to clear this up?
Who’s that man?
Why are you hitting me?
Why did you hide it?
Why is he crying?
Why is she screaming?
Why me?
Why oh why oh why?
Won’t you leave me alone?
Would you like to dance?
Would you recommend [subject matter of film] to your friends?

Please feel free to add questions via the comments box if you believe there are any major themes I’ve overlooked. Once we’ve got all the key questions here in one place we can stop making art and hand it all over to the scientists to deal with.

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Beyond the Screen

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051744/

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: My Favourite Song

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051174/

Let's just try and take 2011 one stupid day at a time

This time last year, I predicted that this time this year (i.e. now) everyone would be compiling predictions as to what will happen next year (2011) - and I was right.

Building on the success of last year's prediction, I have compiled a list of top tips for the filmmaking trends and tropes of '11. Here they are in no particular order, except for alphabetical:

Butter

Nobody knows what the real fall-out is going to be from the demise of the Film Council. Filmmakers are facing unsure times now that it's unclear who we should butter up to and why we wasted so much time buttering up to the previous administration. The industry therefore has a surplus of emotional 'butter' which will surely be spread over the subject matter of its output, although it’s too soon to say whether this will manifest itself metaphorically or otherwise.

Furthermore, there will be a portion of butter (metaphorical) for each and every one of our darling online supporters as we try to milk them, piecemeal, for the budget of our next picture. This is called crowd-funding and, considering the feeding of cow offal to cows resulted in BSE, the Institute advises against it in its purest form. Instead, try the alphabetically convenient:

Crowd-producing

Similar to crowd-funding, but more hands on, 'crowd-producing' involves directly engaging an online fanbase with the ongoing production process. A list of tasks (chiefly: sums, phone calls and ego-management) considered too mundane for the director but too important for the crew will be made available online, with fans encouraged to pick a 'chore' and deal with it efficiently parallel to sorting out their own complex problems (messy divorce, looming audit into dodgy former business). Like crowd-funding, crowd-producers will be expected to stump up cash for their slice of the glory, but in this case it does not have to be their own.

The Institute is also looking into ways of making 'crowd-mothering' - a network of reassurance and (where feasible) hugs for insecure filmmakers - into a workable initiative.

Increased importance of L'Institute Zoom on global film scene

Here's Armend, the Institute's marketing man: "We do a variety of fine work here at the Institute, and we also make films. By ceaselessly going on about what we're doing and thinking about doing, and bandying our name around in connection with upcoming awards until it's a virtual inevitability that we'll win them, our marketing strategy is intended to catapult us right past 'annoying' and into the lucrative realm of 'familiar background noise'."

Words are cheap in the internet age - there are over 1,000 of them in this important and prophetic article alone!

Notworking

What is your USP? Last time I went to a networking event I left after thirty minutes and threw up next door, then came back and told everyone I met that I'd just sicked and that I was developing a web series about electronic brain augmentation. People were genuinely interested in the sick.

Already a prevalent trend, Notworking is to Networking what Cloud Gazing is to Cloud Computing. The idea is that while you sit down by yourself and have a cup of tea, the ether/the others can sort themselves out and inspire/inform/employ you at their will. Notworking is at its best unpredictable, and at its worst pleasantly predictable. The important thing is to allocate a precise time when you are Notworking, otherwise you are just not working, which can be guilt-intensive.

Nuisance Campaigns

Combining the sophisticated punch-in-the-face tactics of internet rollover ads with the time-proven effectiveness of the nagging child, Nuisance marketing will be the phenomenon you can't escape in 2011. GPS and online social networking will enable pushy campaign teams to track the movement and desires of the potential audiences. When the marketing team becomes aware of a congregation of the appropriate demographic (in pubs, shopping centres, at funerals), they will spring into 'life' to create thematically linked 'situations', which the target audience must negotiate in order to 'survive' or 'escape', depending on the theme of the film. (This idea was originally conceived by Guy Debord, but he didn't word it very well and nobody thought they could make any money out of it). Cloned SIM cards and hoax profile pages will be used to stir up and externalise the tension hinted at in the semi-public relationships of online social network users, creating a genuinely malevolent 'nuisance'. The Nuisance campaign will continue until each would-be audience member gives in and commits to seeing the film.

In the case of smaller arthouse films, a one-to-one stalking-type approach will be utilised. The underpaid but otherwise jobless quirky-faced star of the movie will travel from city to city with the director and his girlfriend, and spend a week at a time personally harassing (in character) the handful of local pseuds whose purposely obscure online Likes suggest they might actually 'get' the film and forgive its dismal production values. When the locals have created a vehement enough online campaign to justify a screening, the director will arrange for the film to be shown on the city's Big Screen, or just underneath it on his MacBook.

3D-Nausea

I think I mentioned this on Twitter once but I haven't worked out all the technicalities yet and just want to reassert it was my idea before someone steals it. Basically, "3D-N" is metaphysical 3D for existential arthouse-type films. The characters and locations appear all around you in suffocating detail, but it feels like something's missing.

Hats

This year we'll be seeing a lot of movie villains in hats.

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Hello Flash Gordon!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032475/

Overkill

Yesterday afternoon I dropped into Nexus Art Cafe, scene of the Institute's now-defunct Universal Ear Studios complex, where Nexus Al suggested that I cast an eye over our former workspace as he'll be clearing it out at the weekend and doesn't want to chuck anything he shouldn't. Everything seemed to be in order, but I couldn't help noticing the rather excessive approach that had been taken to the removal of our Snuggle Office door sign, as designed by UNIVERSAL EAR 1st AD Rowan. I suppose the end of any snuggle is a wrench.

Post-brew, I had a chance street encounter with Girls Of Unfortunate Climes art director Rebecca Manley, whom I'd not seen since she departed the Nexus studio for the bright lights of London, leaving our versatile crew with bits, bobs, and instructions for a full pop-up set & costume design. Manley is looking forward to her forthcoming solo exhibition in Germany, where she is to create a physical representation of the entire internet. The artist and designer, who habitually wears a crinkle-cut Pringle around town, hinted that the work may involve a mirrorball, and I daresay there will be plenty of coloured paper involved too - as we parted ways, however, I realised she had neglected to mention whether her version of the internet would be functional or not.

Miscellaneous Fragmentary: Ceylon Swimmers

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129389/

GOUCLog 6

GOUCLog 5

GOUCLog 4

GOUCLog 3

Facebook group...

Understanding "Girls"

When the postal service took delivery of Harley Byrne’s one and only documentary for them, shot in Manchester in the Spring of 2012 and edited from his hospital bed over the subsequent weeks, they quickly decided to lose it. Far from the portrait of a robust but alienated local population that they had sought, the commissioning body perceived Byrne’s vision of the girl gangs it represented as nihilistic and self-reliant; doomed, yes, but preferring a fate concocted by the arbitrary forces of nature to security under the patronage of state or corporate powers. Where was the letters-to-mum narrative device Byrne had agreed to structure the film around? Where, indeed, were the teenage girls Byrne had originally identified as his subjects – and who were these twenty-something imposters in pig-tails and moonboots?

As a consequence of none of this having happened yet, these questions have not yet been asked. The flawed clues dredged back from the future for us at L’Institute Zoom’s Future Films department being fragmentary at best, our own questions today may go unanswered. Much of what is written here is wrong. The prehabilitation of Girls Of Unfortunate Climes (a.k.a. Icy Video@Abel’s Vagina) over the next two weeks will only cause more problems.

Firstly, it has been asserted that Byrne shot the documentary on a shed-built “one-man filmmaking machine – a contraption to record and re-interpret the spirit of a given subject rather than to reproduce light on film or pixels”. How, then, are we to pre-interpret the mess of visual textures that “Girls” presents? A typical scene features a Mancunian underpass, badly exposed on grainy celluloid; across the shot dances a ‘teenage’ girl in an anachronistic spacesuit – however, her image has a pixelated, apparently digital patina and her shadow is out of sync. A crude silhouette of roadside foliage in the foreground fails to distract the viewer from the sense that these images have been composed from separate sources. Is this documentary? Would it encourage you to buy stamps? What (if any) of this is real?

Secondly, Byrne himself had it that his machine would not reproduce photographed light, but rather record the spirit of events and fabricate them into a movie using entirely new light: it was not a camera. Yet close analysis of the mobile ‘shot’ that leads us up Abel’s Vagina (as a certain stretch of the Princess Parkway is colloquially termed) suggests that Byrne’s recording device was mounted to the handlebars of a postal worker’s bicycle. Would this be appropriate for such a device as Byrne describes, netting “spirit” rather than photons? Perhaps - but it seems unByrneian. He was never a cyclist, opting for the reassurance of feeling his feet against the ground. (He never learned to drive, and would change the subject when the question came up in conversation.) He preferred to work alone, but could there have been a second documentarian, on a bike? If so, what happened to him when the girls took Byrne captive?

Thirdly, did Byrne have permission to film the girls – and if so, who did he negotiate this with? It seems to me, from what little Byrne’s film actually teaches us about the “Girls”, there are three possibilities:

1. For Byrne to have got close enough to study them satisfactorily he would have needed their permission. We see that they are highly territorial and willing to kill in bloods cold through hot. Given the deferent adulation the gang show towards their apparent leader, Ms. Selena Jolly, the decision would surely have been her call. She can be seen manipulating the dramatic/aesthetic effects of the gang’s behaviour in Byrne’s presence. Indeed – even allowing for the impaired judgement of the bereaved – it is only in Ms. Jolly’s absence (through death) that the remaining girls turn on Byrne.

2. Byrne was unable/chose not to gain permission, captured the “spirit” of events from a distance and embellished/structured the material according to his own sensibilities and background knowledge, if any. The girls, after all, had footage enough of their own from their perpetually reeling camera-phones, and hardly need engage with a square like Byrne.

3. The whole thing was made up.

It seems best to proceed – both with this essay and the project at large – from the first assumption. We can see where that leaves us afterwards.

Fourthly, the girls of the title all die violently at the end. So how did they post-dub their dialogue? Did Byrne fabricate their deaths in the name of “spiritual” unity? Predict the trouble and have the dialogue pre-dubbed? Have a cast of female hospital staff fill in the gaps at his bedside? Is the effect of badly-synced dialogue merely a misleading technical glitch, a side-effect of Byrne’s peculiar recording techniques? The answers are out there – or not.

Fifthly, the girls brutally murder a policeman – for kicks. Notwithstanding the suggestion that the victim might not be an authentic officer – may instead be a civilian in costume, seeking his own thrills – how are we to understand Byrne’s standing by to coldly capture the event for his film? Was he afraid he would suffer the same fate should he become involved? Hardly – although he no doubt entertained himself with self-defence scenarios in the quiet moments that followed. Rather we should see Byrne as a creature of the street, whose self-preservation instincts were more than matched by an animal indifference to (or acceptance of) the toil and tragedy of a natural world to be found at work with the same cruel innocence in the tangles of the human mind-brain and the bramble bush.

Sixthly, I am not at liberty here to go into depth concerning the “thought virus” that can pass from a mobile phone to human brain, but suffice to say that although Byrne found the idea “a little cognitive” he thought it best to play safe.

Seventhly, the most convincing shots we have recovered of the original “Girls Of Unfortunate Climes” are those featuring the primitivist Lonely Girls gang. These fantastic beasts are generally seen apparently filmed on location (as opposed to the cut-and-paste edit suite trickery of the Space Race scenes). The ostensible use of a long lens lends – on a superficial level – the illusion of authenticity, as the Lonely Girls understood the taking of their image as a provocation: Byrne would need to stand well back with his camera. But Byrne didn’t use a camera. Unless the laws of “spirit”, in the context of Byrne’s spirit-capturing, light-producing, filmmaking contraption, happened to coincide with those of optical physics, surely this long-lens aesthetic was a contrivance added by the so-called “purist” Byrne to evoke the distance he was forced to keep from the Lonely Girls. Didn’t such artifice die with the “noddy”?

Eighthly, hospital records suggest that - aside from the obvious violation – the main physical damage Byrne suffered was the scraping of his face against the gravel as he was dragged across the underpass having been rendered unconscious by Ms. Eve Witherspoon. The use of the phrase “brave, ruined face” in the Future Films blueprint should probably be considered a rare and decadent instance of poetic flair on the part of the engineer who drew it up. However, if the documentary is to be trusted, he was certainly in no state to continue production of it, and the remainder of the film (at least as far as the somewhat perfunctory coda) must be attributed to the spirit-capturing device having been left running (which rather devalues Byrne’s former presence as cinematographer).

Ninthly, although Byrne was rather snappy with the written word itself (claiming, oddly, to have “read more than you’d think”) he didn’t always follow the meaning of certain types of words when they were organised around each other in sentences – particularly sentences of a scientific flavour, given his long-held assumption that scientific knowledge comes free with genetic memory and shouldn’t require further development. This being the case, and yours truly being no expert in weather of the future, perhaps we should consider his description of the fate of the Girls of Unfortunate Climes in terms of his status as layman eye-witness: where once there was acid rain, in post-communication age Manchester ‘information rain’ falls instead – and you don’t want to get it on your shoes.