Surveillance Trailer

Many thanks to the genius that is Ben Marshall.

The Posters Have Landed...

IC Squared

Both today and yesterday I met up with Laura, Rob NJ and Matt to talk about the direction of the script - we were attempting to define the core plotlines and to concretise (yes, it is a word Laura!) what we have already created. Today we were joined by Jenny - we hadn't intentionally excluded anyone, it just so happened that as a sub-grouping we had bumped into each other in the IC* and decided to have these two informal meetings. It has to be said that the smaller group size probably did allow us to accomplish a little more than we would have done in a larger (albeit better organised) meeting.

We constructed a timeline of the main plot using index cards*, and created a kind of family tree of (principal) characters. We're going to have to cast fairly soon, as the play will open in five weeks (well, five weeks yesterday in fact), and we're now aiming to finish the script within a week. At the same time we took the opportunity to pilfer some food from some kind of conference in Colab 1 - apparently it's to do with a magazine that coincidentally features an article called something along the lines of "Video Recording Theatre for Education", which could be quite interesting...

Anyway, as previously mentioned there will be nine of us heading down to stay at mine tomorrow in order to get up bright and early and visit the V&A "Collaborators" exhibition, a word which has unfortunately become rather negative in my mind of late as I'm still "hard at work" on an essay on Sartre and Vichy France. This has however focussed my mind onto ideas of memory, particularly collective memory, and potentially how subjective memory is challenged by the increase in data collection and video recording in our society. Can't get away from relating everything to this bloody play! :)

Dancing with the Camera

It's practically the end of the Easter Holidays, and not a single post during all this "time off" when I should have had lots of time to tell you about NSDF, the Surveillance Studies Network Seminar Series, and our plans to visit the V&A's Collaborators: UK Design for Performance exhibition. Of course it's only now that I have an essay in for Monday that I've decided to get blogging (ttpo#'s very own Matt Kendrick has written 25 pages of script instead of his), but for this post I'll just limit it to the SSN Seminar as it has just happened and I've actually got a chance to remember most of it.

Before I start writing about today's events, I should probably give a bit of background. I haven't yet mentioned Professor Clive Norris, who is head of Sociology at Sheffield and uncoincidentally a founder member of the Surveillance Studies Network. I contacted him in January to ask to meet him and discuss the project, which we did the following week. We had a really interesting discussion in which he brought me up to speed with the emerging field of surveillance studies and suggested that we might perform a work in progress of the piece at the conference going on this week. In the end we realised that this was going to be too tight a time-scale, but he ended up inviting me to the first installment of the aforementioned seminar series which I duly attended today.

Feeling slightly like an impostor (I'm an undergraduate of French Studies, almost everyone else in the room was a published academic in the field), it was soon apparent just how useful the experience would be - the first speaker was John McGrath, Artistic Director at Manchester's Contact Theatre and author of Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space, who began by talking about a show by New York theatre company The Builders Assocation and their piece Super Vision. Checking out the trailer and the production photos, as a show it looks absolutely amazing, and its interesting to note that like our show (so far), the plot consists of three intertwining stories. Various online reviews do seem to indicate that the show had nothing particularly new to say about internet privacy or data security and that the piece is overwhelmed by its use of media, but boy is it pretty!

John talked about surveillance space (a notion he developed in the aforementioned book) and hyperexposure, and talked about the essential disconnect of surveillance, in particular talking about sound - any voice recording is always more suggesting of what is missing and is open to (mis)reading by the listener. He also talked about the way we send contradictory profiles into the datasphere, the idea that most of us these days have multiple data selves rather than us having a fixed "self" - your Facebook self probably has much cooler taste in music than you do, for example.

In the discussion after his talk I asked him (in a rather awkward manner - was in dire need of a coffee) about the experience of the actor in plays such as Super Vision - his answer was that acting on stage using cameras/projector screens requires great discipline, much like that of a dancer. The way in which the performer needs to position themself to be seen both live and as a projected image requires an awareness of space and well-rehearsed physical movement. This was valuable stuff, as the ttpo# lot haven't yet had to act with a script, let alone a camera pointing in their face.

Other talkers were no less interesting - Gareth Palmer had some very interesting things to say about reality/lifestyle television and its ambition to transform. In our devising sessions we have developed a scene examining (female) body-image, and it was interesting to hear him highlight the body as subject of the (male) gaze, as this is something we have been discussing in our workshops. Mike Nellis talked about electronic tagging, discussing public and tabloid opinion, prohibition v. inhibition, and the evolution of the idea from a 1960s patent through a Spiderman cartoon to the present day. Hille Koskela talked particularly about the "hijacking" of surveillance through webcams and cameraphones, beginning with a Youtube video of two security guards beating a man in East Helsinki. The resulting discussion gave all participants lots to think about - the authorship of the video, the failure of the camera operator to intervene and the ethics of recording someone without them knowing.

I've got a feeling this post is getting a little dry so I'll leave it there, but next time I'll be talking about NSDF, our Dragon's Den-style pitch to Head of Theatre Development at the Arts Council, and possibly a little bit about the V&A exhibition, but I should probably get back to some Henri Rousso and his "organisation de l'oubli"...