'We are making do with an impoverished and increasingly homogenized language to describe the landscapes outside of our cities' says Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways. He's at the Foyles on Charing Cross Road, talking about his new book Landmarks. To prove his point, he turns to the Junior Oxford English Dictionary which in 2007 removed seemingly essential words such as dandelion, nectar and cauliflower to be replaced with others such as broadband, email and analogue. Should children really learn to spell blackberry with a capital B before they've tasted the fruit?
When he's not lecturing in English at Cambridge, Macfarlane spends a lot of his time walking in and writing about these landscapes, so you might expect him to have developed a richer vocabulary for them. But the point that he's making is relevant to us all. How often have you been for a walk in the countryside and found yourself unable to name the plant, animal or distinct weather that catches your eye? What does the act of naming bring to our experience? What does it matter?
It's about cognition as much as anything, Macfarlane seems to be saying. Once you know the name for something, such as a ‘smeuse’ (Sussex dialect for ‘the hole in the base of a hedgerow made by the repeated passage of a small animal’), you're more likely to be aware of it and actually see one. He gives the example of a period in which he was reading J A Baker's Peregrine, a singular exploration of the Essex landscape in search of these beautiful raptors. Around this time Mcfarlane started seeing these birds in his own area, tuning into their presence with an awareness that he had not previously held. Language and books about nature can, he says, change the way that we see. Macfarlane's own writing, infused with the culture, history and people of the landscapes that he visits, certainly achieves this for me.
He describes a campaign to save the peat moors of Lewis, the North most of the Outer Hebredies. For the company hoping to build Europe's largest wind-farm here, it made sense to describe the place as empty and desolate. To anyone looking at pictures of these open, windswept places, that's how they seem. For locals such as Finlay Macleod, however, it's a landscape steeped in the experience of the crofters who once cut the turf from it's ground. Macleod's lexicon, included in one of nine glossaries in Landmarks, gives us phrases such as the wonderfully precise 'rionnach maoim’ (a Hebridean Gaelic term for ‘the shadows cast by cumulus clouds on moorland on a sunny, windy day’).
As I stood at the train station this morning, and realised that I was suffering 'sun-scald' from the glare of the rails, it dawned on me that it's not just our countryside that requires a richer language. Many of us can't even describe the landscape of our everyday urban environment. The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape is a good start, but perhaps there should be a word the shadow cast by a tree upon a brick wall, for litter trapped against a fence by the wind, or the way that you can look back in time by glancing above the modern shop fronts of a high street. Maybe there already is. I've always been a fan of desire lines (that muddy corner of the grass in a park that everyone cuts to make their journey shorter).
Macfarlane wants to encourage his readers to experiment with their own language, highlighting the fun that Douglas Adams and John Lloyd had re-appropriating English place names in The Meaning of Liff. It's time, he says, to re-wild our language, and there's a page at the back of the book left blank for you to start your own lexicon. My wife and I begin with 'The Best Bits' - a phrase we use to describe those rays of sun that break through the clouds like beams of god (as an Art History graduate I'm sure I used to know the correct word for this phenomenon but it's since been supplanted. Where can I turn for a decent visual dictionary?). In the interest of linguistic diversity, I'm sure we can do better than that.
I'm sitting in the office on Wednesday morning watching the BBC News. A section of iron railway at Dawlish is wobbling like an elastic band as waves wash over the crumbled masonry below. This was my route to the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in Plymouth for the weekend.
After the wettest January on record, the UK is experiencing the worst flooding we've seen in years. The South West has been the worst hit, and now the storms are taking out the coast. My colleagues send me pictures of waves the size of mountains crashing over Sennen cove, waves engulfing churches and pubs. On the TV, another huge blue LOW is spiraling in from the Atlantic in a volley of curvy white arrows. "Should we abandon...?" asks an email from a music critic who I'm due to be travelling with. "The roads are clear from Exeter to Plymouth" Prof Eduardo Miranda from Plymouth University assures me over the phone. I book a hire car and co-ordinate trains with some of artists heading down from London: namely synth-pop legend Martyn Ware of Heaven17 and his assistant engineer Tom Belton.
I join them on the train at Paddington. Martyn's wearing a black and gold patterned shirt and a greyish cardigan. Closer inspection reveals the gold pattern to be Glock 17s. On the seat tray in front of him is a black polystyrene box about the size of a computer keyboard. "You won't believe this," he tells me, pulling out an even smaller creamy grey rectangle, "it looks like a toy doesn't it?" It is, in fact, some kind of new Japanese super-synth-sequencer-tape-loop combo that costs more than most people would spend on a laptop - a far cry from the giant wire-crossed analogue keyboards that Ware started out with. It's also what he'll be playing live in Plymouth later tonight night. "Otherwise it'd just look like I'm doing my emails". He's only had it for three weeks and still doesn't completely understand it, but he seems confident. It starts playing a loop as he tries to put it away. After a few attempts, he works out how to turn it off.
The train sails through the waterlogged paddy fields of Somerset in deceptively bright sunshine. We arrive in Exeter half an hour early and pick the hire car up with no trouble. After negotiating the Bluetooth connection, Martyn treats us to Beyoncé's new album. It’s the only music on his phone that doesn't require access to 4G. The sky in front of us darkens and lets loose in heavy squalls, but the road remains clear. Despite skipping half the tracks ("she could be the new Whitney Houston. She's letting herself get ruined by a man") we arrive in Plymouth before it's over. A five hour journey door-to-door. What travel chaos?
As Martyn and Tom set up for the evening's concert, I head to the Roland Levinsky Building where most of the 9th Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival will take place. Co-directors Simon Ible and Professor Eduardo Miranda declare the festival open over some wine and nibbles and introduce us to Duncan Williams, a young sound engineer in the University's Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research, looking relaxed in trainers jeans and a black shirt. His composition 'Choncord for Five Elements' has been been chosen as the first performance of the festival.
We file round into the Peninsula Arts gallery to discover the elements. A quintet of giant, five-tonne blocks of swirling Italian marble dominate the room. They've been carved by Devonshire artist Peter Randall-Page, who is exhibiting major new work between the Peninsula Arts gallery and Plymouth Museum over the road. Symmetrical, ball-like forms covered in perfectly polished rounded lumps, they look a bit like scale-up pollen or viruses. Above each one is a speaker. Williams has assigned a voice to each stone and a programme that allows them to interact with each other. The space is awash with sound, I can hear water and wind and what sounds a bit like the crackling of fire, but I struggle to locate what's coming from where until I find a sweet spot at the centre of all five speakers. People are swirling around the stones themselves, most running their hands over and around the bulbous marble forms. It's an extremely tactile environment. The marbling patterns are intensely hypnotic and perfectly teased out by the undulating surfaces of the beautiful shapes.
I'm introduced to the Lithuanian Cultural Attache who is here to see composer Linas Balthas and pianist Lauryna Sableviciute. We walk over to the next venue together, a chapel like building divided into lecture theatres on three floors. We're in the loft space, a high-beamed white vault with theatre-style seating. I spot speakers at the front and back, Martyn Ware's piece 'Recapture' is a 3D sound composition, so we chose a row of seats right in the middle.
Ware strides out onto the stage in a blue suit, and white shirt with polished midnight shoes to match, taking up position at a music stand. Tom follows, sitting side on to us facing a laptop to the right of the stage. A guitar refrain starts looping through the front speakers, followed shortly after by snatches of old lyrics about memory. Other noises start to fade in and out and I become aware that some of them are coming from behind me. There are no real beats, just washes of high end, slurred piano and strings rising up through the mix. "It's easy to remember but so hard to forget" croons a smooth voice from the front. It's not Ware, but it brings my attention back into focus on him. In a Guardian interview before the festival Ware describes how he is ‘fascinated with that meniscus between recognisable and unrecognisable’, like wind in the trees that sounds like a familiar pop song. There's some definite knob twiddling going in. Tom's not moving. The Lithuanian Attache finds this hilarious. I tell her that he's doing his emails. It's like a radio tuning in and out. The only thing I can compare the sonic experience to is Chris Watson's multi-channel live mixes. Two pioneers from Sheffield still pushing the envelope.
Next on stage is Remember a Day by Alexis Kirke, a researcher of both music and computer science at Plymouth Uni. Kirke explained his intention behind the project in a video posted online a few weeks before. It's an illustration his idea that singing might help those with dementia to remember important information. Wearing a grey suit and tie, he sits with a laptop to the left of stage, while a cellist and soprano take their positions. As silence settles, Kirke reaches for his phone, setting off a ringtone melody which is taken up by the cello. The soprano adds words "Ge-t u-p, wa-sh hair, bru-sh teeth..." intoned in slow operatic phrasing. It's a daily routine, punctuated by activities relating to a dog. This last word always sung as a long semitone note: "....brush d-oogg".
Then come numbers, one to nine, up and down in scale, like vocal exercises, before breaking out into recognisable 077.. telephone numbers. From out of these comes a new refrain "*Co-codamol* twice a day, twenty-five one hun-dred". It's the back of a medicine label. The cello throughout is really quite exciting, all sorts of strange rhythms. I'm later told this is a by-product of algorithmic composition, music written by a computer that can only apply a mathematical understanding of melody. In the third movement the mobile phone lets rip. Synthetic chimes ringing through space, cello chopping and slicing and sluicing through and around them. The vocals return and the ringing ends. The daily routine holds us steady. The chimes swing back in. Ringing up and down the scales like church bells. Heralding the joyous occasion of brushing the dog.
On Saturday morning I go to see Alexis talk about A Day To Remember with members of the local Alzheimer’s Society and Singing with Dementia, a local group that promotes the palliative benefits of group singing. They show us a video of one of their workshops. The interviews with husband and wife couples brings a tear to the eye and makes me wonder at the power of music to bring joy to even the most difficult of lives. Nicole Quin, whose Irish mother benefited from the group, tells us how the group activity helps to reduce social isolation, while familiar recordings can form the basis for desert island disc style storytelling.
I have lunch with Tim Grabham who is in Plymouth to film the festival and interview Prof Miranda for a film he's making on the incredible properties of slime mould, a single-celled amoeba-like organism. Apparently there are some exciting musical applications already in the pipeline for the 2015 festival. It sounds fascinating.
That evening Prof Miranda premieres his latest work 'Sounds from the Underground', which sees him duet on piano with Lauryna Sableviciute. The distinction between this and every other piano duet I've seen is that one of the two won't actually touch the piano. Prof Miranda will instead use an array of electromagments installed in an impressive array over the open strings of the grand. They will vibrate the strings according to an computer alogrithm that interweaves with the work of Sableviciute's fingers. The results are strange sonorities, pulses in pizzicato, bowing and percussive in accordance with Miranda's taste for the classical music of his own South American heritage. Another highlight of the evening is Linas Baltas Air, which sees two string orchestras play simultaneous pieces that sound like slithering variations on Air on a G String.
Concert over, Alexis and I hop in his red hatchback to drive down to the Hoe and watch the tail end of the storms that ravaged the coast at Dawlish. Most of the waterfront is cordoned off with hazard tape so we venture to the nearest wall overlooking the Hoe. The dark water of Plymouth Sound crashes into the stone cliff front below throwing up plumes of white spray. Earlier in the week the waves were coming right up over the road. A Chinese restaurant just below us is in tatters, its large windows smashed in by the same sea they were made to view.
We spot figures halfway down the front of the Hoe towards the Barbican, Young lads, an decide to join them, partly out of civic responsibility, but mostly due to our own thirst to get closer to the action. By the time we get there they're right down at the foot of the cliff where waves are crashing over the stone quay. We stop one of the lads from going down the last sea slicked flight of stairs. He's drunk, so I struggle to make out what he's trying to tell me. "it's alright" he shouts "I'm a poet."
A few months earlier Alexis had stood in front of Prince Charles and local dignitaries conducting the wave pool in the University's new Marine Institute. The pool was rigged with sensors and Alexis armed with hacked Kinect controllers that could sense his arm movements and relay them back to the pool controls. He's a poet too.
Biomusic, the 10th Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival, takes place at Plymouth University this weekend, 27 February - 1 March: http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/event.htmhttp://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/event.htm
Decisions made by pre-programmed computer
algorithms are increasingly affecting our lives, and not always for the better; a point made
clear by two events in the last two weeks.
An Amazon glitch between 7 and 8pm last Friday saw hundreds of products automatically plummet to a
rock bottom price of 1p, at which point they were quickly snapped up by consumers already
whipped into a bargain Christmas gift frenzy by media hype around Black Friday. The culprate in this case was Repricer Express - a software which
promises "continuous repricing 24/7" for sellers across multiple online
channels. As a seller, this is a way of ensuring that you're offering the
most competitive prices for your wares without having to check on the
competition yourself. Come Saturday morning, a number of people who had left the algorithms
in charge found that huge amounts of stock had been
given a way in a freak 1hr flash sale caused by a glitch in the software.
Whilst an algorithm stealing from Amazon will be seen by
many as a kind of automated Robin Hood, redistributing riches from the greedy corporation to the poor consumer, it turns out that the online megalith won't be the one that will actually suffer. Craig Constantinides of Go2Games claimed in CityAM that
£358,000 of stock had been affected. He issued pleas via Facebook for
customers to return, or pay full price, for goods purchased in the
giveaway. Which raises the point that although it was the machines
wot gave it away, it was consumers that pounced on the bargains, unable
to believe their luck. Should it be on their conscience whether they return
the goods? It will be unless Repricer Express or Amazon refund all damages.
To be fair to Repricer Express, they have
pointed out that there is already an automatic alert built into the software to warn
retailers of any dramatic price fluctuation. This suggests that
those who came a-cropper were those who chose to turn this function off
and trust the machines. On the other hand the hour of the glitch could just have
easily affected anyone who was doing something other than constantly
check their phones 24/7.
Talking of conscience, the second crime against humanity
perpetrated by the algorithms this week was courtesy of taxi app Uber. The company operates an automatic surge pricing which saw fares in the area of
Sidney caught up in the hostage siege shoot up to a minimum of $100, as
people tried to flee the area. A spokesperson for the company explained
that the system was designed to attract more drivers to an area of high
demand, but the company quickly moved to regain their human status by
offering free rides to all affected. This goes to show that behind every algorithm lies a
human agent with the power to decide how it is programmed and to take
responsibility for any resulting failure. The real
heartless automaton of the week was the badly programmed disgrace to the Islamic
faith responsible for it all, not to mention the idiots posing for selfies at the cordon.
Human agents need be held to
account for any machine-made decisions, but we all need to be aware of
how much to responsibility we are handing over to the automation in our
lives.
Monday 9 February 2015: If you're interested in these ideas, I can thoroughly recommend Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage, published last month by Bodley Head.
How could you not be excited by Warp x Tate? Pioneering electronic music label teams up with top UK art institution for a night inspired by Jeremy Deller’s 'Acid Brass'. What a setting for a party. What a perfect way to see the re-hang of the newly refurbished gallery. As the day drew nearer, it became obvious that I was not alone. Twatter and Facewaste were abuzz. Asking around, it seemed that everyone was planning on going. This had the taste of a big rave, albeit it likely to be an above-board and respectable one.
By Friday afternoon @Tate was sending out cautionary tweets about limited capacity. I bolted out of work at 5.30pm on the dot, raced down to Vauxhall and hurried over the bridge. By 6pm the queue was already snaking around the block from the ramp to the lower ground, while the front steps were littered with groups of people. We made it in by quarter past, dodged the secondary queue for the cloakroom and headed up the stairs to see what was going on.
The lights were out in the busy central hall with projectors casting Warp videos onto the walls. At the far end, a blown up version of Deller's Acid Brass spider map filled the space between two colossal columns. In front of this, Patten was onstage, emitting disjointed noise and geek cool. Unless you were crushed into a fairly small sweet spot at the front, though, the sound from two tiny speakers was quiet and echoey: lost in the cavernous hall with drinks queues longer than Mark Wallinger’s 'State Britain'. Instead we set off in search of Warp installations dotted around the newly rehung galleries.
First stop: Hudson Mohawke's 'Summer of Love' in the 'The Chapman Family Collection' room. It's packed with people wandering between the faux-African Macdonalds sculptures, chatting and posing for Instagrams, as an oil wheel projector casts psychedelic swirls onto the roof above. A short loop of ambient electronica pulses through a couple of small speakers on the floor. It’s a playful environment, which works well, but Hud Mo’s Dazed video made to preview the installation does a better job of evoking the spirit of 1987.
Just outside the door, a studio light has been set up to illuminate Deller’s original Acid Brass spider diagram, hung in a corner next to a colossal Peter Doig. Here we can read about the original 1996 performance, which saw a brass pit band playing acid house anthems. The diagram describes links between the two, tying the rave movement into a wider cultural context of pit strikes, electronic dance music and the North. I love this piece and can’t wait to hear the embodiment of it later. The rest of the room contains some Wolfgang Tillmans photos, a Fiona Rae painting, a rather nice black and white Keith Coventry and some large panes of crushed flowers which appear to be leaking down the wall. On behalf of the old Tate, I'm slightly shocked. This bodes well.
Having lost my friends, I leave the 1990s and time travel back towards the 1980s. I’m immediately be blown away by a Bill Woodrow junk sculpture, a life-size elephant head on the wall with AK47s for tusks, standing guard over a village-meeting-style circle of smashed car door windows. Its ears are maps of Africa, torn from large-scale Atlases. Rejoined by the group, we pose for photographs with the epic wall trophy and follow its sad gaze across the room to Mark Wallinger's ‘Where There’s Muck’ - the word ‘Albion’ spray painted in giant Tory-blue letters directly onto the wall, over a tableau of burnt wood, with a worker figure on the central panel. The date is 1985. Exciting stuff. We pose for photos with Barry Flanagan’s ‘Leaping Hare’. It lends itself well to narrative.
Floating further back in time, I'm drawn by the sounds of electronica, past a startling late Francis Bacon triptych and Richard Long's photograph of 'A Line Made by Walking', into a room of 1960s collage and bricolage sculpture. Anwar Jalal Shemza's 'Chessmen One', 1961, is a revelation of Islamic modernism. I love the Paolzzi, as always, and Burra's drawing-cum-photomontage 'Keep Your Head'. I didn't even know he made them. Through a doorway, Henry Moore's shiny, domed 'Maquette for Helmet Head' pulls me towards it like a magnet. I thought I knew Henry Moore, but this whole room is a physical rediscovery for me. Over the years his work has become flattened in my mind, by successive 2D reproductions and sketches. This is a powerful space to be in though, with all its myriad angles, air resonant with form and the ehoes of vintage synths from next door. Modern British sculpture might have it's associations with Britten at al but perhaps it should be displayed more frequently with early electronica in the background.
The 808 and 303 tribute room runs parallel to this one and features the two legendary synths on plinths at opposite ends of the room. They're not plugged in, but the plinths have movement sensors on them. Someone tells me that every time you pass one you add or remove a layer to the track which loops through the speakers on the floor. I never work out the exact configuration. Around the room are black and white photographs by Chris Shaw, one of the few British contemporary photographs still making good work in this tradition. Each is scrawled with their own quirky title in black pen. They're juxtaposed with prints from 1960s Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, whose impressionistic blurs of Tokyo nightlife have enjoyed a significant reappraisal in the West of late. The gritty aesthetics complement the raw sound.
By this point we’re gasping for a drink so we decide to try my luck at the slightly quieter downstairs bar. There's still a huge queue outside, trickling through a barrier of security guards in ones and twos. One half of The Blessings (as I discover when I speak to him later) is playing some pretty tasty off-kilter beats next to the bar. He gets a few people moving, but it's hard to galvanize a dance floor bisected by a 15min drinks queue. Unable to take our drinks anywhere else, we elect to re-watch the Dazed videos in one of the screening rooms.
Back upstairs, we head in search of Melancholy. I find myself in Martin Creed's light room, which for some reason has a crowd barrier running through it. Taking the right fork I find myself channelled, in slowly strobing light, towards a closed door in the next room. A group of people is sitting in my way. I step over them to duck out of the channel. Later on I find out that this was the queue. Apparently, at it's peak people were waiting for Creed's light to go out and trying to push into the queue, only to be caught in the act as it flicked back on again.
The last stop on the installation trail is Rustie, in the Turner wing. I find it by accident, following the sound while misdirecting a friend towards the 808 tribute room. It's the best sound I've heard all night. It draws us down the corridor lined with Turners and into a room with two speakers. There are no beats; only resonance, high and bright. People are sitting, walking around or staring intently into oily sunbursts and thickly textured rural scenes. When sound in our room fades, I realise it's getting louder in the opposite alcove. We migrate accross. There are another two speakers here. A group dressed in black, some with beards, join me. I head back into the corridor between the rooms, sound washing between them, and watch 'Hannibal Crossing the Alps'. The music is reaching euphoric cresendo. In the room I've just come from, a large man with a serious beard throws his arms into the air in semi-ironic elation. He's framed by a huge golden, greeny-brown painting. It's beautiful. We keep chasing the sound down the corridor. It's 10 channels in total, split between 5 rooms, in and out of which we wheel and glide. I could spend all night here, but it's 9 now and time for the main event: Jeremy Deller's Acid Brass Band. We head back to the main hall in anticipation.
Halfway towards the front we hit a wall of people and pause to drink newly acquired ciders, which we’ve now realised are cheaper than beer. It's as crowded now as it was at the start. Eventually, a figure in baby blue suit jacket pops up onstage, folllowed by another, and another. All carrying shiny brass instruments. The crowd whoops and cheers. As they strike up, we start to dance. We've been waiting all night for the opportunity. On the grand stone walls around us, scenes of dancing crowds in warehouses strobe and flicker. The people around us are fairly static, so we form a chain and start snaking towards the front. Reaching a impasse by a roped off artwork we stop and introduce ourselves to the people who's space we've invaded. They're much more lively. It's all smile and grins as we groove through the set. The band are clearly having fun too, especially the conductor, whose manic grin and enthusiasm remind me of that guy who always climbs up on the speakers at the front to really let loose.
When the set ends someone near us starts a joky chant of "One More Tune!" But it's all over. We drift out of the cavernous hall, out onto the grand steps, littered with people smoking and donning coats. Out into the night. The iron railings around the building are plastered with bikes, strapped on at jaunty angles. Waving farewell to my friends I weave through groups of fellow ravers over the river and back towards the station. I catch the eye of the guy boarding my train with me and we sit next to each other to loudly compare notes on the night. It feels like 5am in the morning.
I get home and go to bed with the ghosts of artworks flashing on my retinas in the usual place of hi-hats and synths echoing in my ears. It’s 11pm.
Here are my three favourite pieces of advice that I can remember from 2013:
"A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life." Hunter S Thomson, Letters of Note
"People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you." Neil Gaiman addresses graduates at The University of the Arts, Pensilvania
"Be here now" Sign painted onto the side of a converted schoolbus bus on its way to Burning Man Festival
Ever wondered what 50 blokes singing a Georgian Wassling song sounds like? Well now you know!
A huge thank you to the wonderful Choir With No Name who invited us to support their Christmas Extravaganza at Union Chapel on Tuesday.What an incredible experience and what a brilliant project to be involved in. The choir - which now counts chapters in Birmingham and Liverpool, as well as North and South London - has been established to provide people on the edge of society with all the positive support that I've discovered since joining Chaps. It's an exciting, positive project to feel involved in, it provides a strong sense of community and it gives you the simple, uplifting pleasure of singing in harmony with other people. The Choir With No Name also share a meal after every practice, which is a lovely idea.
Between the two London and Birmingham choirs we were treated to a very merry medley of Christmas classics, tender carols and even a festive version of The Specials. There was humour, There were brave soloists and there was plenty of tinsel. Before the finale we were introduced to Suzanne, who became homeless after struggling with her drinking but has now been with Choir With No Name for five months. She said, “the more I think about going there, and concentrating and doing what I’ve got to do, the better I feel. So the best thing I ever did is join the choir”. Here's their website where you can sign up to support the charity as a 'groupie': www.choirwithnoname.org
I volunteered to run the Chaps Choir social media for the evening and was over-whelmed by all the Chappreciation from the audience. I think we can now count Janet Street Porter as a fan, as well as quite a few other women who apparently want to grow beards so that they can join us. Not bad for our second concert! Here's the Storify:
"You wanna get deep?" asks Watkins Tudor Jones of zef rap group Die Antwoord in a 2010 interview with The Times of South Africa. Their 2012 music video for the track Fatty Boom Boom - which combines an irreverent Laga Gaga parody with shots of rappers Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er dancing frenetically in white and black body paint - has amassed over 15 million hits on youtube since it was first posted. Along the way it's sparked accusations of racism and prompted scathing attacks from Lady Gaga’s fans, while Die Antwoord have been head-hunted by everyone from advertisers to Hollywood.
The video was also one of the internet 'memes' up for discussion in a Shoreditch basement atFuture Human's 'Meme Control’, the last salon of 2013.
So what is a meme and how deep do they get? Are they just time-wasting internet distractions or do they say something profound about the human condition?
The term was originally coined in The Selfish Gene, a 1976 book by Richard Dawkins in which he proposes that genes, like viruses, rely on humans to be passed on. “Genes are the replicators" Dawkins wrote "and we are their survival machines.” Towards the end of the book, he goes on to suggest that perhaps culture could be seen in a similar way. He created the word ‘meme’ from the root 'mimeme', Greek for ‘imitated thing’, to describe "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”. Since then, the word has been appropriated by internet culture to explain the ‘viral’ proliferation of cat videos, animated gifs and anodyne quotes which seem to take up so much of people’s attention online.
So what are the links between the two, and why do people share these things? Future Human’s Jack Gwilym Roberts opens the evening, updating Dawkin’s theory with some thoughts on evolutionary psychology. This is the idea that all behaviour can be traced back to primal urges - to mate, to eat, to ship our pants (20 million views). So are we, as Dawkins suggests, controlled by our memes? Does sharing demonstrate altruistic behaviour, which helps us to work and survive together as a society? Do we copy and share because we want to look good to potential mates? Or in sharing internet memes are we just breeding idiocy? Are they, like religion, just a way for us to simplify the world, to rationalise experience and relieve stress in a complex environment?
Basic emotion is a critical factor, says Holly Clarke, a former 'meme scientist' at Unruly media, who admits partial responsibility for the T-Mobile Dance (38 million views) and the Evian Babies (72 million views). Viral ads, she tells us, rely on feelings such as surprise, anticipation, fear and disgust, to stimulate a physical reaction. But it seems that as we find ourselves exposed to ever higher volumes of 'content', we quickly become numb to these provocations. It’s all about "being more epic than the last epic thing". Your viral ad needs to have “a wtf?! factor” to survive. This certainly seems to be something which Die Antwoord have understood.
Tony Sampson, author of 'Virality', thinks that this leads less a case of survival of the fittest and more a reign of the idiot. 'Cognition is the enemy of marketing,' someone tweets to the screen. “Exactly,” says Tony.
The internet is still in it's infancy, says Holly. We're still learning what to read, what to look at, and what to share. Effectively, we’re still learning how to manage our attention online. "The BBC still has lots of awful things at the top of it's most read,” she points out. Ideas which are simply ‘wacky’ quickly dissipate though. “Who’s going to care about the Evian Babies in a few years time?” asks the woman who created them.
Whereas people used to share things just because they were “a stupid internet video”, now, says Clarke, people are looking for something real. Hence the increasing use of hidden cameras and user generated content in mainstream advertising. Think Kevin Macdonald and that Sainsbury’s Christmas advert.
Maybe this is a sign that the internet is growing up? So the question is, as it matures, is the internet is going to become more responsible? Perhaps it already is, says Holly, it just depends on who's using it. She points to open data culture, while in his opening presentation Jack cites Avaaz, an online campaigning organisation with over 30m members worldwide, as an example of using the rules of memes to do good.
One person who takes his responsibility very seriously is Stuart Calimport, founder of The Human Memome Project (great name). Stuart, who comes across as a very earnest member of the Quantified Self movement, has begun to create metrics around his own response to memes, in the Dawkinsian sense, and to compare his results with others. Unlike most marketing companies, he says his primary motivation is to look for the health and longevity predictors which they might reveal. Stuart wants to live forever and is interested in the ideas and behaviours that are going to help him get there (and you too - for the right amount of money). He believes that everyone has a 'memome', a sequence of constituent ideas and influences that has shaped their personality in a similar manner to DNA. If only we could work out how to shape them in the right way… This links back to an idea Jack mentioned in his introduction. If the brain can be seen as hardware, for the software of the mind, then perhaps memes are the code?
Not in the eyes of Sampson, who thinks that all of this is founded on pseudo science. "Culture is not biologically determined," he tells us, and "meme is a dodgy theory… a control mechanism for a certain system of belief". The question of how ideas spread is an old one, Tony says, which can be traced back to the development of crowd theory at the turn of the 20th century and the rise of socialism and popular fascism. The transfer of ideas is really about society and about networks. Computer viruses such as ‘Melissa’ and ‘I love you’, are spread socially.
"People will only share if they think they're the influencer" says Holly. It's about having content which engages and provokes, but it's also about seeding this content with the right people at the right time. It's about finding those key influencers who everyone else copies.
Again Tony disagrees. Read 'Is the Tipping Point Toast?' he urges us. This is a Fast Company article by Clive Thompson, which outlines research by Duncan Watts seemingly discrediting Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that a small number of very cool people dictate the trends that everyone else follows. Gladwell based his theory on a famous 1967 study in which a sample group was asked to pass letters to a certain individual through their personal networks alone. It was found that the average number of links from sender to the recipient was six, hence the degrees of separation, but also that the majority of letters went through the hands of three key individuals. Interested in these ideas, Duncan Watts, a network scientist, set up a number of much bigger computer simulations to test the theory. To cut a long story short, he concluded that while the six degrees finding held true, a trend or meme could in fact be started by anyone in the network. Although it was true that those started by key influencers spread wider and quicker, there was statistically more chance that a trend would come from elsewhere. Trends, he concludes, are more akin to wildfires than viruses. Hundreds of fires take place in forests, but they only turn into wildfires when the conditions are just right. "If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes.
So it's all about creating something to match the public mood, which is exactly what Holly claims to have achieved with her viral successes - deploying retro music, rollerskates and cuteness as a killer combo. At the same time, though, I don't think we can discount the need to disseminate ideas in order for them to take off. While Watts’ computer generated results did show that an idea can start anywhere, and be carried by word of mouth, it also proves that it’s when people with large networks or audiences pick up on them that they really spread. For each of her campaigns, Holly sent the videos to people with large online followings at just the right time for them to create a surge of interest which quickly snowballed.
I think the confusion here is with how we see these people. Yes, they are influencers, but, as with all of us who create, curate and share content online now, they are also now publishers with audiences to entertain (shows us those thumbs! Bask in the reassuring glow of those retweets!). Hence a desire for exclusive content which will spread quickly, rather than something which takes too long to digest and think about (like this blog).
Which brings me to a comparison with pre-internet media. Which newspapers sell the most copies? In the UK it’s the The Sun and The Daily Mail. How do they do it? By getting exclusive stories which provoke basic emotional reactions and harness the public’s mood.
So perhaps things really haven’t changed that much after all, and maybe it’s not the internet that needs to grow up. You might even suggest that the best way to improve our Human Memone is simply through a good education - the most effective form of memetic engineering (to extend a metaphor). I strongly believe that basic secondary education should include critical analysis (ie. thinking for yourself), media literacy (ie. being able to understand how the media works) and some understanding of the power structures of society (ie. the agenda behind it all and how to play the game). But then I guess we can’t all be as earnest as Stuart, or as pessimistic as Tony, and those cat videos really are much funnier than homework... *
*Besides, Michael Gove thinks education should be more about mnemonics than memetics, and he's in charge now.
