 Preferences. Okay. I like just why you didn't come. Sure. Yeah, and then. Good. Hi, welcome to Park Avenue Armory. I am Heather Lubov. I'm the Chief Development Officer at the Armory, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to our stunning Board of Officers room, which just opened last week after an extensive restoration. I do think this is truly one of the most beautiful rooms in New York, thanks to our brilliant architects Herzog and Demeron. I would also like to say a very warm welcome to all of you who are tuning in to our very first live stream, and you are all encouraged to tweet your thoughts and questions using the handle hashtag MAVAC. We took over the lease to the building six years ago with a mission to restore our landmark spaces as a center for immersive and unconventional art. Massive attack versus Adam Curtis is a perfect example of the work that we do, giving to extremely talented artists the ability to dream big, to be provocative, and to quite literally, if you haven't seen the show yet, surround the audience with their art. Thanks to the British Council, which has been an incredibly generous funder of the show, as well as the sponsor of the series of talks related to the work, we have a fantastic panel assembled tonight to discuss one of the major issues that Adam Curtis considers in his work, the role of the media. So it is with great pleasure, it is my great pleasure to thank and to introduce Graham Sheffield, the Director of Arts for the British Council, who will moderate tonight's panel. Graham is responsible for the Council's global arts policy. He's had a long and distinguished career in the arts, including 15 years as the artistic director of London's Barbican Center, which is Europe's largest multi-art center. We feel a particular kinship with the Barbican, because like the Armory, it programs in all artistic forms, music, theater, dance, film, spoken word, and the visual arts, and places a very strong emphasis on artistic partnerships and on arts education. Graham also served as the CEO of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong, where he led the development of one of the largest arts infrastructures and programming projects ever envisioned. So I will turn things over to Graham. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. And I should say, actually it's interesting, you made the reference to the Barbican, is that Alex Poots, who's your programmer here or your director here, worked for me when I was at the South Bank, actually in the 90s. Some of you may know the festival Meltdown, which is still going after 20-odd years. I started that in 93, and Alex came and helped program in 94. And then when we did a festival on the US in the Barbican in 98, Alex was our consultant. So we've been working together for like 20, 20 years. So I'm sorry he's not here tonight, but he may be tucked under the duvet in Manchester watching this on the live stream. So hello, Alex. I think several people have said they're going to be watching this tonight. So welcome to all of you, whether you're in the US, UK or other parts of the world. I think maybe there's one colleague watching from Syria, though it's quite late, from Lebanon, actually she is Syrian, but from the Middle East. It's quite so it's great to think that this discussion will resonate further than this room. I've certainly always been drawn to works of art, which comment on and reflect and challenge contemporary and recent history and politics. And as such, this piece, which I saw in Manchester, is a fantastically bold and innovative example, typical of the challenging and the risky artistic policy that Alex chooses to follow in his festival direction, both in Manchester as well as here. And I'm assuming everybody here has either seen it or will see it tonight. So I won't be revealing, as it were, the end of the Agatha Christie storyline. If I say it's a very, very provocative and challenging take on world history post war through to 22,005 Iraq, unless it's changed since I saw it in Manchester, give or take a few years in either direction. It's almost the history of my history in a sense. So a lot of the images I was seeing, I remember from my childhood, not the very, very earliest ones. So in very, very contemporary, intense visual experience and the music formed by Robert Del Nayo of massive attack and the provocative filmmaking. Now the theme for the panel tonight is not specifically artistic, not a critique of the show as such, but we've called it viewing media through an artistic lens dash, the power of illusion and the illusion of power. But hopefully we're going to cast some light on the show and its purpose from philosophical, philosophical angle, political angle, economic and journalistic. And joining me to explore the topic, a fantastically distinguished trio of thinkers on my left, Alexis Goldstein, activist, self described as activist, writer, programmer, teacher and occupier, a contributor at the nation, frequent media guest on MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes. And she tells me recently joined an organization called The Other 98%. Maybe you'll bring that into the discussion at some point, encouraging public democracy. On the far right Simon Critchley, philosopher and presenter of an excellent series of talks at Brooklyn Academy of Music, self-confessively as a philosopher, quotes, interested in everything. And Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Center for Journalists and not for profit for the advancement of quality journalism worldwide. And goodness knows we need it. I think you very much needed, I would have thought particularly in the UK actually at the moment. I must say I found it an extraordinary show, particularly as I'm a musician of overlie of the ironic and contemporary popular music of the period. Even finding bits of Peter Grimes, Britain's Peter Grimes stuck in there. It's quite hard to unpick sometimes some of the decision making, some of the hectoring tone of the piece, the villains all exposed. But whatever you think of it or thought of it, it is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking with a brilliant cross-cutting and editing and the whole creative process is a fascinating in itself. So let's start with the immediate reactions to the work from the audience, as it were, the panellists who've seen the work in the last few days. Just give us your headline thoughts on how it was for you. That's the best way to start and then we'll get to everybody in the discussion. And we will have opportunities for Q&A at the end, so please store up your provocative and challenging questions for the panel, and we'll have 20 minutes at the end to catch those. So who wants to start? Alexis, you're looking bursting to go. Sure. Can I just see who has seen the piece already? Okay, about half of them. So I found it very visceral. I think that what I appreciated about it is it seemed a political piece with sort of an overarching message, but it was also deeply personal and it was trying to manipulate our emotions, I felt, because there were a lot of individual characters that we were sort of introduced to and got to know. And it explored a lot of different themes from sort of like our obsession with the 24-hour news cycle to the fetishization of finance and data and the sort of pitfalls and challenges and really chaos that has come in the wake of it. But what I found moving was the sort of interplay between the sort of pounding music and the lights. Like in particular, there's one moment that I remember, and I don't think this unveils anything for those of you who haven't seen it, where there's gunfire and there's a scene of war and the lights are firing in rapid succession so as we feel as if we are being ourselves attacked. And there are moments where it's talking about all of us becoming more withdrawn into ourselves and the visions and the visuals of the piece are very dark and the music is very dark. And so it's the sort of participatory experience. We're looking at this narration of what the world has become and the sort of cynicism and the darkness that the world has become, but we are brought along, I felt, in that journey and made to feel emotionally the same thing that we're sort of being told the world itself has become. And so that was what I thought was most moving about it. Did you concentrate on the message or the art? I found them fairly indistinguishable. I suppose if I were had to pick one, I was focused more on the message. I found it to be a fascinating work of art. I had myself had never experienced anything like this and when I tried to explain what it was to people, I was as a journalist, I usually have words to explain it. And I just couldn't put my finger on one thing that it was. It was sort of a documentary. It was sort of a concert. It was sort of a visual arts show. I mean it was a lot of things and you know obviously there was a lot of there was some very strong and interesting storytelling in this thing. So for me the fact that I was puzzled and struggling to figure it out was actually an exciting thing because I felt this was a new experience for me as a viewer. A new form of entertainment that was also illuminating. I didn't necessarily agree with the storyline. As a journalist I didn't see it, you notice I did not say this is a work of journalism. I didn't see it as a work of journalism even though I know the the creator may see himself as a journalist. But I did think it was an exciting experience of as a participant and a lover of the arts. Yeah I mean I really liked it. I'm here as the massive attack fan. I mean I grew up listening to well a bit more than grew up listening to massive attack and I don't know how familiar people here and elsewhere are with the massive attack phenomenon and what that means. We could talk about that but and they've got Horace Andy who is a legend for people like me. Jamaican reggae singer and Liz Fraser who was the lead singer in Cotto Twins and that sort of stuff. And then I mean for the bass sound alone alone it's worth being in the room. The sound quality is extraordinary. That's united visual arts. So the sound is a kind of immersive totality and it really is beautiful because it's incredibly loud but there's no distortion. So and then the screens are I mean this multiple screen effect is is terrific. It's a you know that I mean the things that it reminds me of a little bit of the pieces by artists like Mark Leckie, British artist like Fiorucci made me hardcore which used popular music and and and footage like that but this is also more kind of didactic as a story and if you know Adam Curtis is I guess if you can enter anything by him it would be a century of the self which is an extraordinary account of the emergence of the self out of propaganda through the medium of Freud's nephew. It's extraordinary and it's also it's a very very particular and didactic history and this is a very particular in didactic history I see as the shift from I guess you know a kind of post-war world cold war world which was premised upon some idea that there could be change that individuals could change the world and and that was a good thing to a vision of what he calls repeatedly a managed world or a static world which is where we find ourselves today and the kind of linchpin in that narrative is Chernobyl and and the image of the sarcophagus so it's a kind of very personal take on the last 50 60 years of Western history let's say and and it goes in a very kind of dystopian direction and and then then you come up with a nice conclusion at the end I won't spoil for people but I'm not sure whether I buy it but it tells us some very good encapsulation of it it tells us a lot about Adam Curtis himself and his views but does it tell us anything about the power of the art in the sense that is he saying there's nothing we can do about it or there's nothing that the that work can do to make us learn lessons from what we've done is there a sense of even though the ending tries to be optimistic is it in a sense a false optimism was a very peculiar kind of you know I'd like the other people to you know to get a sense of this there's very peculiar kind of irony you know in the piece that it's all about the development of a world which is 24 7 cnn news coverage as it were a world of endless two-dimensional images that will not go away and will not die and and we sit for 90 stand for 90 minutes watching images of that world immersed in a in a kind of nostalgic world which is the world of massive attack in the 1990s so I don't know I mean there was an extraordinary moment in the in the narrative which is where he talks about the Taliban and about Taliban iconoclasm because one response to as it were a world of images is to just to the big images destroy them well and nothing and without I suppose unveiling it for those of you who haven't seen it that was a particularly moving piece because they essentially show that the Taliban aimed to erase all imagery and then make a very compelling case for the fact that they were actually very much influenced by the imagery of the American mass media and the operatives of Hollywood and they sort of present that in a way that is I don't want to spoil it for anyone but it's it's very very moving and very powerful yeah and that's true you know I mean it's you know I remember reading Osama bin Laden's statement than the Towers of Lebanon where he talks is this one it's the one where he talks about the motivation for the 9-11 attacks and the motivation 9-11 attacks was it was a visual memory that he had of the attacks on the Towers of Beirut from 1982 so as it were 9-11 begins as a visual memory and you know we tend to forget there's a lot more we could say about that about the power of it the strange power of it so I'm not sure whether we're shown a way out well that's that's oh go on sorry I was just going to say like I agree with you because you sort of wonder if we're being punked by the end because there's so much emphasis throughout the piece about you can be fooled by things that are not real and we present these illusions and then they become reality and it gives the example of um Donald Brumsfeld that meet the press and talking about how Osama bin Laden is hiding inside of this giant enormous underground fortress and there's dozens of them just like this and and and then in the end you know it's very clear that we have been fooled by this illusion and yet we have craft and there's no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq either and we're being fooled by the illusion so to what extent is the audience meant to be aware of the idea that maybe we're being fooled by an illusion as we sit here and watch the piece yeah or not yes I mean I found it in some sense is quite nihilistic in the sense that the you know you're not left with any any solutions any better ways out he's excoriated virtually everything from the extreme right to the extreme left but he's never actually said what that ideal world is he's just shown us how we failed over the last 50 but you know that said you know it's kind of interesting that you know I could see he had he had several couples that he picked out and one of them was you know Ted Turner and Jane Fonda and you can see the example of Jane Fonda who was the great change the world fight the Vietnam war and then she's you know miss body beautiful doing her calisthenics but Ted Turner you know Ted Turner created CNN of course you know I'm the journalist here speaking but um and I was trying to I'm sitting there thinking what was wrong with the creation of a 24 7 news channel what was what was the the heresy in this did he did he feel that the images just got cheapened because they were commoditized or or what um you know one of the interesting things as a journalist I mentioned this to you earlier was that I covered the Chernobyl nuclear disaster which is shown as one of the great failings of the of the era and um and I will tell you that this accident happened I mean I know it vividly I know the day I mean when it happened it happened on a Saturday April 26 1986 and I was the Moscow bureau chief of Newsweek at the time we did not know till three or four days later that there there actually had been an accident you know we we were aware over the weekend that radiation had been flowing somewhere they were capturing it and and they thought it was Sweden and Sweden shut down its its its nuclear power plants and then they said no it's coming from you know the direction I was sitting in and it was like oh my god and I remember when my boss has called me on a Tuesday and said to me um we're doing a cover story and I said oh okay on what so on the worst nuclear accident in history now imagine imagine that now I mean is this progress that they could hide people could hide things of that magnitude in that era to us and we we were just shut out of the news so I'm I'm wondering whether his premise about technology data sending of information is actually that horrible thing I mean look at Assad now in Syria his father leveled a whole freaking town in Syria Amat and nobody could see it and nobody did anything about it and now look what his son has done with poison gas and the whole world is on him and we have evidence we have pictures we have citizen journalism we have a lot of so I struggled with his I struggled with a lot of his vision of the world today and I guess I'm more optimistic it's not exactly nuanced the vision is it no it's that's why it's not journalistic it's not even there's no other side it's just he's got a vision of how dark this world is and he does a very good job of using multimedia to to get it across but I have to say that you know maybe others identify and it wasn't that there weren't things that resonated with me that he said but it wouldn't exactly be if I were going to write the story that would be the way I would see the world I think one of the things that I got out of what he was trying to say about the mass media and the constant cycle was that we are our sort of observers now we're spectators we aren't active participants in our own lives with agency it's this idea that we're being inundated with data at all times and it allows us to withdraw into our sarcophagus which is one of the central themes that keeps coming up and I actually don't have an answer I'm curious what the rest of you think but of how to unpack this because it starts with Chernobyl fairly early on Chernobyl is itself a sarcophagus and then later on in the piece it talks about how we have all become this sort of self-contained sarcophagus and there's a lot of people that he identifies throughout the piece who also withdraw into themselves there's the scientist who won't leave his hotel room in Reno there's the daughter of of Pauline Boti thank you who eventually dies of a heroin overdose and is sort of withdrawn into herself and so there's this like recurring theme of the sarcophagus and I'm still trying to figure out how to unpack how you know Chernobyl here's this accident that sort of presses outward versus the sarcophagus that pulls inward while we sit and just watch reality we sit and watch reality and we take drugs to affect our moods there's a little interview with a kid with a ADD or whatever and the proliferation of the pathologies of the sarcophagus as it were and the drug treatments that go along with it. It's interesting you mentioned the Chernobyl and the sarcophagus and the fact that if if they'd still be making this film they could have sort of reeled in Japan and the whole Fukushima nuclear plant which is all happening all over again but Simon you had a sort of mini treatise you wanted to deliver on the sort of sarcophagus and and the kind of what is a sarcophagus and how how do you unpick that well because you could think of a sarcophagus as somewhere you put dead people but it's not true because in Egyptian sarcophagi then this was a this was a passage to the afterlife life didn't end it continued in some other form so the sarcophagus is not a place for the dead it's the place for the kind of undead and the sarcophagus of Chernobyl is certainly not dead the the nuclear gunk in there lives and will live for however long that will live and then the sarcophagus of data within which we I mean the prisons that we build for ourselves with our phones and our the rest of the apparatus that we use are also not going to die right well and there's that occurring you dropped it tonight and your facebook page will still be up and running that celebrities never die we're watching dead people dance over and over and over again and there's that sort of long montage of people who are no longer with us dancing so we live in this sort of ghost world right and the film is a kind of almost you know ghostly nostalgia at times for the ways of which we're inhabited by the past which is almost an afterlife in itself isn't it yeah and it's and there's something you know I mean I might be the only person here who believes in ghosts because you know I believe in theater and theater is all about ghosts hamlet uh escaluses the persians and it's all about and ghosts are those creatures that refuse to obey the line between life and death and that can seem like a supernatural thought but can also seem like a you know we are in an odd situation that we're we're not we're flooded we flood ourselves with data that won't die and not just data metadata but won't die and and and so yeah um did the music you you guys know the music very well did the music uh have that same intellectual component there was there a selection of the pieces that fit the fit the narrative that he was saying well that's right it's gonna actually read my mind I don't think we haven't met before but I was just gonna say if we're talking about the documentary aspects and historical who are not talking so much other than the music and I I don't know what I've got a view on it I found it sometimes I found it overwhelming as an experience but I'm not sure I found the music in many ways quite nostalgic as opposed to the kind of the rigor of the intellectual debate in the film how does that well I mean it is you know it's music from the past I mean the most powerful moment I think is when Horace Andy again this giant of you know Jamaican reggae does sugar sugar the most kind of inconsequential of songs over footage from a British show called the black and white minstrel show yeah which you can guess what it was from the from the title it was an unpleasant kind of but we grew up watching it and it was perfectly normal that white people would have blackface and dance around on television so you've got this strange that strange juxtaposition so there's a kind of which the way in which things like I don't know you can reel them off the charelles dusty spring field all sorts of songs are used and then there's a kind of chronological sequence well there's one there's one massive attack moment which is the track two of protection the 1994 album is called karma coma which is a tricky speaking and I guess there's a kind of point that's being made about being coma toast you know we're in a kind of karma coma that's what's what it's like in the sarcophagus of data but the me the most powerful musical moment was the there's if you any bowhouse fans out there there's an extraordinary moment when Bella Lugosi is dead appears and just the opening chords oh god it's Bella Lugosi is dead so there is that nostalgia and I don't know quite what to do with it you could say it's a ghostly nostalgia it's twisted it's but it is a kind of there is a temptation to wallow yeah that's what I felt but I'm interested to keep the discussion going afterwards on that because I'm trying to convince myself that it could work without out the music just as a piece of documentary journalism and one thing about the music is the massive attack why massive attack so hugely important in the history of British music is that they you know that they appear in Bristol in the early 90s 91 blue lines the first CD but they're coming out of the 80s scene Bristol's a complex cultural nexus of all sorts of things strong influences from the Caribbean all of that so you've got a musical form which is hugely indebted to black american music to particularly to reggae and then to punk and post punk and all that stuff that's a kind of mix the point being was what they're talking about this before is that massive attack was something new right it was it was music hadn't sounded like that before and it was extraordinary so there's a kind of way in which the the question that we're asked at the end of the piece which is you know go home and do something you know you think okay they go home subway and do but is in a sense is answered musically in a sense music is a strange thing where you can take a whole assemblage of traditions and different forms and at certain moments in history something new will emerge like hip-hop emerged here in late 70s early 80s and I thought the venue was really important here too to me the yeah I thought the fact that they had it in such a cavernous space absolutely it was set up with these 11 huge screens with the band behind the screens and the lighting I mean the way it sort of developed you used the word developed everybody I thought it I thought it was terrific that the venue was perfect for this it was and that's interesting because it sort of goes back to this idea of what's real and what's not real if the band itself is behind the screen and we're watching the screen and the music is coming you know it's like the man behind the curtain what what is real and what isn't and we don't really sort of interact with them we can't see them except through when the light changes for their image of their face is projected onto onto the screen but I just wanted to jump back to something that you said Simon about um how massive attack there was nothing that we had ever heard like it before and that in some way stands in contrast to something that the piece talks about which is about sort of the increasing data fetish that we have you go on amazon oh you bought this you might like that or you know you're on twitter you should follow this person because you follow that person and nothing new is being created but then that makes me wonder you know massive attack you said in 1994 it was like nothing we've ever heard before and what does it mean that we're sitting here in 2013 and is it meant to reflect back on the immense creativity or is it meant to sort of come back and and be a part of that if you like this you might like that sort of death of creativity or is that a death of creativity who said that's death of creativity because you get a recommendation based on things you like in the past I don't I don't know maybe that's advancement you know if I can if I can say look I've I've read these kind of books but here are 15 more you might you know my eyes are open might read more things that are very interesting that I find compelling so I'm not sure his technology data argument just didn't resonate with me I mean I got his case I just didn't necessarily agree with it you know twitter is a revolutionary form of communication twitter is giving us real what's really happening on the breaking news it's the breaking news platform twitter is revolutionizing the news business journalism is journalism I said the news and citizens now own the own breaking news who did who did you read about the washington shooting from you read it on twitter first from citizens who should who took pictures from inside the capital and I'm not saying they're being replaced by journalists but they're now part of this completely new ecosystem so I don't know I was just going to ask you just I mean as a journalist you've got in this piece you've got an artist really invading journalistic space and he's not invading it with the sort of detachment of the objectivity that the journalist normally brings to a story but he's invading it with with subjective opinionated angry and very combative material how does that make you feel as a journalist I just didn't see it as a work of journalism so it didn't make me angry I saw it as I saw him as more of a documentary maker he had a point he found the clips the people the stories to tell to make a very strong point whether you agree with the point or not you know is another story but I didn't take offense as a journalist I just he just he didn't he didn't seem to be doing what we do in the best of our trade I was just going to say I saw it less as an indictment of technology as a whole and more of a sense of how are we using technology to retrieve back into the sarcophagus and how are we using it to sort of numb ourselves and and just fall back into this spectator like role where we just absorb and consume and there's a clip a very brief clip and I'm not sure who the the woman is but she says I I go to bed and I check the news right before I go to bed so I know what happens and then I wake up in the morning and I look at what I missed and I'm just always watching and I think part of the call at the end was this idea of find your own way home don't use google maps to find your way home but this idea of like taking agency back so I don't know that it was an indictment so much of just technology or twitter or the news cycle but the way that we've used it to just withdraw into ourselves that's how I saw it did you identify did you say that's me yeah I mean I I am a terrible addict of technology and I'm on twitter entirely too much and I feel like our drive is to increase our productivity like I'm in a sphere where I do some writing and you have people like madaglacias who has changed the way that people write and the ideas you're supposed to churn things out really quickly and the death of the long read like we're all so distracted and the more people run faster the more we're all expected to run as fast as the rest of them and and we've sort of seen this this depth death of doing things slowly and carefully and deliberately at the you know everyone wants to be the first one to report the headline and that leads sometimes to the headline being recorded incorrectly yeah I think the task of I mean to be just speaking very bold terms the task of art is to slow down in that sense you know it's it's the for me is what particularly theatre does but all movies or music it slows it's a kind of emergency break it's a kind of foot on the brake and you can see what you're seeing at that point you know you can you arrest things for a second for an hour or two or no how long it takes I think that's crucially important I agree with you on this question of agency we could talk more about this but a question of technology I think the relationship between technology and agency and technology and democracy I think is just a complicated one I think we get a very simple line here which is because it you know you know we're used to this absolutely true we have this citizen journalism we have and we have incidents that you know and Alexis was involved in takes the occupying I was down there as well and that was something which was both as it were about bodies in space about physical bodies in space but also about mediation and technology at every particular instance so the the relationship between technology and democracy I think is it's it's a complicated story as we've been sitting here I've been talking about this and we're sitting in in in New York where I just had this vision of sitting the entire bringing the entire UN here to the Park Armory in playing the this piece to the UN Security Council and thinking what kind of impact and effect that would have on the people that are trying to run the world it would be quite an interesting audience because we're all you know probably of a certain cultural people and coming here for the art and so on but the audience that he's really addressing isn't here the awesome members of the US Congress would be good well Congress would be very interesting if it's function if it were open well they're all there they're all but this kind of work have been written in the state is the kind of interest and the kind of dynamic question asked by somebody who had left the room and was talking excitedly with the fellows that were you know discussing the show they asked that was that question I just happened to eavesdrop would you like to try and answer it um I think I don't know I'm the American I'm one of the Americans here I don't know I mean is the art scene here at the cultural scene here absolutely engaged enough to write a piece absolutely yeah I mean you got I mean you know it's a bit I mean it's a I was reading Ben Ratcliffe's review in the times and he compares it to a kind of this could be a kind of a similar undergraduate hit to Koinikatsu you know that or it could be if you think about the documentary making of some Earl Morris or there's a whole absolutely could happen here and I think that there's so much cynicism especially among the millennials and my friend Nicole Cardy who I worked with at the other 98% was recently talking about this that they she's uh you know 25 so she's come of age with 9 11 the financial crisis crossing the one trillion dollar mark in student debt and these are people who sort of like base not what is it 25% youth unemployment and so I think that a lot of the art especially coming out of the millennials is very similar to what we see in the sort of deep cynicism about the sort of decades and decades of failure and this inability to really provide the basic services to help people live and so I yeah I agree with you that I do think but I don't know maybe it would it would probably come from perhaps a younger artist who has just lived through this past decade. It was hard to be produced by a millennial I think it had to be somebody who was living through that didn't you feel that way it had to be somebody who was living through the that period as an adult and absorbing it I don't think he is somebody who didn't live in the Soviet era I mean my husband was teaching a journalism class and talking about the Gorbachev era and he's looking around and you know people are scratching their heads and he says oh oh you know he has to define who Gorbachev is so you know when you're at that stage I don't think that somebody a millennial could produce this something like it they could produce and the and the and it may resonate but I think this obviously has you know has somebody who's connected personally with with these histories he picked people out that he connected with through this period and and showed the distress I suppose I meant not this particular work but a work of this kind of genre and the work of that kind of political angle and power yeah I hadn't seen one here so I but you know more than I do you've seen sort of bits and pieces of visual art and concerts with visual art but it was sort of this this interesting storytelling narrative combined with with the concert and the screens and the technology that made it very exciting I mean you know there was a debate going on a little bit in the in the summer in the UK from one of our playwrights Mark Ravenhill who said the arts had somehow become disengaged from politics and and current issues and certainly I for one disagreed in Edinburgh this summer seeing every work I saw was about contemporary history in some way most of it deeply depressing about death rape bioethics espionage you know then I'm making a film about WikiLeaks you know so I sort of feel the arts are getting more engaged yeah and less engaged the Occupy movement there was a lot of art that came out of that and I was at the moment with my mother and just so happened to see a bunch of newspapers that a number of my friends help put together with beautiful graphics in it hanging up on the wall at the moment this was probably a year ago at this point but I do think that you certainly do see this reflected in art maybe not in the more mainstream art but certainly around the fringes and certainly in the in I know colleagues from the bridge council will will know certainly in parts of the Middle East where the social volatility and uncertainty the arts are very much on the front line there in some of the in some of the countries particularly Libya and Egypt well and I wonder if if part of the message of the piece and I don't know the answer to my own question is that art allows you to escape the esophagus sorry the esophagus audience which that is the sarcophagus very interesting can I analyze that later well it sort of allows it's sort of my question was what's the future for arts activism here I was directing that to you so well yeah I think that it's one of those mediums that corporatism really tries to control and engage in and there's sort of this obsession with making something go viral and how do we make something catchy and everyone was so disappointed I don't know folks used to follow that twitter account horse ebooks that would just tweet out random phrases and people thought it was so hilarious and apparently it's just all a part of some vast marketing scheme and everyone's hearts were broken so there's this attempt to sort of like harness the arts in order to either maintain the status quo or sell you a widget but it still seems to be you were talking earlier about how massive the tech just and and just the music out of Britain in general just was your greatest export and just a great system uncontrollably flows and and we were also talking about maybe we should bring up pussy ride and how quickly that story spread and the protest that they had in the church and the music itself and so it does seem to be a mechanism for protest because it seems to be in some ways still this uncontrollable force that people respond to and then proliferate and spread I mean I mean British music since I guess since the I mean for me when I was 12 years old and I saw David Bowie on top of the pops performing star man in a sense what happens in British music giving away your age no I'm 53 so I was 12 years old yeah it was that moment is I mean the people like Bowie, Sid Barra, Nick Drake and others there's a kind of particular kind of British take on which until that time have been hugely imitative of what was happening in the US and it and also becomes a kind of musical theatre you know in a sense what people don't get about about punk and post-punk and all those strange movements was their theatricality so this is the theatricality of this in a sense is is very interesting in that regard and it it's a different kind of a different picture of race emerges in the British context to the American context because all these kids like Robert Del Nage are listening to is is black American music or or Jamaican reggae and it produces a different kind of mongrel assemblage that is that is British music for those wonderful decades and I mean you know I guess now Simon Cowell has tried to destroy as Margaret Thatcher destroyed the institution to the welfare state signing what's his name yeah has single-handedly tried to destroy popular music as we I think he's got a lot of help I don't know if it's just he's got a lot of help yeah he's the principal architect isn't he's the principal architect but I mean it I mean in this I'm struck also by the fact that that the party where I made the point about the playing it for the politicians in the UN the politicians still have this amazing ambivalent relationship to the arts and the sense in one sense they're afraid of them certainly in some parts of the world and in other parts of the world certainly in the UK there's a sort of a sense that they're being not marginalized but but pushed into the box of a creative industry so that they're there to provide economic growth and development right and to some extent that seems to me to militate against the arts as a vehicle for new thought new ideas inspiration and the rest it's something I have to wrestle with sort of every day at home in the job where you know dealing with government departments that are wanting to see return on investment and I'm just wondering this piece of work is you know that's never going to produce a return on investment and yet it's a very powerful medium and I'm just trying to rationalize those two extremes in terms of the political landscape in which this work inhabits you any comments on that one thing in particular they go very hard against Goldman Sachs in the banks and I happen to notice that the season hope I'm sure I'll get in trouble for saying that the season of the armory was sponsored by city and I would have to think to myself is that because they went so hard against Goldman Sachs or they just didn't watch the piece before they sponsored the entire season of the armory really sort of this delicacy right because increasingly we have these corporations sponsoring the arts and is that going to lead to censorship of the arts or is well your entire arts ecology in the US is based on donations and philanthropy and corporate sponsorship anyway isn't it yeah I mean I guess I'm again the optimist on this panel probably but you know there's a proliferation of nonprofits around this country and proliferation of artistic groups and theater groups and and the like that that you know go to indiegogo and you can go and and and invest as an individual in projects that you want to invest in so I see lots of lots of alternatives and you know we live in the city the city that's oozing with this kind of stuff I mean I have my my daughter's in the theater world and she's constantly doing stuff on a shoestring but it's getting out there and people are you know it's it's a fabulously creative place so I guess I'm I'm not as down about this and also you know if you go down the west side of our riverside park and look 10 years ago at what was there and what is there now there are works of art almost every 100 feet if you're a jogger as I am and you go down this like it's an amazing it's an amazing jogging experience that you won't have you wouldn't have had 10 years ago so I guess I think that there are exciting things that are happening too that I don't see it as the corporatization necessarily arts I think it's good that there is such a thing as corporate social responsibility and that government that that corporations are earmarking money for good causes as as a nonprofit I run a nonprofit myself and I take nothing if there are strings attached and I will tell you that I don't most of the people that get the people that give to all the people that give to us give with no strings attached I guess I mean I I see more of a relationship between certainly I mean popular culture whatever we mean by that let's say popular music and periods of crisis of decay of chaos you know so the great periods for example of British popular say punk is a very good example of something that comes out of a a real sense of national crisis in Britain chance of the exchequer going to the IMF to borrow money and shame involved in all of that bin bags in the street trash in the streets whatever but it was also incredibly fecund as indeed it was in New York in that period yeah the great the great period of you know musical fecundity in in New York was a period of social catastrophe right and that's interesting and I tend to think that you know in and that's why well massive attacker from Bristol right and that's interesting Bristol is not the capital city Bristol sort of to the side of that and here I'm interested in I think I placed my bets more on the Detroit's the Baltimore's the those those places where things in a sense in a sense of the one of the problems with New York is that it's I live in Brooklyn and it's all a bit too you know it's you live a kind of parody or parody that you can't escape you know you have facial hair you become a parody you don't know facial hair you become a parody you ride a bike you're a parody you don't ride a bike you're a parody you're a parody you know Brooklyn I and in a sense we live this sort of intense of consciousness all the time how many people in the audience live in Brooklyn that's right stand up Brooklyn um but it's off it's a hell but you it's a sarcophagus but Simon it's interesting the point the point you're making in some ways is that you know Bristol Manchester to some extent Liverpool that's we're discussing that earlier Birmingham certainly Leeds Leeds Gateshead all these places in in the UK have come back through the cultural lens haven't they've all been reinvigorated through creative industries through culture through digital media through new media through experimentation are you say I mean is that the way forward in the States where you've got these um decaying industrial cities and there doesn't seem any other way other than a creative return for those yeah yeah and it was I was in Cleveland a couple of years ago and it was you know I mean Cleveland is it's kind of it was kind of fantastic because people are taking over disused blocks doing urban farming doing all sorts of extraordinary things I went to three or four great record shops which had things you couldn't find here there's a a real sense of energy which comes in sorry rock and roll hall of fame rock and roll full of fame so it's yeah so I think yeah but it's um I worry about the you know the way in which Pittsburgh too has done that yeah revived itself become a cultural center used to be a steel town and it's kind of redefined itself you know Andy Warhol museums Carnegie Mellon taking you know creative energy losing through the city and so I think there are Detroit's and Detroit was you know Motown but I mean I suppose what I'm angling at is are we getting answers you're saying what does Adam Goethe say at the end what's the way are we getting more energy now from city from city states as it were than from state states and is this a way forward that is different from the one that's projected I think it is because I think that like perhaps in the past and that film sort of starts with this is the government tried to change the world and the government tries to sort of programs and they don't mention the Great Leap Forward but there are all these like examples of great vast programs that were tried that led to mass devastation and the sort of things that you're talking about at least when I think about Detroit and the things that have been coming out of Detroit that are interesting and exciting and artistic these are all people getting together on their own without support from companies without support from the government and if anything they're being hampered by the emergency state that's been declared and the pensions will be wiped out and their whole city council democracies been completely decimated by this emergency manager but the people are acting autonomously without interference or well not really interference they're being interfered but without help from the government and in some ways the piece I don't know if that's the message of the piece but it's just wondering here's when the government tried to help and it hurt us so terribly and then there's this sort of call at the end that you should you know rise up and have agency and and is the answer to that that the government should try again and not be so scared of trying to change things because the big there's this big middle part where it's like when we tried to change things things went poorly so we stopped trying to change things and we're just gonna manage them and watch them and watch you and there's this sort of invocation of the surveillance state and so one thing that I'm not clear about is is he sort of advocating this kind of anarchist slash libertarian let's just do it ourselves kind of occupy style or is it the government should realize that it's okay to make mistakes and we should try to change the world again instead of just being so scared or is it both is it neither I don't know well never know because it wasn't developed in this in this presentation I don't think anybody in their audience that here have a question or point they they want to make it's a thought on more like I think there's think about it while there's there's a there's a there's a there's a kind of reference back to a state managed as a state based politics that was about change you know New Deal here welfare state in Western Europe so a bit common as another example and as a word that the you could read it in a consistently kind of anarchistic way in a sense that the the emergence of this static world this managed world which has led to you know the sense in which the world is a kind of prison and what do we do has also led to other kinds of possibilities so where people in interstices in gaps do things for themselves and we've seen that over the last few years in the name of occupy and the rest so you could read it that way I think it's and it sort of slightly fits in what you were saying earlier Joyce about the changes in journalism and people are just taking control aren't they there's less yeah I think it's empowering the technology can be scary and can be self-defeating can also be very empowering it just depends on on how it's used but in this case yes it is so what future for news corps in places and people like this you know you're going to are you asking about the future of journalism yeah well I just think it's we're in the middle of the revolution now and we don't exactly know who's going to survive what's going to come out of it but that said I think all of us as citizens know that we need reliable contextual accurate information we don't want to have to be trying to struggle to figure out whether something that comes across is accurate or not accurate and so so I think that there's going to be a combination of citizens putting their input into the system and very valuably when it comes to breaking news but also you know things can be doctored you know somebody could say this is breaking and it may not be breaking so how do we verify and know this is real so there there's a lot of thought being given to how do we how do we measure that how do we figure that out with the technology and also there's a need for a skilled people who understand how to tell the story in a responsible way so that we as citizens can make good decisions because we have good information in our lives and I think that's absolutely an essential part of any democracy so I'm again I'm optimistic that that journalism will survive I'm not sure who will be telling those stories who will be writing those pieces in the future and what new streams of you know what new platforms will exist and who all the players are because it's much more complicated now yeah oh good I was going to say something so lady at the back and then there's another person that's saying nearly in the same room the gentleman in the front please um yeah uh I don't know if this is working I'm quite here at the moment now is it turned on try again it's one of those mics I think that if you speak into it it will speak up hello uh I don't know if it's on but I'm sure you can all hear me okay now it's on uh yeah I just wanted to follow up on something that was said earlier about like I guess yeah about you know the use of Twitter and how that affects media and etc and I really related to what you were saying about it um and to I guess one of the things that for me is important about this work is that it asks questions about not whether information is available only but about um how much information there is to pay attention to and being in this weird time when people's attention spans are increasingly diminished and this kind of interaction of you know if we can if we can even call it that like this kind of media of um you know using Twitter or using Facebook or whatever these different means online um is also uh it's coded like COATED with like corporate like typifications of people and then that's then used to like kind of reify the organ the more maybe organic ways in which um in which social activity and creativity may have developed in the past a lot of that kind of organic like flow has been taken away where you do get oh if you like this story look at this story or or maybe maybe we'll just create that you this type likes the story because we'll just put it there you know and so this kind of embeddedness and this kind of insidious getting into um you know I mean it's it's the big sort of thing about public and private right like how does that affect us at yeah like we sort of we we withdraw into our own biases and we surround ourselves with Twitter followers who agree with what we agree with and we you know and if we don't we're just talking to them to get into a fight and and so I've read I feel like at least several news articles about this about how our politics are increasingly polarized because the technologies that we use are creating these ways that we can live in these bubbles and not actually have to interact with people who don't agree with us because if you like this then you'll like this if you follow this person on Twitter find this other person who also agrees with you and you can all have this either conservative bubble or liberal bubble or whatever bubble you might be living in I'm not sure if that gets to to what you were saying or not but that that was the first thing that sprung to my mind and I like what you said too about the reification right like it's almost as if like I don't know Twitter in some ways I love and hate like I'm on it a lot and I feel like I can interact with people like the barriers are down like you know sometimes you can talk to people you would never have access to but it's also not really a natural experience and you lose some of that human component of actually having a conversation with someone that may be a little bit boring at times and you just push through it because that's what you do when you talk to somebody and it doesn't have to be everything doesn't have to be efficient and so we start to like have our human interactions with people and expect it to behave by the same rules that the technology realm is and so we're all just kind of like jerks right like we just wanted to be quick is that good oh wow that's too good so I'm actually torn which question to ask because I grew up in Bath and Bristol in the late 80s and early 90s so I felt like there was like two conversations going on there's like people who knew Bristol in the early 90s I but I also work in the media so I'm kind of torn which which route to go I think I think I'm going to make a comment slash question about the media and it goes to what people were saying about the kind of the war for attention in the saturated landscape and I think we spend you know we spend a lot of time worrying about how we're being controlled by media and you know there's great luminaries who's devoted their whole lives to worrying about it no Chomsky and people like that right and when you see how content is actually manufactured on the shop floor to me you have a very different perspective which is it's kind of just holding up a mirror to ourselves that everybody knows that if you engage the the kind of fight or flight human reflex with your headline writing you will you will get easy traction and so that will always fly and it will fly more and more in a highly saturated marketplace where you're trying to quote unquote break through so it's like well how do I break through well I no matter I've been in meetings where we've literally talked about where we've got this really smart intellectual piece and we're just going to write some tabloid-y gotcha headline because we're not going to get our numbers and so I think we should stop worrying about the evil others trying to control our consciousness and start thinking about what we click on or choose to read I think it's I hate I'm going to sound like a bad like I don't know Republican congressman now saying it's all about personal responsibility and but but and that's not my intention but but but there is an element of a lot of this is holding a mirror to ourselves in terms of what the content that we choose to to engage in and a lot of the control mechanisms that people see as control mechanisms are actually very willing everyone's a very willing participant in the control mechanism and you have to choose not to participate if you wish to no longer participate and that takes hard work and our lives are so comfortable we can't be bothered to do the hard work I think there's one thing I just I everybody wants to come back if you're on that okay thanks if if you haven't heard of him there's a man named moxie marlin spike and he wrote a response to the nsa leaks that was basically why uh if you're not doing anything wrong if you shouldn't worry is the wrong way to think about surveillance and it speaks to this idea that we're all making these choices and we should just stop making these choices and he has this really great lecture that he gave called gmail is not a choice and his basic point is we could all choose not to have a cell phone but society there's something called the no network problem whereas if you're not using something that has a network of people that are also using it you're all by yourself and so using a cell phone is no longer about whether or not you want to carry it around but whether or not you want to participate in society because society has changed the way it behaves because we used to make a plan to meet at a certain day at a certain time and we would stick to it and now we all have phones and so we can change it at any time and it's just like oh I will call you after work and so I I hear what you're saying about not clicking on the like side boob link or whatever but I don't think that it's as simple as that when it comes to something like whether or not you use gmail or whether or not you use twitter because even if you don't use gmail and you use rise up and you make that personal choice you cannot talk to anyone else that uses gmail and so I think that we do have agency in some sense about what headlines we click on and whether we read those meaty stories but then there are other places where society has moved on and we I think yeah I think that I think that we have a real crisis because the metrics used to value the the good journalism skew us more towards the tabloid headlines and the tabloid stories I know for a fact I I used to work for a business news magazine and we had somebody who would do slide shows all the time online and you know feature you know how to renovate your bathroom and this was not a heart this was not a franchise that this business we were magazine was doing but when they put it up yahoo would pick it up and it was sort of a Martha Stewart type thing and it'd get five million hits and it encourages you to go into this very different direction that's not the core of what you're all about and I think that that's been you know hits the way we measure success or the way advertisers force the news business to measure success is problematic and I do believe it's going to change because I do believe that people want you know that you can value a smaller audience who wants to get this stuff and doesn't want to read and click on the Martha Stewart toilet story and but they are smart they are people that you may want to be advertising in front of and it may not be a million clicks so now I've just seen technology where now you can see how far somebody's read into a story and that might be a measure of well you know are you going to you know 10 7 8 paragraphs into the story and really really looking at it you know there I'm not saying that that's a perfect solution but I'm just saying that I I think the advertising environment is so confused now and I don't think they've quite gotten it and that's why they're the business model for journalism is so incredibly broken but I'm I'm because I mean social media is doing the job that advertising used to do essentially now isn't it well yeah to some degree it is and or they're advertising on social media instead of in the new nation of something it was a message pound pound pound like a corporate advertisement as far as I'm concerned imagine if they could sell Cheerios that way you know with a huge room full of docile computers and the message pounding into them and it made me wonder if it was kind of a joke somebody alluded to that early in the discussion I thought it was a very interesting performance I really did enjoy it and I said is the joke at heart this is he trying to show us what he's talking about or what and you're standing too so you're sort of getting tired as as it was on yeah I mean I think maybe he's trying to make you feel the way that he wants you to feel about being controlled by data like physically as you watch it as a lot I'm overwhelmed I'm overstimulated there's too many lights flashing in my faith I'm tired but massive attack is awesome I don't know I think there's also some of his own personal frustration of this constant you know the inability of things to change so I said that's what I think there's a lot of anger in it and that comes out in the power of the soundtrack yeah I think it is there is a kind of performative contradiction in the performance which is it is interesting and kind of escape their attention yeah okay well whatever your view of it if you're going to sit the night it certainly won't leave you without thoughts I think oh you have to be and I think I'm a choice of saying only about you you you actually the only optimist on the panel I I think I'm slightly more optimistic now as a result of having listened to to all of you this evening because I begin to think that there are other ways and I think there are you know the power of individuals now that the increasing inability of governments to govern is actually maybe not such a bad thing and that actually we may find other ways through the solutions that's not intended to be a facile a Voltarian conclusion that everything will be all right but maybe there are possible worlds but maybe it may be there is hope anyway if you're going to see the work tonight do go for a stiff drink afterwards because you'll need it and in the meantime for those of you who've seen the work you can go off for a stiff drink now and to those of you online thanks very much for sticking with us and if you've gone off to sleep during the debate then you can pick it up where you left off online tomorrow in the meantime thank you to the Armory for hosting us thank you to Simon Joyce and Alexis and thank you all for coming thanks a lot here with the mic I thought that was probably a reasonable moment to wrap I know that was beautiful thank you very much