My goodness.
When I started this blog in 2005, it was an experiment. The software was new technology and there were many people eager to get their hands on it — to see what they could do with it and how it might change society. In my early posts I tried out different styles of writing and different topics to write about. I made friends and received praise for my output. It was in the back-and-forth of blogging that I learnt to write clearly and persuasively, which has led to a weird, varied and rewarding career.
The impetus to experiment with new technology came out of the milieu in which I was working at the time, in the office of 59 Productions in Edinburgh. Collaboration was highly valued: the idea that creative people would, together, be more than the sum of their talents. Digital technology was becoming cheaper, and we adopted guerrilla approach to film-making and theatre. Where the tech did not yet exist, we chained together disparate components and made-for-other-purposes software to produce the desired effect.
Scotland was the perfect incubator: host to internationally famous festivals, and yet small enough that the most influential and creative people in Scottish film and theatre were usually only a phone call or a five minute walk away.
We made some marvellous things.
There’s a ‘bit’ I do when talking about 59 Productions, which is to say that when I worked there, we were a few wankers in a room with some Apple Macs [beat] but ever since I left they’ve become stratospherically successful.
It’s funnier when you hear me say it. And it’s funny because it’s true.
It’s also an easy thing to admit because I don’t regret leaving the company when I did. I confess to pangs of jealousy when I heard they were working with Sigur Rós or with Danny Boyle on the London 2012 ceremony. But I recognised that the company was going to grow on the design and storytelling talents of my co-directors, Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer, and I had best leave them to it.
These days my involvement in 59 Productions mainly involved attending their fabulous Christmas parties, and boosting 59 Productions’ output on social media.
Which brings me to Mark’s recent TED Talk. In an impeccably delivered presentation, he introduces the audience to 59’s work: recreating the magic of a David Bowie performance at the V&A, projecting a Saturn V rocket into the side of the Washington Monument, or working with David Hockney to create an installation that allows the audience to plunge into the artists painting and creative process. (Tom Hanks, who wrote Moonwalkers at LIGHTROOM, absolutely loved it. “It’s like a whole new medium of art!” I said to him. Tom agreed.)
But as well as a marvellous showcase for 59’s work and talents, Mark also achieves the perfect articulation of the ethos and the sensibility, which was present when we started and remains still.
Those technologies that might otherwise threaten to isolate us can actually be harnessed to bring us together. And not just as audience members, but also as creators. Because making immersive work calls for a richly multidisciplinary approach. One that creates the conditions necessary for the collision of ideas to take place. An approach where architects and animators, directors and designers, writers and technologists are brought together as if in a kind of cultural Large Hadron Collider: a machine in which multiple disciplines can be accelerated towards one another in the hope that the resulting collision might release something new. Something energetic. Something that has the power to change the direction of the bodies involved.