BAD IDEA 7 by Jack Roberts

PLUS

The S a David atchi Brot hers Came Swoo ron Jame p s Cam vs. Mike Le eron PlayS Goes igh tation 3D ’s B Russia n Milit ig Gamble ar y E mbed

Made in the UK

ISSUE 7 // autumn/WINTER 08 // £4.50

ISSN 1751-9152

9771751915004

FROM THE HIP

Photographs by JOHN “HOPPY” HOPKINS 1960-66 John “Hoppy” Hopkins is a Cambridge educated former nuclear physicist and a seminal photographer of London’s 60s underground, shooting for Melody Maker and the Sunday Times. Alongside Barry Miles he co-founded the International Times. Lee is proud to present the first publication of his photographs, From the Hip.

ALLEN GINSBERG’S 39TH BIRTHDAY Ginsberg was on a world tour, and he was on a high. He’d just been thrown out of Hungary (after being thrown out of Cuba), for being too open about his homosexuality. In London, we put on this big poetry reading in the Albert Hall and Allen was the top of the bill. Soon after that it transpired that it was his 39th birthday, so we had a party for him in a basement apartment in Belgravia. I walked in and there was Ginsberg, naked except for a pair of underpants on his head, joking and laughing with the other people there. We were eating and drinking and having a good party when there was a knock on the door, and John and Cynthia Lennon turned up, with George Harrison and Patti Boyd. When he saw Ginsberg he sort of did a double take. He was a bit uneasy, had one drink, and then made for the door. Barry Miles (centre in the photo) said, “Hey, why are you going so quickly?” Lennon leaned over and whispered in his ear: “Look, you don’t do this sort of thing in front of the birds.” And then he left.

EDITORIAL

n our last issue, in light of the expanding sub-prime mortgage crisis, our cover proclaimed, “It’s the economy stupid!” A few months have passed since then, and while it’s still not clear how the global credit crunch will play itself out over the next 12 months, things aren’t currently looking too good, with talk of the worst world market depression since 1929, and a list of crumbling financial institutions – Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers – that reads like the extended roll call of a suburban wife-swapping party. At the time of writing, the US House of Representatives has just voted in a US $700 billion government bailout package (approximately $2,000 per American citizen – ouch!) to mop up Wall Street’s toxic debts. But it will do little to allay fears that the US economy, and therefore the British economy, is headed snout-first towards a crippling recession. Ho hum. But forget all that doom talk for just a moment, and remember that we’re also living through a period of tantalising and unprecedented opportunity. The availability of cheap, digital technology and fast Internet access has empowered the innovative and enterprising like never before, and nowhere is this more evident than in Britain’s creative industries, where the level of upheaval in the past few years in the face of digitisation has been, and continues to be, seismic. In this issue of BAD IDEA, we set out to investigate how these changes are being manifested in an industry sector that employs close to two million people and accounts for a whopping 7.3% of the UK’s GDP. We look at how the London-based web publication WGSN dominates the global fashion industry, interview seven of the most groundbreaking young creative minds from around Britain, and learn how aspiring film directors are rendering gatekeeper film distributors obsolete through their use of crowdsourcing, online alternative reality gaming and Google maps. Alistair Harper profiles Alex Evans, the genius behind one of the biggest UK indie computer game launches of recent years; and perhaps most controversial of all, we report from the inside on how brands are increasingly abandoning traditional advertiser-funded business models to become direct patrons of culture, or even create it themselves. Is this the future of advertising, and if so, does popular culture now exist in an ethical universe where absolutely anything goes and everything is up for sale? Find out and join us, as we enter the creative industries…

CONTENTS

Fashion Echo Chamber pg42

BAD IDEA // ISSUE 7 // AUTUMN/WINTER 2008

Out Of The Ordinary 12 The

Literary Community Finally Moves Online Ben Beaumont-Thomas

13 Making

Millions From Amateur Snaps Daniel Stacey 14 White

House Vote-o-matic Alyssa McDonald

Brand Patrons Put Out pg32

15 Mags

Up, Mags Down Jack Roberts

16 First

Find The Characters, Then Write The Script Alyssa McDonald

18 Obituary:

29 Alligator

Hunt

Kim Tingley 30 The

Olympic Ceremony That Never Was Huon Curtis

Tell It Like A Story

Clay

Felker Jack Roberts 22 The

New Blockbuster Experience Jack Roberts

23 Mind,

Meet Machine Jack Roberts

Who’s Your Brandaddy? Oliver Harris The New Wave Ben Beaumont-Thomas & Daniel Stacey What Is Christopher Nolan Going To Do Next? Jez Burrows

24 Art

Therapy Jean Hannah Edelstein

25 Many

Ways To Shuck An Oyster Daniel Stacey

26 Art

Bubble Or Super-rich ‘Habitat’? Ben Turner

28 Bleeding

Heart, Hard-nose Alyssa McDonald

Georgia In Flames pg104

62 Seven

Of The Best British Creatives Under 30 Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Jack Roberts & Daniel Stacey

The Game Changer Alastair Harper Turbo-folk Tycoon Matthieu Aikins

Cultural Revelations 98 Art

To Last a 1000 Years Robert Collins

104 Georgia

Vision Nevine Mabro Indian Designers The New Polish Plumbers? Sam Jordison

Year Of The E-book pg46

108 Are

114 Backstory:

Burmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Refugee Trail Simon Wheatley

Cover Photograph: Sebastian Meyer Makeup: Tomokaz Akutsu Hair: Naomi Yajima Model: Chris from Shacklewell Talent Management Glasses: Karen Walker from No-One Boutique Logotype: Supermundane. Cover Type: Hudson-Powell

founding editors

Jack Roberts jack@badidea.co.uk Daniel Stacey dan@badidea.co.uk design and art direction

Steve Sawyer steve@badidea.co.uk chief photographer

Sebastian Meyer sebastian@sebmeyer.com contributing editors

Alyssa McDonald alyssa@badidea.co.uk Jean Hannah Edelstein jean@badidea.co.uk contributing art directors

Oscar Bauer and Ewan Robertson www.oscarandewan.co.uk editorial interns

Laura Snoad laura.snoad@hotmail.com Ben Beaumont-Thomas ben.beaumont.thomas@googlemail.com advertising director

Sten Cummins sten@badideaa.co.uk events manager

Ben Harrison ben@badidea.co.uk writers

Matthieu Aikens www.maikins.com Ben Beaumont-Thomas ben.beaumont.thomas@googlemail.com Robert Collins www.soulcorporation.com Huon Curtis huoncurtis@gmail.com Jean Hannah Edelstein jean@badidea.co.uk Oliver Harris oliharris801@hotmail.com Alastair Harper alastairharper@gmail.com Sam Jordison www.myspace.com/samjordison Nevine Mabro nevine.mabro@itn.co.uk Alyssa McDonald alyssa@badidea.co.uk Jack Roberts jack@badidea.co.uk Daniel Stacey dan@badidea.co.uk Kim Tingley kkt2110@columbia.edu Ben Turner ben@turnerphotos.com

artists and illustrators

Jake Blanchard www.jakeblanchard.co.uk Jez Burrows www.eveningtweed.com John Gerrard www.johngerrard.net

photographers

Matthieu Aikens www.maikins.com Dominique Charriau info@badidea.co.uk Alan Davidson info@badidea.co.uk Simon Fernandez info@badidea.co.uk Navine Mabro nevine.mabro@itn.co.uk Sebastian Meyer sebastian@sebmeyer.com Hy Peskin info@badidea.co.uk Koca Sulejmanovic info@badidea.co.uk Ben Turner ben@turnerphotos.com Simon Wheatley www.magnumphotos.com Makeup Tomokaz Akutsu info@tomokazu-akutsu.com Hair Naomi Yajima Model Chris from Shacklewell Talent Management Glasses Karen Walker from No-One Boutique, London E2 8AA Published by Good Publishing Ltd. www.goodpublishing.co.uk GOOD PUBLISHING Ltd., Floor 4, Shacklewell Studios, 18-24 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London E8 2EZ. Tel: +00 44 (0) 207 690 0118 The views expressed in BAD IDEA are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the editors or Good Publishing Ltd. If you would like to contribute to BAD IDEA, or if you just have a good story to tell, please write to editorial@badidea.co.uk For all advertising and marketing enquiries, please contact Sten Cummins / +00 44 (0) 207 254 0298 / sten@badidea.co.uk For any other enquiries about BAD IDEA and its contributors please contact info@badidea.co.uk Printed by Stones the Printer / www.stonestheprinters.co.uk

www.badidea.co.uk

BAD IDEA is supported by the UK Arts Council

Out Of The Ordinary

The Literary Community Finally Moves Online If the tipping point for e-books is nigh (see pg. 46 for more convincing), then where are all the cool web applications that are going to link the old world of tree books to the new age of networked novels? Enter Zoomii.com and Librarything.com. By Ben Beaumont-Thomas.

hen you hit Zoomii.com for the first time, you’re presented with a little pop-up video, complete with the kind of sonorous, geeky voiceover used in those iPhone tours. “Welcome to Zoomii books. Let’s take a tour of the store”. Yes, let’s. Launched in June by Canadian Chris Thiessen, Zoomii uses a special algorithm to place cover shots of Amazon’s top 25,000 rated books on CGI shelves, organised into the usual bookshop categories like ‘Mystery & Thrillers’ and ‘Mind, Body & Spirit’. By clicking and dragging across the screen, as well as zooming (or zoomiing?) in and out, you can browse through Amazon’s books like you would in a real bookshop. “Books will be with us a long, long time, whether paper or electronic. With technology progressing as it is, I’m not sure there’s any stable pattern. But long-term, e-books will dominate,” believes founder Thiessen. “They’ll be cheaper, more convenient, and even be nicer to read. I’d be surprised if in 10 years they don’t have at least half of the market for books.” With programs like Zoomii you’ll be able to buy

digital books in a setting reminiscent of the browsing culture of physical bookstores, albeit sans the tactile qualities, the wailing children, and the low-volume Tracy Chapman album piped in the background. The digital age is also turning reading into far more of a social activity than it once was. Librarything.com, the Last.fm of the book world, launched in August 2005 and now has 440,000 members. You use the site to list the books you love and hate on a personal profile, which are then crossreferenced with thousands of other user profiles to provide you with recommendations on what to read next. There are Librarything discussion groups by the hundred – dedicated to Scandinavian detective thrillers, lesbian librarians, ‘Kicking Ass: The Hemingway’, and even one for fans of the TV show Lost, which must cause some tutting amongst literary purists like the loyal membership of the group ‘I See Dead People[’s Books]’, which among other activities has dedicated itself to cataloguing Willa Cather’s entire personal library. Stay tuned for book burnings in Second Life

Bad Idea

Getty Images Revenue

What iStock kept,

Different

2007

what snappers got

User-Generated

The Image Factory

Photography Archives

Non-iStock Revenue: $785.9 million

Getty Images was launched in March 1995 by Mark

51 million

20.9 million

iStock Revenue: $71.9 million

A: iSTOCK 3.6 MILLION B: FOTOLIA 4.1 MILLION C: SHUTTERSTOCK 4.5 MILLION D: FLICKR 2.0 BILLION (AS OF 11/07) E: FACEBOOK 4.1 BILLION (AS OF 11/07) F: PHOTOBUCKET 6 BILLION

Getty and Jonathan Klein. Mark is the grandson of J. Paul Getty, one of the 20th century’s wealthiest men: an oil tycoon once quoted

Total Revenue: $857.8 million

by the economist Robert Lenzner as saying: “The meek shall inherit the earth, A

Making Millions From Amateur Snaps

but not the mineral rights.” Mark’s brother John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in 1973 by Italian terrorists, who severed his right ear before releasing him for a US $2.8 million ransom. The company was

iStockphoto.com is the bargain bin website that sells stock photography for

started with $20 million

under £1. Now accounting for almost 10% total revenue for the world’s biggest

from Mark’s father and

photo-seller, Getty Images, is it the business model that destroys professional

uncles, who had sold Getty

photography? BY DANIEL STACEY.

Oil in 1984 for $10.1 billion. A public float in 1996 raised

Out Of The Ordinary

a further $50 million. They began to rapidly acquire photo archives, outstripping competitors by quickly digitising their images to generate online sales. Share price topped out at $95 in December 2005, before falling to $34 in February this year, when the company was sold to private equity firm Hellman & Friedman for $2.4 billion. Their largest competitor is Corbis, which is privately owned by Bill Gates, who founded the company under the misguided belief that revolving displays of digital art would become popular decorations in suburban households. Since its launch in 1989, Corbis has never

1600 ASA

turned a profit.

I07

company Scoopt in early 2007– a site where amateurs can upload newsworthy pictures from their cameras and mobile phones. Getty have even brokered a deal with Flickr which allows Getty’s picture editors to sift through their 2-3 billion images and invite amateur photographers to join their agency. iStock accounted for $71.9 million out of Getty’s total $857.6 million annual revenue in 2007; it’s a runaway success, despite the often sub-par quality. As Getty Image’s CEO Jonathan Klein said earlier this year: “I cannot say, hand on heart, that I have the best picture of the Chrysler Building. So I have to make sure I have the best search engine, the best service.” But this model for distributing creative products could revolutionise more than just photography. iStock already sells video and vector designs, and is launching iStockmusic this autumn. Moran even predicts that soon “really high end photographers will start selling or licensing their post processing techniques to amateurs on iStock.” Could the wire service industry follow a similar path if someone starts deciding to sell blog content for a couple of quid a pop? If the returns are anything like those of iStock, the answer is yes

AR IMAGES SIDEB 8

imon Moran was a Newcastle based web designer looking for cheap images, when he chanced across iStockphoto.com in 2001. Seven years later he’s their photography director, and has just returned from Seattle, where he helped to run iStockalypse, a conference for iStock members who’ve sold over 25,000 images. At iStockalypse he hosted exercises in lighting and post-production, as part of his role to increase the quality of the amateur photography on the site. He also develops online manuals, tutorials, and trains iStock’s 95-strong global photo inspection team. “iStock has always been a community, and a way of teaching each other in a hands on peer-to-peer way,” Moran says. The iStock ethos is to turn amateurs and their content into something monetisable: it sells user-generated images, royalty free, for as little as US $1. Moran estimates that 75% of those at the recent iStockalypse had no formal training in photography. Sifting through the Internet’s mountains of user-generated imagery has become a lucrative pastime for Getty Images, iStock’s owner, and the world’s largest photo seller. After buying iStock for $50 million in 2006, they purchased Scottish

CONFUSED BY ALL THE RHETORIC AND MESSIANIC CHARACTER CULTSOF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION? FIND WHO YOU'RE REALLY BATTING FOR WITH OUR HANDY VOTE-O-MATIC DIAGRAM. START AGAIN Do you know when life begins?

Change Sorry, Mike’s already gone home

Um, no. Not really

You’re in the wrong country I hear Jamaica is nice this time of year

Which of these two vague concepts do you most identify with?

Trick question, but as you’re American the chances a gun will be involved are quite high… so do you want a prez on cuddling terms with he NRA?

Do you know when life ends?

How do you feel about Ahmadinejad?

Maybe, just maybe, our countries should do lunch

“Marraige is the union between a man and a woman… god is in the mix”

What do you want to do about the energy crisis? Where should the research dollars go?

“Swift conversion of American vehicles away from oil”

Nuclear

??? Hot Damn, yes I do Yes, if it’s an expression of “the full measure of outrage”

Do you agree with the death sentence?

No Yes, alot

‘B’ Thanks Do you think legal partnerships should be banned?

Good, what about gay marriage?

Reform

Yes! At the moment of conception

Nah

Yes, faggots are gross

LOSER! START AGAIN

But i’d like a veep who is…

Would you prefer a prez described by the NRA as: A - “abysmal, wretched and pathetic” B - “poster child of the extremist gun control movement”

Higher taxes “We should preserve the unique status between man and woman”

‘A’ Please

Why negotiate with a leader who calls Israel a “stinking corpse”? [Uh, technically he’s the not the leader, thats Ali Khamenei – Ed.]

What would you like to do about the economy?

Lower taxes Bad Idea

Mags Up, Mags Down ⇑ Radar Having run aground in 2005 after its investors pulled out after just

three issues, the American magazine Radar was resurrected in 2007, and has been resurgent since, putting on a circulation of 250,000 and one million plus monthly page views on its website Radaronline.com. Billed as ‘pop-culture for smart people’, its recent success has been a poke in the eye for the critics of founding editor Maer Roshan, including Gawker.com’s Nick Denton, who has posted relentlessly mocking blog posts about Radar for half a decade now (“It wouldn’t surprise me if Nick had fantasies about moving into print,” Roshan tells us from his office in New York), and Spy magazine co-creator Kurt Andersen, who dismissed the publication as “a wholly recursive exercise in recombinant magazine-making.” While Roshan’s long-running pursuit of financial backers and his attempts to “re-relaunch” his title were much ridiculed, his grit paid dividends when Yusef Jackson, the millionaire son of Reverend Jesse Jackson, came on board as an investor with Ron Burkle, a billionaire business associate of Bill Clinton – although Burkle refuses to publicly confirm his involvement. Defying gloomy predictions for ‘dead tree’ media ventures, the new Radar has put on sales every issue, and blue chip advertisers – Calvin Klein, Budweiser, HBO – are warming to the title. A summer redesign, courtesy of revered design agency Pentagram, has pepped up the magazine’s look, and an addiction to Photoshopped covers has thankfully been curbed, with post-ironic glamour girls Pamela Anderson and Shannon Doherty giving good face in recent issues. “The idea was to take the ballsiness of a tabloid, but do it with intelligent writing, great photography, and great journalistic values,” says Roshan. “The obvious parallel is Vanity Fair in the ‘80s.” This may be so, but Roshan needs to have a word with his foreign distributor; you’re more likely to find members of the Bin Laden family in a British newsagent than copies of Radar, and that’s a shame.

⇓ Marmalade. Founded by Kirsty Robinson and Sacha Spencer Trace in

2002, Marmalade was a cult independent magazine covering the London creative industries. A chaotic, visually innovative publication with a photo-montage aesthetic, it proclaimed itself the vessel of the ‘D.I.Y. generation,’ a loose network of musicians, filmmakers, illustrators, and fashion designers including Giles Deacon, Gareth Pugh and Henry Holland. Outwardly, Marmalade appeared a vision of bubbling success, with its hyperconfident editors claiming a booming circulation and new “very, very sexy” magazines in the pipeline, while partying it up with celebrities like Kirsten Dunst, Noel Fielding, and Johnny Borrell (perhaps fatally, Borrell’s brother acted as advertising sales director in one issue). Inwardly, the wheels were coming off though; in late 2006, Marmalade cut a dubious deal with Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace to farm the feature content of an issue out to web amateurs, and launched an ambitious website soon after, that aimed to be part creative agency, part radio station, part brand servicing centre. The website was unfinished though, and in early 2007 Marmalade quietly hit the wall, with no explanation given. When we contacted Robinson and Spencer Trace to find out what had happened, they claimed they were on maternity leave – “up to our necks in nappies” – and considering a relaunch in 2009

Out Of The Ordinary

David Cameron has charisma, has captivated voters nationwide, but until November last year hadn’t released a single policy document. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Mike Leigh fan Alyssa McDonald investigates.

f you left them in the pub together, the conversation between Mike Leigh and David Cameron probably wouldn’t be all that friendly. On a personal level, there’s not a lot of common ground between the 65 year-old Mancunian director, who describes himself as “leftish,” but “never politically involved in any real sense,” and the 41 year-old Eton-educated Conservative leader, whose interest in film doesn’t get much more leftfield than a passion for Bond movies. But professionally, Cameron’s approach to creating an electable political party has more in common with Mike Leigh’s filmmaking than you might imagine. For example, spot the difference: “Knowing not to put the icing on the cake before you put the cake in the oven is crucial to the whole thing.” “[It’s] like building a house together. First you prepare the ground, then you lay the foundations, and then finally, brick by brick, you build your house.” The first quote is Mike Leigh describing his notoriously lengthy rehearsal method, which involves months of character development through “a great amount of improvisation,” long before there’s any kind of formal script. The second is David Cameron at the Tory conference in 2006, explaining that the developmental stages of reforming the party shouldn’t involve a manifesto. Elsewhere he’s described that initial stage as an exercise in character: “are you a reasonable, decent, non-discriminating, sensible, practical person? If so then you can move on to level two.” Not to suggest that the fine details of their working methods are comparable. Amy Raphael, who edited

Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, pointed out that David Cameron isn’t “sitting around in a church hall with the shadow cabinet, asking each of them to think of 200 people they know or once met, and then David Cameron choosing one of the people on the list and asking his MPs to morph into that person.” But in a more general sense, both men’s projects are about creating a coherent narrative world from a mix of fact and fiction. Mike Leigh’s characters are based on actual people. And nobody’s stupid enough to think that politics is all about reality. According to Tory pollster Andrew Cooper, when John Major lost the 1997 election to Tony Blair, “there were myriad policy errors, but people talked about the party’s character.” David Cameron was the first Conservative leader in opposition to realise his party couldn’t be saved in the first instance by a new manifesto. So in 2006 he developed a plan that was “not about individual policies,” but about “look, feel and identity”. Cooper points out that while that meant Cameron was working without a script, and “consciously deferred the process of making policy, that’s not the same as making it up as you go along.” Similarly Leigh’s ex-wife and long time collaborator Allison Steadman says of Leigh, “no one knows what’s going on inside his head, but it’s certainly not a blank canvas.” As well as being the director of his little production – shepherding the more right-wing

Bad Idea

Photography by Sebastian Meyer

First Find The Characters, Then Write The Script

members of his flock with mantras like “elections are always won on the central ground” – Cameron is his own lead character. He tends to be accused by detractors (like Raphael) of “fumbling around in the dark”, but he’s been talking about creating a “modern, compassionate Conservative” since he took over the party in 2005. It’s just taken him a while to define what that means. And unlike Leigh, who has the luxury of total secrecy whilst he’s honing his characters (“despite having spent several years working on the book with Mike, I’m still not sure how his ‘method’ works. He wouldn’t let me anywhere near Happy-Go-Lucky until he had a shooting script”, Raphael says), Cameron’s evolution has been totally public, while the development of the script goes on in private. So what’s he produced? A Boden shorts wearing, “comfortably off ” every-middle-class-man. An admirer of Euro favourite Obama despite his party’s stated allegiance to McCain. A caring politician of the people who deeply regrets toeing the Tory party’s gay-unfriendly line on Section 28 back in 2003 and now vocally supports civil partnerships. A father whose experiences of the NHS with his disabled son Ivan have brought him “into touch with a lot of people you meet in politics... but in a different

way.” A man who has always cared about “quality of life” – although that phrase meant better schools and hospitals back in 2005, whereas it was all about the environment by 2007. A cyclist who urged the UK to “vote blue, go green” in 2006, but by credit crunchy 2008 wanted to help them “vote blue, go green – and save money.” As a list of policies it’s not consistent, but as a narrative it’s coherent. And nobody cares in the slightest that it doesn’t yet translate into anything concrete, that the party didn’t have a single policy document until last November. By October 2006, Guardian/ICM polls showed that the public was keener on Conservative health policies than Labour ones, despite the fact that the Tories didn’t have any public health policies at the time. Their burgeoning success had been built on something other than substance. Instead of getting bogged down in the hit-and-miss minutiae of policy documents, Cameron had been working, Leigh-like, on his party’s general aura. While Leigh fears with each film that he’ll never finish it, Cameron never seems to doubt his impending glory. All the “we will fight, we will win” rhetoric is pretty standard political fare, though – how the story ends depends on whether the British public carry on judging the man who would lead their country as superficially as if he were a character in a movie

Out Of The Ordinary

Clay Felker – 1925-2008 Clay Felker, one of the great magazine editors of the 20th Century, died on July 1 after a long battle with illness. Clay played a major role in the genesis of BAD IDEA, mentoring founding editors Jack Roberts and Daniel Stacey at the University of California, Berkeley, and offering advice and encouragement in the magazine’s early years. Jack roberts pays tribute.

Clay Felker (right) with Sen. John Kennedy and photographer Hy Peskin in 1953, near the Kennedy’s summer home. Photography by Hy Peskin (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Bad Idea

lay Felker defined New York, the magazine he founded out of the ashes of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper in 1968, as concerned with “how the power game is played, and who are the winners.” This was a dynamic innovation. By charting the status anxieties and baubles of the Manhattan middle classes, Felker reinvented aspiration as spectator sport, forging the template for the modern city magazine. Feisty, avaricious, and attuned to the self-image of an audience of highball sipping urbanites, New York combined a steely commercial sensibility – restaurant reviews, lifestyle pieces, ‘best of ’ lists, all of which were uncommon at the time – with wild, imaginative feature journalism. The best writers flocked to the title, lured by Felker’s fabled enticement – “I’ll make you a star” – and not very much money; Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, Jimmy Breslin, Gail Sheehy, Ken Auletta, George Goodman, Nik Cohn, Nick Pillegi, and Mark Jacobsen. They used New York as a launchpad for glorious careers and what Tom Wolfe would come to characterise as ‘New Journalism’: hard reporting that read like literary fiction. It wasn’t long before the magazine’s writers were breathing what Wolfe later described as Felker’s “own mental atmosphere of boundless ambition, his conviction that we were involved in the greatest experiment in the history of journalism.” New York announced itself to the world by lobbing a pipe bomb at a venerated rival, the New Yorker, a literary giant that, despite having access to the most famous writers in the world, had lapsed into a creative narcolepsy. “We start the week the same way as The New Yorker, with blank paper and ink,” Felker would tell his staff, “There’s no reason why we can’t be just as good as they are… or better. They’re so damned dull.” It struck him their torpor was a story in itself, so, after an initial request for an interview with editor William Shawn was pompously rejected, Wolfe was dispatched to gatecrash the New Yorker’s 40th Anniversary party. He returned with a stick of dynamite entitled ‘Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead.’ Running at 10,000 words, the article scandalised the Manhattan media world, intimating as it did that the most esteemed editorial vessel of the age was nothing more than a ghost ship populated by pusillanimous librarians. Furious, Shawn threatened Jock Whitney, New York’s then publisher, with libel, and recruited a phalanx of famous contributors to write venomous letters – E.B. White, Muriel Spark, even the reclusive J.D. Salinger weighed in. Time and Newsweek lapped up the east coast literary feud, reporting it to a national audience of millions, and New York’s ad sales were doubled in one stroke. More controversial feature stories would follow.

‘La Dolce Viva,’ Barbara Goldsmith’s seminal exposé of Andy Warhol’s mistreatment of Factory ‘superstar’ wannabes caused a sensation – and also revulsion, as the magazine’s high-end Madison Avenue retailers pulled their advertising from New York in protest, precipitating an investor crisis that almost sunk the title. Then there was ‘Radical Chic’, another Wolfe zinger that skewered a benefit party held by Leonard Bernstein for the black panthers, and Nik Cohn’s ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,’ a penetration of the Bronx disco subculture that became the basis of the film Saturday Night Fever. Felker was at the centre of it all, goading his writers, coaxing narratives, untangling ideas and endlessly generating new ones, forever interrupting conversations at the dinner table to scribble notes

“We start the week the same way as The New Yorker, with blank paper and ink,” Felker would tell his staff with his gold ballpoint pen. He was already a glamorous figure at this stage; a native of Webster Grove, Missouri, he had worked as a reporter for Life magazine before becoming features editor for Esquire. His second wife Pamela Tiffin was a famous film actress, and he often kept glittering company – John F. Kennedy, Jake Javits, Sammy Davis Jr., Norman Mailer. Felker’s proximity to power and celebrity was intensified by his rising stock at New York; when the magazine launched as a standalone title in 1969, its circulation rose from 50,000 to 240,000 in a single year, jumping it out of debt and into a public flotation. New York’s rapid growth suited Felker’s own expansive ambitions, and he assumed the role of publisher as well as editor; in 1974 he oversaw a takeover of the Village Voice, a leading alternative weekly, and then launched New West in 1976, a Californian take on the New York formula. Felker’s grand designs would prove his undoing however – he made the mistake of discussing business plans with a friend, Rupert Murdoch, at a dinner party, and soon found himself powerless to avert a hostile takeover bid from the Australian. Going public had proved fatal: Felker was forced to sell his shareholding for US $1.4 million, and was ejected from the magazine he had built to greatness. The high watermark of his career was over. Thereafter, he had career successes as the editor and publisher of Esquire in the late 70s, a producer at

Out Of The Ordinary

20th Century Fox, and the editor of Manhattan, Inc., a Wall Street magazine, in the early 90s, but none of his ventures flew as close to the sun as New York. In 1994, he set up the Felker Magazine Centre at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught there until 2004. Here, Felker shaped the career of many young journalists, and in turn fed on his students’ energy, describing them to journalist Charlie Rose as “leaves that turn to the sun, just as I did at their age… on fire with the idea of having a magazine, just like I was.” It was in Felker’s Berkeley classroom that Daniel Stacey and myself first worked together, long before we relocated to London and founded BAD IDEA. Many of our ideas about journalism and magazines took first form in Felker’s class, and he will always hold a special place in the history of our publication. Despite suffering from throat cancer and life threatening bouts of pneumonia, Felker continued to offer us advice and support. When I

visited him in 2007, he urged we persist with BAD IDEA, saying he thought the journalism we were pursuing was “wonderful and important.” Perhaps he recognised something of his own past in what we were doing – young editors and writers in their 20s and 30s, taking risks, chasing down the stories they think are interesting and significant, and to hell with the consequences. For us, learning from him invested great confidence for the battles ahead; the news of his death brought a sense of deep loss, and the knowledge that journalism had said farewell to one of its titans. Rest in peace Clay, you remain an inspiration

The Tom Wolfe/New Yorker Affair

Tom Wolfe replies in New York, April 25, 1965:

Tom Wolfe’s satirical attack on the New Yorker’s editor William Shawn put New York magazine on the map, raising its profile nationally and helping to double its advertising sales. Enraged, Shawn wrote to Jock Whitney, then the publisher of New York, as did several of the New Yorker’s other prominent contributors, to attack Wolfe and Felker’s conduct.

‘This wealthy, powerful magazine has become a Culture-totem for bourgeois culturati everywhere. It’s followers – marvelous! – react just like those of any other totem group when somebody suggests that their holy buffalo knuckle may not be holy after all. They scream like weenies over a wood fire.’

From William Shawn’s hand

Letter from J.D.Salinger,

Letter from E.B.White,

delivered letter, April 11, 1965

the reclusive author of The

author of Charlotte’s Web

‘…As the editor of a publication that

Catcher in the Rye

‘Tom Wolfe’s piece on William Shawn

tries always to be truthful, accurate,

‘With the printing of the inaccurate

violated every rule of conduct I know

fair, and decent, I know exactly what

and sub-collegiate and gleeful and

anything about…. The virtuosity

Wolfe’s article is – a vicious, murderous

unrelievedly poisonous article on William

of the writer makes it all the more

attack on me and the magazine I work

Shawn, the name of the Herald Tribune,

contemptible, and to me, as I read it, the

for… it is pure sensation-mongering…

and certainly your own will very likely

spectacle was of a man being dragged

wholly without precedent in American

never again stand for anything either

for no apparent reason at the end of a

journalism.’

respectable or worthy.’

rope by a rider on horseback.’

Bad Idea

Out Of The Ordinary

The New Blockbuster Experience The return of 3D cinema, and James Cameron back on the big screen? Jack Roberts investigates.

n September 5, the IMAX corporation announced Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (see Pg.54) was the most successful IMAX release ever, taking over £31 million in gross box office. In a world first, Nolan shot six scenes of a major commercial picture in IMAX format, and the success is exciting big studios facing static theatre admission figures and declining DVD sales. None are more enthusiastic than Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of Dreamworks. He’s worked with four of the leading studios – Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Universal – to offer an US $800 dollar per screen subsidy for new digital projectors, which he hopes will persuade 10,000 of the 37,000 US cinemas to adopt the technology by 2009. Katzenberg described the coming technology at the March ShoWest conference in Las Vegas “as nothing less than the greatest innovation that has happened in the movie business since the advent of colour.” Apart from much improved picture quality, these digital projectors will allow cinemas to show 3D films that were previously prohibitively expensive. Plus, it means theatres can charge more for tickets. Major 3D digital features lined up for 2009 release already include reformatted versions of Toy Story 3 and the Star Wars trilogies. The two biggest releases, though, are made-for-3D, integrated IMAX features. First up is Dreamworks’ Monsters vs. Aliens, an animated CGI B-movie spoof with gurgling creatures voiced by Reese Witherspoon and Seth Rogen. Even more hotly anticipated is Avatar, James Cameron’s first feature film since the 1997 megablockbuster Titanic. Variety has reported that the film’s budget is an eye-watering US $250-300 million (£140-170 million), with a worldwide release slated for mid-December 2009. Such an investment in Avatar, which will only open in a limited number of theatres, offers a clue to the future of the blockbuster: part film, part immersive experience

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Mind, Meet Machine Early next year, Emotiv Systems launches the ‘Epoc,’ a neuro-headset that allows players to control video games with their thoughts and facial expressions. It’s the first of an innovative range of commercial ‘brain-computer interface’ (BCI) technologies in development, and could change the way we interact with computers forever. Jack Roberts speaks to Tan Le, the 30 year old co-founder of Emotiv.

What inspired you to set up Emotiv? It all started when [co-founders] Nam Do, Professor Allan Snyder and I sat together at a dinner talking about the research Allan was doing with autistic people. We talked about the how humans interact with computers and thought it would be incredible if the next generation of human beings were not only able to communicate with machines on a conscious, but also on a non-conscious level. And this became our mission: to create the ultimate interface for the next generation of man-machine interaction. Can the EPOC headset really figure out what you’re thinking? It sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel… The Emotiv EPOC is the first high-fidelity brain computer interface (BCI) device for the games and entertainment market. A brain computer interface works by observing an individual’s electrical brain activity and processing it so that computers can take inputs directly from the human brain. The brain is made up of approximately 100 billion nerve cells, which are called neurons. When these neurons interact, an electrical impulse is emitted, which can be observed using non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG), which has been used widely for medical research with no known side-effects. The EPOC is not claiming to be a telepathic device. We have created the first BCI technology that can detect and process both human conscious thoughts and non-conscious emotions. By reading and interpreting the electrical signals your brain naturally produces, the headset is able to interpret facial expressions, emotions and intent. This will fundamentally change the way games are played and designed. Imagine being able to make a game easier when the gamer is frustrated, or harder when their engagement score is declining. The options are endless.

furrowed), horizontal eye movement, smirk and grimace (clenched teeth); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate as well as a completely new category of action based on visualisation, the first of which is the ability to make objects disappear. Do you see potential for this technology outside of computer games? Beyond the gaming market, we see a huge potential for future applications including interactive television, accessibility design, market research, medicine, automotive, aerospace and security. Currently, IBM and Emotiv are planning to explore how to make these environments more personal, intuitive, immersive and ultimately more lifelike. IBM also intends to explore how the Emotiv headset may be used for researching other possible applications of our BCI technology, including virtual training and learning, collaboration, design and sophisticated simulation platforms for industries such as enterprise and government

How does the Epoc measure non-conscious thought? It detects over 30 different expressions, emotions and actions including emotional detections such as immersion, excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows Out Of The Ordinary

Art Therapy

by jean hannah edelstein

rt will help, I think. I should do some art. I am miserable at work: long hours, low pay, a boss whose steady campaign of bullying makes me jump anytime someone says my name. I sign up for painting and drawing. I was good at painting and drawing in high school, although I suspect that my A-grade might have been slightly inflated as a result of the relative performance of my classmates, many of whom had probation officers and court orders that meant that they were not allowed to get closer than ten feet to an Exacto knife, compromising their ability to fulfil the requirements of our etching assignment. It is a Monday evening at the Working Men’s College in Mornington Crescent. Before we are allowed to begin making art, the instructor, a feisty Russian woman called Svetlana, directs us to sit in a circle in the centre the studio and introduce ourselves. “I’m Paul,” says a fellow who has the pudge and complexion and posture of someone who spends a lot of time with a video games console. “I took the class last term, and I’m really keen to meet people.” He smiles at the women sitting on either side of him, winsome and desperate. They shift to the distant edges of their chairs. Svetland nods and smiles. “I’m Lisa,” says the next student. She’s in her early 40s with dark hair pulled back in a messy knot and a sad, lined face. “I guess... well, I needed something to do when my kids are at their father’s.” She frowns. “I’m Ted,” says the next student. He is weathered. He has long hair in a tatty braid, hempen clothes, 26

tattoos on his face. He jerks and fidgets in his seat. “I started painting when I was in recovery.” “Um,” I say. “I’m Jean. I hate my... I quite liked art at school.” We set up easels and set to work displacing our emotional problems with charcoal evocations of a pile of items stacked haphazardly on a central table. Svetlana circulates and looks over our shoulders. She clucks. “That,” she says, observing Lisa’s painstakingly, perfect, to-scale rendering of the folds of fabric, the empty toilet rolls, the tins of beans, “is so delicate! It reminds me of Carvaggio.” Lisa nearly smiles. Svetlana moves on to Paul. “Oh, Paul,” she says, lightly touching his arm. “Your drawing is so sensitive... and sensual.” Paul turns red to the tip of his ears. Ted is next. He draws in manic, twitchy, spasmodic strokes. “Very spiritual,” she says. “Quite Jackson Pollock.” Ted beams and snorts. Svetlana wanders over to look at my drawing. It is a mess of angles and smudges. The tin cans are square. I seem incapable of translating what I see in front of me on to the paper in any kind of recognisable form. I am frustrated. Svetlana pauses. I look at her, expectant. “Jean!” she says. I cringe, and cower, my Pavlovian response to direct address. “That is so CUBIST.” It is the nicest thing that anyone has said to me in months

Bad Idea

Many Ways to Shuck an Oyster

The Oyster Card, London's public transport smart card, is under attack from computerhackers and science-geeks. Daniel Stacey looks at its chances of long-term survival.

008 has been a bad year for the Oyster card, Transport For London’s smartcard pass. This October a paper by security experts at Radboud University in the Netherlands will be published, which reveals their method for hacking into Mifare Classic RFID chips, the technology behind the Oyster. NXP, the maker of the cards, tried to block the release of the Radboud report in June, but was denied by the Dutch court, which ruled that “Damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings.” So once this paper is available to download, just exactly what happens to the Oyster? Well, security guru Bruce Schneier tells BAD IDEA it’s unlikely anyone beside the most diehard geeks will be bothered to exploit the flaw. We asked him if there might be a flourishing industry of counterfeit cut-price cards for sale? “There’s more to running a criminal enterprise than that,” says Schneier. “I think that anyone who tried to make a business doing that would be caught through traditional police investigative means.  So I don’t really see this as much of a risk.” The Oyster system

is monitored by TFL for evidence of cloned cards, and as TFL has said in the past: “Any fraudulent card would be identified within 24 hours of being used and blocked.” However, über-geeks will still be able to bring out their RFID chip readers, brush up against commuters and capture the details of a card. Is all that equipment and disingenuousness really worth a £6.30 daily travel card? There’s another hack out there though, for those less technically inclined. Science bloggers on BoingBoing, Sciencepunk and Skeptobot revealed in May that the Oyster card can be easily reduced into its chip and antennae component by soaking it in acetate and peeling the plastic coating away. Once this is done, the chip and antennae can be placed in other devices. In August the LondonPaper reported that bankers had been putting the antennae and chip inside the band of their Rolexes. This sounds a little gauche to us, so we’ve come up with a few ideas of our own. Why not knock up the Oyster sovereign ring, or a magisterial RFID pimp scepter? Over-priced travel and dodgy data transfer has never felt so fun

Out Of The Ordinary

Bad Idea

Art Bubble Or Super-rich ‘Habitat’? London’s emergence as the global capital of contemporary art has been accompanied by a massive inflation in prices. As the October sales get underway, Ben Turner asks how long can this booming market last?

amien Hirst’s bold September sale of 223 works, ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’, seemed an adequate time for art critics all around the world to raise the question: is there a contemporary art market bubble, and if so, is it about to burst? Hirst’s £111 million answer, a record sale for a single artist, was ‘no’. But now, with, the global financial system in meltdown, and a new atmosphere of thrift in the air (not to mention that some of the collapsing firms including Lehman and Neuberger Berman may flood the market with their corporate art collections), is the skyrocketing market for pickled sheep about to fall back down to earth? October has become one of the key sales months for contemporary art in London, with the Frieze Art Fair attracting a large audience of international buyers, prompting concurrent sales by the major auction houses and satellite fairs like Zoo. Could this October be the breaking point? Although prices seem to be inflating at hyperspeed, this market isn’t particularly linked to Wall

London contemporary

Street or corporate America (and as Oliver Harris mentioned in our last issue, when they are linked, art tends to be a safe bet for investors in times of stockmarket crises). The Gagosian Gallery, a large global retailer of contemporary art, revealed last month that almost 50% of all its sales now come from buyers from Russia and the post-Soviet states (up from around, er, zero in 2004). Where previously these investors went after older and more established artworks, now the trend seems to be towards modern art – reflecting the nouveau riche and internationalist tastes of the new Russian jetset. With oil and commodities prices booming, Forbes listed 110 Russian billionaires in 2008, up from 36 in 2004. So the bubble may not be about to burst. There may not even be a bubble, just a new market that didn’t exist before: a market for what art critic Robert Hughes describes as art ‘décor’, which services a growing pool of new investors who view this season’s contemporary art trinkets as the super-rich version of a Gucci bag

£300,000,000

art sales 2005 - 2008 Source: Art Market Monitor

February £225,000,000

June

October

£150,000,000

£75,000,000

Left: Frieze Art Fair inaugural opening, 2003. Photography by Ben Turner.

£0 2005

2006

Out Of The Ordinary

2007

2008

Bleeding Heart, Hard-nose Eddie Stride is the founder of the City Gateway charity, which runs the successful social enterprise Gateway Media. He talks with Alyssa McDonald about the difficulties of combining acts of conscience with capitalism.

unning a small business that makes money isn’t easy; running a financially viable, socially responsible company in the difficult industry that is the media, at a time when the world economy is in meltdown is… challenging.  But not impossible. Gateway Media is the most successful of a group of social enterprises Eddie Stride manages as offshoots of his East London based charity, City Gateway, which helps young people in the deprived Limehouse area to gain training and work experience.  As a company, Gateway Media offers a fairly standard range of products – websites, branding, promotional films and so on – but what makes them different is that they also serve a social function, providing work placements and local employment. Stride, who grew up in Limehouse and originally planned to work for an investment bank after he graduated from Cambridge, is adamant that the company’s primary aim is a business one: “we want to keep making money”. Very few social enterprises ever achieve this goal, but Gateway is getting there. The numbers are small but the trend is positive: last year the company made nearly £55,000 with a margin of over £11,000; in addition it provided thousands of hours of training.  At the moment Gateway Media is still part of the City Gateway charity (although Stride is careful to point out that it belongs to a different cost centre), and there are various overlaps between the two bodies’ budgets – charity workers double up as company staff, while the business provides training places for users of the charity. But in the next couple of months the company will become an independent business entity.  Social enterprises occupy an awkward space between business and charity, designed to achieve something more complicated than either pure profit or straightforward public good. For Stride that can present difficulties. On the one hand he’s well aware that taking the business to the next, more successful level means moving away from its socially responsible, well-meaning image. “A lot of people have advised us to drop the social enterprise name. Because potential clients tend to think, ‘Oh, how fantastic’ – but then straight away what happens is they think, ‘what’s the quality going to be like?’” At the same time he acknowledges that the do-gooding image is largely what attracted the company’s major clients (they have worked with TfL, the live exhibition linked to TV’s Grand Designs, and are currently tendering for a London 2012 contract). “Because of the social enterprise part, they’re keen to get us involved”. But while branding may be an issue, he doesn’t see a more fundamental conflict between social enterprise’s community goals and business ones. “Why can’t you have big successful companies which make loads of money and pay for stuff on the charitable side? We don’t all have to be pandering to shareholders. If the profits are going into the community, making people more employable, then you’re creating a more generally healthy economy.”  Given how sickly the economy is after a few decades of pandering to shareholders, you can’t help but hope he’s right 30

Bad Idea

SOCIAL ENTERPRISE ACROSS THE POND: TOM’S SHOES The Californian hippiecapitalists behind Tom’s can apparently do no wrong. Their slip-ons are based on the rope-soled Argentinian alpargata, updated by ex-Nike designers and produced in less than traditional designs (this season they’ve included Democrat and Republican styles). For every sale the company provides a pair of shoes to a child in a deprived country – watch the short documentary For Tomorrow and try not to feel inspired.

Alligator Hunt by Kim Tingley

ene waited with his rifle ready. He watched the alligator float in the slough. It took a breath and raised its head. Gene fired. The alligator sunk. Gene boarded an aluminum boat, paddled out to his kill, and snagged it with a hook-ended pole. Then, pulling the carcass, he paddled back to his friend Tim, who took the pole from him and tugged the alligator ashore. On land, it made futile crawling motions with its hind legs. It had a clean, red bullet hole in its head. Tim pulled a switchblade from a leather holster on his belt, slipped it through the top of the alligator’s skull, and worked it around. It sounded like the scraping of dinner plates, the steel blade against the bone. When the alligator’s spinal cord split, its body jerked. Blood pooled in the knife hole and overflowed down the neck. “Yeah, alligators are pretty neat animals,” Tim said. He pointed out tiny black dots all along the sides of the alligator’s mouth in the places where a person’s cheeks would be. They were motion sensors that could feel even the slightest displacement of water — the gliding of fish. Tim propped a metal ladder against the gate of Gene’s pickup and positioned the alligator

at its foot. He secured a winch to a rope tied around and between the jaws, flipped a switch, and cranked the body over the rungs, bumping, into the bed. Gene and Tim drove all afternoon, looking to shoot a few more alligators. Nearing sundown, they cut their engines on a gravel path. Along it, a steep mud embankment led down to a ribbon of ditch. Gene shot three alligators in the water from the path. After he dragged the first one up the incline, severed its spinal cord, and stretched it out, it measured only 5’ 5” — a disappointment. “Roll him over so he can bleed good,” Gene said, and stalked off with his rifle around the truck and down the road. It took a couple tries to roll the alligator over, not because it was heavy, but because the flatness of its body made it slide instead of tip. Once I had it on its back, bleeding, I stroked its belly; the plating was as hard and smooth as a seashell. The skin where the alligator’s leg met its torso – its armpit – was the softest. It felt most like a sheeny mesh cigarette pouch I used to pull out to admire from my babysitter’s purse. This alligator’s forelegs ended in dainty feet – three long toes and a sort-of thumb tapering off into sharp claws. My own thumb filled its palm

Out Of The Ordinary

The Olympic Ceremony That Never Was Beijing’s Olympic celebrations were spectacular but lacked realism – even the stunning flyover fireworks footage was computer generated. In a letter from Beijing, Huon Curtis fantasises about the opening ceremony that could have been.

t was August 1, and I was drinking late at night in a dark bar down a deserted hutong. I seem to remember ending up in a rambling conversation with a middle-aged man I have never seen since, who claimed to be one of the creative consultants for the Olympic Opening Ceremony. We had a long drunken chat and he said that the World would be quite surprised by the content of the Ceremony. He said that the theme of the night would be ‘Chinese History – An Homage To Brecht’. He and his fellow creative consultants had started with the idea that theatre and public spectacle should aim towards being a collective political meeting.  Fittingly, the Ceremony would have various phrases of Brecht’s Questions from a Worker Who Reads flashed upon the ground at key moments. The first quote to begin the night will be: “Where, the evening that the 32

Wall of China was finished/ Did the masons go?” Night descends, and lights slowly illuminate what appears to be a massive recreation of the Great Wall. A long shot reveals the Great Wall to stretch from one end of the stadium to the other. Incredibly, the Wall then starts to move, worm like, across the ground: its peaks and troughs undulating for the cameras. The wall seems to ascend the side of the stadium and move across the audience, up to the roof. “WTF is going on?” the creative consultant screams at me. The cameras pan in. A close up reveals that the Great Wall is actually made up of thousands of actors all working in tandem (although some of them look uncomfortably crushed) to create the effect of one big wall. The thousands of actors are by this stage assembled on the roof. One by one (then in their

Bad Idea

$41 billion

$16.9 billion $11.2 billion $3.8 billion Sydney,

Athens,

Beijing,

London,

2000

2004

2008

2012

• The Beijing Olympics reportedly cost over US $40 billion, including $501 million for the Bird’s Nest. Claims that 10 workers died building the stadium were strenuously denied by Chinese authorities.

• Beijing supplied three security pens for official protests, and 150,000 security guards to deal with the unofficial ones. They must have had plenty to do: not one single application for the right to use the pens was sanctioned.

• China won every table tennis gold at the 2008 Olympics. Why? The International Table Tennis Federation cut links with Taiwan in 1953, in favour of the People’s Republic. Communist Party officials then scoured the countryside for suitable children to train up, giving birth to the Ping Pong Superpower.

• Beijing definitely had grandeur, but logistics, not so much. In many venues snacks didn’t extend past potato chips, dry bread rolls and instant noodles (no water supplied). Train stations were transliterated for non-Mandarin speakers rather than translated: the stop for the Olympic Green Tennis Centre was announced as AOLINPIKEGONGYUANWANGQIUCHANG.

• London then. We’ve got less than a third of China’s budget, and we spent £400,000 of it on an epilepsyinducing logo which a child could have drawn. One in five athletes will have a half-hour commute to their events, and we’ve asked the founder of the Carphone Warehouse to work out what we should do with the new stadium when the Games are over. Fake tickets and fraudulent shares already available! (AM)

Out Of The Ordinary

US Dollar cost at time of Games

hundreds, then their thousands!) they disappear off the edge (to their deaths?) into the car park. The emphasis, as you can see, is not on the monuments themselves, but on the thousands upon thousands who died to create them. The creative consultant revealed that he liked the historical parallel that he was creating by showing the Great Wall in the new Bird’s Nest stadium, which so many dozens of workers had died building. The creative consultant told me he hoped to present Chinese history with a critical perspective. He said that this is where the authorities are at, in terms of revealing their openness to the world. The censoring of the Internet that the Western media is complaining about was just misleading foreplay, and the world will be surprised by the brutal honesty that will be on display during the opening ceremony and the Olympics, he told me. He talked also about various other segments involving people kung fu-ing through bamboo, but the most interesting part is when they get to the late 19th, then 20th century. The Kung Fu stuff ends with a montage of events in the Qing dynasty, culminating in the creation of the Emperor’s Summer Palace on stage: basically a whole lot of jade belt bridges, beautiful gardens, and gold trinkets are spread out for the World to admire in wonderment. But what’s that, on the horizon? A flame appears... The Olympic Flame? No. No. No. It is the British and French forces. They are holding torches. And proffering opium pipes... Darkness. A scream. Spotlight: A man, centre stage. He sways. Close up: The man’s mad opium eyes. The whore and strumpet dance begins. Lots of people float around the stage, acting very high. Later on, Mao arrives. There’s a bit of homage to Mao, with lots of marching. Things get a bit mad at this point. The Great Leap Forward begins in earnest with gangs of people running around with torches. Most of the iron in the stadium is put into a furnace in the middle of the running track. The Cultural Revolution is represented through a huge montage of people engaging in selfcriticism while being called “traitors” and “capitalist roaders” and “snakes in the grass’’ etc. Giant images of churches and other monuments that are burning are themselves burnt. The night ends with Celine Dion singing Brecht’s ‘The Good Woman of Sichuan’ to the tune of ‘My Heart Will Go On’. “So, anyway,” said the creative consultant, “it’s a bit heavy handed. It’s brutal, but honest.”

Bad Idea

WHO’S YOUR BRANDADDY? The era of aristocratic patronage in the arts is long gone, and now the modern institutions that have traditionally funded creative content – record labels, TV stations, print publications – seem under threat or suffering gradual decline. So where do the creative industries look to next for their big payday? Oliver Harris analyses the pros and cons of life in the new era of the brand patron. Lord Maurice Saatchi, one half of emerging brand patron M&C Saatchi. Photograph by Alan Davidson (Getty Images)

f you want to see the future of our creative industries, look under the Westway. By night, Westbourne Studios is an über-trendy venue that has been home to some of London’s most legendary private parties. By day it is a complex of small design, production and marketing companies, whose glass walled offices look out onto a funky low-lit bar where executives sit unshaven in the light of their MacBooks. It is a hive of creative crossovers – one of my favourites is Fecund: ‘We began as a multi-media theatre company,’ their website explains. ‘In 2004 we diversified into training and personal development, marketing, consultancy and keynote speaking...’ But I am here to meet Ben Harrison of SCB Partners. SCB itself is a ‘marketing consultancy’ whose speciality is reaching ‘key influencers’ – those who set the trends. These make up a distinctly ‘hard-to-reach’ audience, and yet a crucial demographic for any aspirant brand. SCB put out feelers, sow the seeds. At the moment they’re scouting sticker artists on the cutting-edge of Madrid’s street-art scene. Like MI6 recruiting from behind a series of fronts, it might be quite far down the line before a Madrid graff artist knows that the source of his money, in this case, is one of SCB’s major clients: British American Tobacco. “You need an agency like ours for a delicate approach. People who know someone who knows someone. Sometimes it’s a flat ‘no’ – it depends where an artist is in their cycle of work. If they’re established they’re already sold out to a degree, but if not they’re more likely to be affordable. For regular artists these days designing a Coke pack is not a big leap. They know they’re going to have a compromised output. Artists are aware of themselves as brands and simply want to be associated with the right ones. At the end of the day, it’s their call to make. It’s like young actresses doing porn,” he shrugs. “And if you can’t get them to work with you, you just rip their work off.” SCB have already won British American Tobacco some exposure to the hipster market through its brand Lucky Strike. If you’ve noticed a recent increase in their presence that will be a result of what Harrison describes as the “Shoreditch Push” – a campaign that saw them saturating bars in a corner of east London particularly popular with ‘style leaders’. Madrid, meanwhile, is home to the Lucky Lounge, a venue which is already showcasing young up and coming artists with only the lightest sprinkling of tobacco involved. So what’s next for the industry? “People are bored of collaboration,” Harrison says. “The ideal now is for artists to come up with brand activation concepts themselves. To be within the process from the start.”

n January 11 2006 an advert appeared on the Lightstalkers website, a professional resource for photographers and journalists. Under the heading, ‘Need videographers all over the world’ it announced: Tell It Like A Story

New branded content/entertainment company looking for filmmakers and photographers (not agents or agencies) to hire for local ethnographic research projects in cities all over the UK. We need people who are well connected to their local scenes and who have a good idea of what is new & happening in urban culture. Please reply to marisa@supmag.com with contact information and samples of work. But the address of ’Sup magazine, and the identity of the poster, Marisa Brickman, gave some photographers pause. Rudimentary Internet searches connect Marisa Brickman to an online project called Cult-Geist: ‘an ever-evolving, interactive global network of 3000+ creatives’ its site announces. ‘We commission projects around the world to generate cultural insight and foresight. We work with artists and brands on creative collaborations & curations - bridging the gap between art and commerce - between emerging talent and brands.’ On the site you can watch a curated show of stills and video-art, under titles such as ‘The Individual Magma in the City’: ‘The pre-eminent individualistic scheme in all Western cities brings no answer to the sadness of the crowd but just emphasizes this feeling of similar individuals...’ Scratch further, however, and Cult-Geist itself turns out to be run by an advertising agency sub-division called GUM. The phone numbers for GUM, like the contact details for ’Sup, match a familiar address on Charlotte Street: number 80, the home of M&C Saatchi. Calls to Saatchi elicit mild amnesia regarding the project. Cult-Geist itself appears to have been shut down within a year. But that doesn’t mean it’s over. GUM acts very much as an experimental vanguard, exploring how far inside

A patron is the opposite of an investor: they need no financial return, only kudos the creative industries advertising can penetrate. It parallels the new contentdeveloping arm of rival agency, Mother, which was behind Somers Town by Shane Meadows (a film entirely sponsored by Eurostar), and the less high-brow Pot Noodle: the Musical, currently impressing crowds in Edinburgh. It’s a hot new model of advertising for bleeding edge agencies to flourish to their clients – more sophisticated than traditional full-frontal product placement, invulnerable to advert filters, non-shouty. And if you create your own content, of course, you don’t have to pay for ad space. GUM’s most controversial moment saw the recruitment of four West London girls through an ad in The Stage, with a view to forming a pop group. There was a brief furore in industry circles, then everyone forgot about it. Until a cute little electro tune appeared last year: ‘Style, Attract, Play’ by Shocka. It featured an act called ‘Honeyshot’ on vocals. Judge Jules and Annie Nightingale played it on their BBC radio shows. Then some listeners pointed out that ‘Style, Attract, Play’ was the slogan for a hair product range, Shockwaves. The Shockwaves press office said it knew nothing about the song and its relationship to the brand. A spokesman for the station said the track was presented to Radio 1 in the usual way, via a legitimate promotions company. Eventually, after various calls to the daddy company – Procter and Gamble – Shockwaves conceded that there “may be a link.” Others remembered the suggestion by GUM’s managing director, Andrew Wilkie, that their girl band might be bought ‘off-the-shelf ’ for promotional work. ‘Honeyshot’ were unmasked. The general disgust on the part of various institutions, not least the BBC with its jealously guarded non-commercial status, suggests such an 36

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400 thousands of pounds offered by Eurostar to fund Shane Meadow’s film Somers Town

undercover tool won’t be used so bluntly in the immediate future. But, as with Cult-Geist, GUM may only have been guilty of moving too fast. While funding of the visual arts has always been a challenge, music, until recently, paid its own way. But the historically brief period in which music was a physical commodity has ended, and with it the commercial viability of the record industry. Sales of records and CDs come close to halving year on year. In June, Guy Hands, head of the private equity firm that bought EMI, suggested bands could have corporate sponsors, like football teams. “Does the Royal Opera in London feel upset that Barclays sponsored a performance?” he asked. But why go to a band and try to persuade them to sell a tune to you, or wear a logo, when you can buy the band wholesale? On March 19 this year, Groove Armada announced it had parted company with its record label: Sony BMG. Like so many bands, they found their old label too large, overbearing, anachronistic. Unlike other bands they didn’t switch to a rival record company, they went to a multinational drinks conglomerate: BacardiMartini. Under a new deal, Bacardi will pay for their next album to be recorded, promote it and give the band a salary. In return they get exclusive rights to use any Groove Armada songs in advertising. Groove Armada, naturally, play Bacardibranded events. Troy Rice, a PR man from boutique London agency Canoe, sees this as the future, and not necessarily a negative one. “Groove Armada was the big news at the start of the year, but without a doubt there’s going to be more. I don’t care about the label they’re on, and nor do most fans. I care about the music. And you’re going to get a lot more artistic freedom working with a company from outside the music industry, than with one dependent on record sales.” This is the twist. A patron is the opposite of an investor: they need no financial return, only kudos. Or rather, if the brand pays for it, then the value that art is measured by is not necessarily viewer figures, or ticket and record sales. The artist is less constrained by hard nosed record execs or network suits, and to please their patron merely has to allow their creative output to market the patron’s work by association. Which often means more artistic freedom, not less. To those of an alternative mindset, the end of independent culture came in June last year when Sonic Youth announced they’d be releasing new material through Starbucks’ Hear Say label. Kim Gordon declared Starbucks “less evil” than the band’s former home, Universal Music. Likewise, when Joni Mitchell’s comeback album on the Starbucks label turned out to be less radio-friendly than expected, commentators were forced to concede that the ‘halo effect’ of having her attached to the brand probably helped Starbucks accept the album’s lack of commerciality. Red Bull is believed to be launching its own record label in the next few months: entertainment blogs have long been buzzing with rumours, fuelled by ‘sources close to the project’, of a new recording studio in their Santa Monica offices. Antoine, from the Paris-based marketing company Rosbeef, works with upand-coming bands on behalf of Motorola: “I see bands that are fed up with their major record company. They think they’re too slow, too big, not new enough. The industry has changed: more people make music; more people on the other hand consider music should be free. The problem is obvious and the industry suffers. I believe brands – if they do it well – can help out.” Rosbeef was created two years ago under the protective wing of Motorola itself. After working on the perception of the brand among youth audiences, they created MyMotoMusic. With the help of Rosbeef, Motorola were the first brand ever to get their own MySpace page. “It’s a big leap for a brand to go and start producing artists, but they can start by supporting initiatives, organising the meeting of artists, tours and parties. It has to be authentic and coherent. Tell It Like A Story

“Neither Motorola nor us want to help bands or DJs that are so big that they don’t really need us. But it’s not just a question of finding tiny artists and making them so thankful that they wear a Motorola t-shirt or something on stage. It’s just that we don’t want to be ‘one more brand’ supporting Justin Timberlake. We all like him, no offence, but he’s Pepsi, he’s L’Oreal, he’s anything really.” Yet working with small, fiercely independent bands takes tact. Again, this is where small agencies such as Rosbeef prove so valuable in the new patronage system: “You’re not just a party organiser. When you represent a brand and start dealing with artists you have to act clever. French artists tend to be less used to dealing with brands than UK bands or DJs, and they are sometimes reluctant to play the game. But it was a lot harder two years ago to get artists involved with sponsored parties. Sometimes they want to see the poster before we launch ads; they make sure there are no logos behind the stage when they play…” “I remember a junior brand manager of a jeans company asking me after a gig: ‘I see the bands thank the venue, their friends and the audience after the show… why can’t they thank us, the brand?’ I told him we could give the bands pairs of jeans but not ask them to wear them on stage. I told him we could, indirectly, give the bands money to promote the LP and the show but not ask them to say it on stage. We have to make sure things aren’t going too far. When brands have a request I’d rather go and see the band myself than let the client do it, if I know the demand will be... unsubtle.” One interesting side effect of the increased involvement of branding in the arts has been the consummation of the drawn out romance between pop culture and contemporary art. In the world of brands, the creative kudos of art and music are twin poles of cool. Charles Saatchi himself was instrumental in bringing down barriers between the art, music and marketing worlds simply by collecting artists who acted like rock stars, and art that looked like branding. Significantly, one of the few jobs Cult-Geist did before beating its retreat, was the production of 11 short films in collaboration with Fatboy Slim’s Southern Fried Records (Katy Ellis, from the label: “It’s important for us to work with creative people who have not made their name yet, which is exactly what Cult-Geist is about.”) April this year saw the launch of Art and Music magazine. The mag ‘taps into the very point where contemporary art and independent music collide’. It will ‘inspire, inform and promote wider recognition of grass roots trends to a mass audience’. It also promises ‘a guaranteed platform for advertisers to reach an audience looking to connect to a “next” thing in two of the biggest and most influential creative industries.’ Gemma de Cruz, art editor of the magazine, explains: “The idea of Art & Music is not to cover all art and all music or somehow try to link Madonna and Damien Hirst but to somehow try and capture the spirit of how these two subjects mix together. For example: why do so many musicians go to art school and not music school? Or what makes an indie band more ‘arty’ than other genres of music?” But the story of Art and Music magazine is itself a parable of new business models. Immediately after the first issue, a patron stepped in. From October the magazine will be known as Saatchi Art and Music, and found, free, in the new Saatchi Gallery. I asked de Cruz if this had always been part of the plan. “I had no expectations when I started the magazine. I did think that if we were able to build it up we could continue to run it independently but if that didn’t work maybe we could find a publisher who might want to invest.  I had... met Charles Saatchi previously so I did have an existing connection. I had heard that he liked the magazine so I asked if he would provide a quote. Then he called myself and David Sheppard [music editor] in for a meeting to discuss the possibility of making the magazine part of the Saatchi Gallery.  “One of the first things that Charles Saatchi said was that he wanted the magazine to remain exactly as it was in style and content which was amazing for 38

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Marisa Brickman with friends Phil Oh (founder of streetpeeper.com) and Tommy Saleh (Soho and Tribeca Grand’s Creative Director) in Paris, 2008. Photograph by Dominique Charriau (Getty Images)

Tell It Like A Story

us to hear. To be independent means to me, means literally working for yourself – that every minute you spend working is to build something in exactly the way you want it to be. Even though Art & Music is now part of the Saatchi gallery, it’s still the same magazine that we set up which was set up with an independent spirit, so in that sense it hasn’t changed. I don’t think I would ever criticise the Saatchi gallery because that’s not we’re about anyway, regardless of whether the gallery had backed the magazine.” Saatchi may well remain hands off. There are, however, less happy precedents when it comes to agencies moving into ownership of cultural publications. In an article published in Clamor magazine – ‘How Much Did You Pay For Your Identity?: The Big Business Of Selling Individuality To Kids’ – journalist Scott Puckett writes on the dangers faced when art and music become publicity, and publicity becomes press. “There is a profound difference between culture and the culture industry. The culture industry segments and divides people into groups for easier marketing and sales; culture struggles against this process.” He cites US magazine, The Fader, a trendsetting minority-interests title containing articles ranging from politics to punk. It also happens to be owned by a marketing and PR company, Cornerstone Promotions, and regularly features the bands and clothing labels they represent: “It’s really quite a brilliant strategy,” Puckett writes. “Cornerstone bills its promotions clients for publicity. It sells ad space in what amounts to a catalogue for its clients and then sells the product to consumers who think they’re buying a magazine. Unless you poke around Cornerstone’s site and start reading The Fader’s masthead, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever learn otherwise.” In a spirited letter of defence, The Fader’s Eddie Brannan claimed the magazine operates entirely independently from its parent company; and, again, that it is precisely this old-fashioned, hands-off patronage that enables independence and freedom of content: the magazine itself runs at a loss. But waters get muddied further when The Fader teams up with Converse and Levi’s for events like last

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50 million free iTunes gift cards handed out in Starbuck’s stores between October 2 and November 7 last year

“It’s naïve to insinuate that it can’t be real art if there’s a Red Bull logo underneath” year’s ‘The Den’ in which indie bands got drunk on Red Stripe and dressed in new designer jeans, coats and sneakers as part of various companies’ ‘presence marketing’ strategies. The woman behind the event turns out to be none other than Marisa Brickman, subsequently recruited by M&C Saatchi to mastermind Cult-Geist. “These bands are poor,” she noted, “and we’re like, we’ll clothe you, we’ll feed you, we’ll give you beer, we’ll take your picture. It makes them feel special that they got invited.” The question posed of The Fader can be applied to the arts generally: does corporate patronage dictate content? Aesthetic? Ideological? If not, to what degree has this been helped by a general depoliticisation of art in the first place? “It’s naïve to insinuate that it can’t be real art if there’s a Red Bull logo underneath,” argues Adam Glickman, publisher of the international culture magazine Tokion. Courtauld lecturer, Julian Stallabrass, is more wary of corporate influence: “Corporations generally want art that is accessible (at least at first sight), reproduces well on magazine pages, appeals to the young and wealthy, is newsworthy and connected with celebrities. The results are predictable: an art that plays with novel combinations of recognisable signs in decorative packages. Meanwhile, the museums become brands too, the logo populating banners, posters, wall texts and catalogues, so that any work displayed bears the stamp of their institutional approval. The idea of mounting an exhibition that takes an ambivalent or even critical position towards its contents now appears merely quaint.” This might seem hysterical until you step inside Brand Tate, and are confronted with their latest line of Cy Twombly T-shirts. Tate Modern, of course, is the flagship behind which modern art sailed into the realms of the mainstream, an unthreatening alternative to gigs and cinemas as a date destination. The financial engine behind it, the merchandising arm, operates as a separate entity: Tate Enterprises. ‘Reflecting Tate’s increasingly broad audience, Tate Enterprises continues to work creatively to optimise the quality and variety of its products,’ they announce. ‘It’s success this year is easy to measure; overall Tate Enterprises (excluding Tate Catering) had a turnover of £13.7 million and contributed a profit of £2.9 million to Tate.’ How did they do it? ‘The shops at Tate Modern prepared for a large and diverse audience... by presenting an affordable range of high quality art-centred gifts, which proved very popular and made the Christmas trading season particularly successful.’ It is too late to go back. And the feeling I get is that no one in either the art or music industry is particularly concerned. The assumption that artists will always be at odds with branding seems less certain the more I speak to people involved. Many I meet, like the UK artist and designer Ronzo, speak of commercial contracts as a mark of an artist’s prestige; the creatives at SCB and Canoe of a tradition going back to the Medicis. Antoine tells a story: “A few months ago the manager of a band we were kind of following calls me, and he asks for Motorola to help sponsor the launch of their EP. I told him we had very little budget left, and this release wasn’t in our plans. I told him we could only pay for an ad. Still the guy decided to put Motorola on the front of the CD. I asked him why he was so ‘generous’ to a brand and he said: ‘I do that for three reasons: one, I want to show Motorola we are able to play the game; two, I think it makes the band look good; and three, it makes it easier to find sponsors for the next album’” Tell It Like A Story

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By B

Amazon vs. Apple in the War of the E-books

Using Google Maps to fund a film

(pg.46)

The fashion industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s online echo chamber (PG.42)

(PG.50)

Out Of The Ordinary

The Fashion Echo Chamber Online trend databases have grown into essential tools for all major fashion manufacturers and retailers. But what happens to diversity and competition when everyone’s looking at the same information?

GSN.com is the multi-million pound fashion company you’ve never heard of, staffed by all the people you ever dreamed of. As I walk past the mood boards and fabric samples of their head office in Camden, London, ever more pulchritudinous faces glance up from their work at the coalface of the world’s leading clothing trends database. Even the tech guys are pretty. It’s less second-floor office and more fashion-journalism holodeck. Those letters stand for Worth Global Style Network, founded in 1998 by two brothers, Marc and Julian Worth, who previously supplied graphics to the fashion industry. They wanted to create a database of their designs, and also incorporate the fashion forecasting that was then published in the form of trend books. What they created evolved into an exhaustive fashion magazine and interactive research tool, chasing after the global wardrobe developments of the bold and the beautiful – Mexican teens, Chinese shopaholics, London gays and New York hipsters – and repackaging them into neat, statistically supported trends for large consumer brands. In 2005 publishing giant Emap bought the company for £140 million. Content director Juliet Warketin has a Wintourian air of passion checked with efficacy, and a softly tousled version of the classic bob. She speaks with a Canadian accent that occasionally drifts towards Sloane Square. “I think of it as an encyclopaedia more than anything else,” she says. 600,000 live pages, 36,000 words added every week, 225,000 images available for download, an archive of 40 million pages: all this will cost you £15,500 for five desktop licenses for a year. It has 35,000 users, including hundreds of major fashion brands, as well as companies like BMW and Samsung who want to keep ahead of the curve. There are the things you might expect from a fashion information database: catwalk photos, street photos, tradeshow news, features on celebrity style. And then there’s window display designs, travel guides, downloadable graphics and scrapbooks, and in-depth analysis of sociological shifts. The latter are

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collated in an area called ‘ThinkTank’ – current articles include a feature on the next generation of eco-tourism, and a report on the social trend of pursuing happiness by being nice towards one another, with helpful ‘key consumer phrases’ as a sidebar: ‘be nice; be kind; authenticity; common sense…’ But how is all this different from collating, say, Wallpaper*’s travel guides, Style.com’s catwalk shots, The Sartorialist’s street reports and the business news of the trade papers? “Where can you find that all in one place?” asks Warketin. “And it’s about the fashion filter, it’s about the fact that we have ex-buyers on our team. We supply information all the way through the supply chain, so we start with colour, with fibre, and we work all the way up through to what your point of sale is going to look like.” Topshop designer Katie Smith is a regular user. “We like to use WGSN to look at street style and festival images, and of course its great shopping guides.  Before we set off on buying trips, I often check which new stores might have opened and which may be worth visiting.” Similarly, Kelly Harrington, senior print designer at H&M, uses the site to track developments amongst various urban tribes. “I find the city section really useful. We travel to all sorts of cities to get inspired.” Looking to stay abreast of cool in a century where the Internet has played the role of pacemaker, acting as a medium for trends to be collated worldwide, the fashion world has become hyperactive and hungry for this constantly updated information. With supply chain efficiencies now allowing fashion brands to turn around product incredibly quickly – to digest and recreate trends in very short spaces of time – WGSN has emerged an almost indispensable tool for large companies. “The fashion industry has become focused on packages rather than seasons; the whole industry has become focused on quick delivery and quick trends,” says Warkentin. “Companies like Zara are turning things around on a 10 day basis, so if they see something is selling well, they’ll go back and do something based on that, and it’ll be back in the store in a week.” Or as Lauretta Roberts, editor of industry magazine Drapers says: “The seasons are becoming irrelevant. People crave instant gratification.” But it’s the Asdas and Matalans where WGSN opinions hold greatest sway, virtually dictating trends to the major retailers. Michael Curran is a buyer at British knitwear firm Stuart Peters Ltd., who shift units in the millions for the mass market. “I think huge retailers get the most out of WGSN because they have less time to send their own people around,” he says. “When you’ve got those large quantities, people really need to be reassured they’re making the right move. When you have a board of directors who has relatively no idea about what’s happening in the fashion world, but you’re trying to persuade them to follow a vision and produce a range before its been sold, you can use WGSN data as proof a trend is happening. It’s about legitimacy.” Conversely, smaller labels will avoid using it. Curran notes the dangers of the service for labels that place authenticity at the core of their brand, citing defunct surf brand Mambo: “They were very reliant on WGSN, and that definitely contributed to their demise as a brand. It can alienate a lot of brands from their fans.” For some, the fact that Asda’s designers will be looking at a trend on the website means that they will necessarily look away. Curran used to work for hip jeans company Ksubi: “We were trying to do something completely original. My bosses wouldn’t have allowed me to use WGSN, because it would have meant a certain type of design.” In other words, designers love and loathe WGSN: it offers them a wealth of 45

The upstart: Fashion futurology is largely a British industry at the moment – with WGSN.com and mpdclick.com both based here. New York upstart Stylesight.com is quickly becoming a major competitor though, and secured a US $16 million cash injection in September from IT investment fund Fidelity Ventures, which may catapult them into the big time. Fidelity Ventures has handed over US $110 million in venture capital this year to emerging tech companies, including joining Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in funding MFG.com, an online marketplace for sourcing manufactured parts.

up to date information spanning the global fashion community, yet simultaneously offers the same information to competitors. It is a rich seam of inspiration, yet also acts as an echo chamber. Warkentin believes “there’s more than enough information to go round” on the site, although she is also willing to admit that for her subscribers, “WGSN gives them a common language, so that everyone can talk about the same thing.” As I express my discomfort at this, she becomes gracefully agitated. “If a designer is inspired by something small and people love it – if they take something really original and really incredible and find someone with the guts to pick up on it – how wonderful is that?” Her enthusiasm is shared by Fiona Jenvey, managing director of rival trend database mpdclick.com: “You used to have an American look, a British, a South American look, but now you have just a global look, with small cultural emphases: the global marketplace has created that. And socially that’s such a great thing because it makes people much more accepting. People of my age are quite inclined towards racism, but Generation Y is accepting of different cultures – it believes in one world, one set of values.” However, both Jenvey and Warkentin admit that there is a growing disenchantment with the homogeneity and rapid trend chasing amongst high street retailers, and also an economic and ethical squeamishness at buying a top that will only be worn once. “People are thinking, ‘I’m a bit tired of buying on a regular basis, maybe it’s time to buy special pieces again,’” says Warkentin. “We’re looking at things that have a little bit more of a lifespan. Brands which tick off the sustainability box and provide incredibly fashion-forward, directional products will do really well.” Jenvey believes this backlash will be manifested in accessorisation. “The high street will have to come up with credible pieces that can be put together in such a way that each person can look completely different, but each wearing the same pieces, just in different combinations. Accessories need to be major, not just pushed over in the corner of a shop somewhere.” So, in exasperation at the difficulty of giving oneself completely to a look that will be uncool in three months, is the public moving en masse into a core look, brightened with points of flair – scarves, glasses, jewellery? Perhaps the pace of change initiated by sites like Warkentin’s and Jenvey’s has created its own antichange trend: a desire for fashion stasis, for classic style. Where then does this leave the desperate cross-bred terminology on sites like mpdclick – ‘pimpfants’, ‘technoethnic’? Has the micro-trend cycle almost reached its point of exhaustion? As we wind things up, Warkentin says, with real feeling: “Creativity is so important right now, because if you haven’t got the guts to do something really exciting and really interesting that’s going to spark you and drag you in…” She shrugs. WGSN, monolithically powerful as it is, still runs on the buzz of this new type of creativity: fast, globally inspired, accessible, quickly plagiarised and recreated, breeding and reproducing at a pace that is in one light exciting, and in another a source of weariness for consumers. On the high street, the rails heave with this week’s version of cool, soon to be displaced by new looks sourced from spontaneous urban teen-trends in Baltimore or Sydney, in a cycle that can be executed in under two weeks. Fiona Jenvey plots the trajectory thus: “You get a group of people who adopt the look in Brick Lane, then in a few weeks it appears in Topshop, then in another season or so it’s in Marks and Spencers but in little touches.” Meanwhile, the Brick Lane kids have already moved onto something new. Where once a youth subculture would have remained unnoticed by the mainstream for years, today’s Internet panopticon reduces its lifespan drastically. If Minor Threat were to form now, within a fortnight you’d likely see Topman tees blaring ‘I GOT STRAIGHT EDGE’ in your local Wetherspoons pub Bad Idea

Tell It Like A Story

Year of the E-book

Although the UK lags behind, it seems that mobile digital books have finally arrived. But in an industry that Amazon predicts will earn it US $1 billion by 2010, whose format is going to win, and when are Apple going to wade in?

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

The XO-2

The Sony Reader PR-505 48

hat makes a product developer, a techno-futurist, or a change-maker shudder in their sleep? It’s the product whose revolutionary character mysteriously consigns it to an early grave, the flag-bearer trampled by the cavalry charge, the innovative device that becomes almost instantly obsolete. Recent history is littered with such sad tales: Betamax, Laserdisk, HD-DVD. And in the latest race to radically redefine how we access and view information – the push to finally bring books into the digital age using electronic readers – we’ve perhaps already had our first casualty. The Sony Reader PR-505, the first serious e-book reading device on the market, already seems to have been wiped out by the Amazon Kindle – which has the advantages of links to Amazon’s massive online bookstore and a wireless download facility. Amazon’s Kindle has, since its launch in November 2007, reportedly sold 240,000 copies, a sales record that if continued would allow it to match first year sales of the iPod (360,000 in 2001). While everyone has ceased talking about the Sony Reader in the US (the most innovative and competitive market for e-books), an announcement by Citigroup analysts in August that the Kindle could double original sales expectations sent Amazon’s share price up 9%. Kindle sales and related revenue are now estimated to top US $1 billion by 2010. The Kindle’s launch comes just at the right time. 2008 is the year of the ebook, that much is recognised: a certainty flagged up by the increasing howls of publishing industry luddites. Margaret Atwood at a talk at the Southbank Centre said that digital readers couldn’t replace books because you can’t read them in the bath. Joanna Trollope at the London Book Fair scoffed that she’d never read War and Peace on an e-book reader. Doris Lessing, collecting her Nobel Prize, voiced resistance to the whole of the digital age: “We never thought to ask how will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the Internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities.” Whilst the literary old guard, living in multi-bathroom apartments whose shelves groan with £20 hardbacks, are unable to sever their romantic attachment to tree books, the inescapable truth is that from shellac to vinyl, vinyl to CD, and CD to MP3, the public gravitates toward the medium that is the most convenient for them. An e-book reader can potentially provide instant wireless access to any publication – book, magazine, newspaper, blog – on the planet, for cheaper than their paper counterpart. Their specially designed E Ink screens almost exactly Bad Idea

replicate the experience of reading print. The Kindle and the Sony Reader both use electrophoretic technology rather than a backlit LCD screen to display text. It works by charging black and white ink particles within tiny capsules the width of a hair; depending on the charge being positive or negative, they rise and fall within the capsule, with the black liquid appearing as print to the reader. Unlike current LCD screens, E Ink can be read comfortably in direct sunlight. Quicker, cheaper, whilst delivering virtually the same reading experience: case closed? Well, perhaps not in the UK. You’d be lucky to have seen an e-book reader in action over here, thanks to high prices and a non-existent marketing push by the available models – the iRex iLiad (£400), the Cybook Gen3 (£269), and the Be-book (£220). When Waterstones started selling the Sony Reader (£199) in September, there was at least a blip of publicity. In the US however, Amazon are stimulating Kindle sales with an aggressive price drop, now at a gettingtowards-reasonable US $360 (£180). “I think that the interest in e-books has been hugely encouraged by Kindle – it’s at least a mini iPod moment”, says Philip Jones, managing director of UK publishing industry magazine The Bookseller. “Some people are saying that a million could be sold by the end of the year.” Out Of The Ordinary Tell It Like A Story

Baratunde Thurston is a political blogger from San Francisco, who keenly tells us the pros of his Kindle – the ability to search Wikipedia for references, adding highlights and bookmarks, and typing notes on the sides of pages. “It’s not nearly as ugly as everyone in the tech blogosphere has been whining about”, he adds. “If the device had a little gray Apple logo on the front, these same haters would be praising the device as a miracle design breakthrough”. John Timmer, science editor at tech website ArsTechnica, has a mixed view though: “The Kindle’s chief strengths are the battery life and the wireless connection”, he says. “The wireless connection’s obvious selling point is that you can buy books and subscriptions as you need them wherever you are

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— flick the wireless on, drink your coffee and, by the time you head for the train, it’s got the newspaper ready to read”.  However, Timmer believes the slow refresh rate of the E Ink technology, with the screen needing a few seconds to change the image, means the Kindle remains imperfect. “Amazon tried to put too much into this machine. It works brilliantly for books, but it’s a lousy web browser because of the slow drawing and page-flipping.” These limitations of E Ink could be its downfall as a technology. Cue the XO2 laptop, announced in May by the One Laptop Per Child company, who make cheap computers that can be hand-cranked, to help further education in the third world. Due for release in 2010, it uses LCD technology for its screen with an extremely high resolution monochrome mode that can be read in direct sunlight, as well as providing colour (which E Ink currently lacks). “The complaint of many developing countries was that their kids needed books not laptops. Well, here’s a laptop and a book!” says Joanna Stern of NewYork-based Laptop Magazine. Best of all, it is predicted to cost just US $75. The new screen technology of the XO-2 could effectively render electrophoretic technology redundant. “History is rife with examples of insurgent technologies exposing weaknesses in the incumbent technology – only to spur the incumbent to get better”, says John Ryan of PixelQI, who are making the XO-2 screens. He cites the example of silicon chips, which, when threatened by gallium arsenide models, improved and emerged triumphant. “We see that the LCD screen can improve, and will.” And if a hand-held computer can perform everything an e-book reader can, and more besides, do we really need stand alone readers? If LCD technology is able to replicate the E Ink experience, wouldn’t the idea of an e-book just end up being another feature on a PDA or an iPhone? Surprisingly, in January this year Steve Jobs slammed the Kindle and the market for e-books during a New York Times interview: “40% of the people in the US read one book or less last year. The whole conception [of the Kindle] is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” But compare that to previous statements declaring that iPods would never have video screens, and that Apple would never enter the mobile phone market, and you can see why many commentators view his outburst as a rather obvious smoke screen, diverting attention from Apple’s very own development of an e-book. As early as 2006, Apple insider sources speaking to tech blog Endgadget.com revealed efforts to incorporate e-books into the video iPod. And with iTunes, Apple already has the company structure to distribute digital content and negotiate with publishers. Unsurprisingly, there are already applications for the iPhone that allow e-books to be read on their screens. One of these, TextOnPhone, has independently negotiated an alliance with the publishers collective International Thriller Writers to gain access to 30,000 different e-book titles. There is an obvious long game in Apple’s gradual monopolisation of mobile music, telecommunications, video and computing devices. Its logical conclusion is the creation of a completely dominant all-in-one handheld computer and phone, connected to an online store stocking music, movies, books, newspapers, magazines, and any other information that can be digitised and sold. If Apple did enter the e-book market, it’s difficult to see which other company could rival such a device and content delivery behemoth. Talking to Jay Marine, head of product management for the Kindle, it is clear that Amazon believe in the long-term prospects for their machine. “There will be a second version; there will be a fifth version. We expect that Kindle will remain popular as a dedicated reading device and based on customer feedback, have no reason to doubt it”. For now the Kindle remains dominant, and is clearly the starting point for a mass-market take-up of ebooks. But with the book publishing industry currently worth £11 billion per year globally, keeping that position will be very difficult indeed Tell It Like A Story

First Digital Steps for Backwards British Retailers Borders and the iRex iLiad: Verdict: at £400 far too expensive, and the Borders online store is doing little to support it by way of compatible e-book titles. Waterstones and the Sony Reader: Verdict: The Sony Reader is already virtually obsolete in the US. Why? It’s not wireless. Waterstones might be launching the Kindle now if they hadn’t broken away from Amazon in 2006 to host their own webshop. Blackwell’s and the Espresso Book Machine: Verdict: an obese photocopier, which sidesteps all the environmental advantages of e-books.

Crowdsource Yourself a Film When the studio and theatre system rejects a filmmaker’s indie feature, what can they do? We look at the new generation of moviemakers deciding to market, distribute and fund their films themselves, using custom Google maps, ARG games and crowdsourced finance.

n 1992, Robert Rodriguez shot El Mariachi for US $7,000. At the time the low sum was revolutionary, and was raised through experimental drug testing and stretched out by using a wheelchair for tracking shots, amongst other money-saving tactics. The costliest resource was film stock – Rodriguez used just 24 rolls of film for the 81 minute feature. The romantic story of El Mariachi’s creation is something of a sham though. That US $7,000 figure doesn’t include any of the costs incurred to actually get the film into cinemas – the prints alone ran into tens of thousands, while publicity and marketing (courtesy of Columbia) pushed it towards the million mark. Rather than representing a radical departure from the studio system, the film relied completely on larger gatekeepers for its success. Recently though, independent filmmakers have found they have other options. Where traditionally they would take their feature to a major festival hoping that a larger entertainment company might decide to pick it up, now many of these filmmakers are building worlds outside the studio and theatre system – empowered by online applications – and refusing to let traditional gatekeepers decide the fate of their films. Take Four Eyed Monsters, whose premier at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2005 – which previously helped to launch such low budget films as Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Jared Hess’s Napoleon Dynamite – failed to gain the feature a theatrical release. Desperate and in debt, amateur filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley set up a fan-site with regular video-blogs charting their struggle to launch the film. Visitors could input their postcodes into on a customised Google map, creating a database showing cities and towns where the filmmakers’ plight had a strong following. As this database grew, they decided to use it to cold call cinemas in the most popular areas and convince them to screen the film on a trial basis, succeeding in securing a limited release across six cities in September 2006. They discovered that for each fan who had input their postcode, 52

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they could expect to sell roughly one ticket to a screening. The momentum these screenings created led to further theatrical releases, and a wave of free marketing. Another small outfit Brave New Films were able to release their documentary Iraq for Sale through a series of screenings in homes, schools, religious groups, community halls, and offices. Many of these screenings were carried out by interest groups who Brave New Films had contacted personally, and convinced of the importance of the film’s theme of war profiteering: anti-war lobbies, conservative think tanks committed to responsible tax spending, and human rights groups. By cleverly launching in the fall of 2006, director Robert Greenwald was also able to interest candidates running for the House of Representatives and the Senate to screen and discuss the film, and incorporate it in their campaign policy statements. The film gained so much momentum through these guerilla screenings that on May 10, 2007 Greenwald was called to testify in front of House Appropriations Committee in Washington DC, and advise on legislative measures to prevent further war profiteering. British filmmaker Chris Atkins followed a similar strategy when trying to promote his BAFTA-nominated film Taking Liberties, a Michael Moore style exposé of the Blair government’s infringement of civil liberties. By interviewing Kate Allen from Amnesty International for the film, he was able to involve interest groups in production, which added further incentive for them to promote the film on their site, forums, and at talks. “I had human rights activists handing out my flyers for free,” he says. “It’s not something that would bother Amnesty. If I make money it means tons of people have gone to see a film about human rights. Tick. Of course they want me to be successful.” Sam Ashken of London-based viral marketing firm HyperHappen, has managed to distill these techniques into a business. “Standard techniques like 30 second TV spots for the trailer and outdoor posters will always exist for big companies”, says Ashken. “But smaller, independent releases traditionally rely on positive word-of-mouth after release. The Internet allows marketers of these movies to ‘micro-target’ potential advocates who can amplify word of mouth through digital media.” One recent example is their work on Hellboy 2: “We have relationships with hundreds of bloggers and online fan communities. We invited them to participate in a program, which gives them early or exclusive access to digital assets like photos and videos as soon as these become available. They can then upload these to their social spaces before they are widely available”. The fans feel valuable, so their bond with the film is greater, and the word-of-mouth becomes stronger. And they are unfazed at being pawns for brands: “People will share branded content online so long as the content is funny, weird or unique enough,” says Ashken. Experimental British film project A Swarm of Angels goes one step further in its use of ‘crowdsourcing’ – the sourcing of a particular resource like content, money or marketing from the mass public. Through membership fees and funding drives, ‘cultural entrepreneur’ Matt Hanson is aiming to raise £1million to make his feature film. And the incentive? Membership buys you the opportunity to advise on the script and filmmaking process, while the crew will be sourced from within the Swarm community. Once the film is finished, it will be distributed DRM-free and under creative commons, meaning anyone can watch it for free. Furthermore, the raw materials of the film – scenes, soundtrack, dialogue, and so on – will be made available to download, allowing members of the public to remix the film. “I think the cinema screen has started to become freed from its place in the cinema”, says Hanson. “Screens are ubiquitous now, with mobiles, escalator Out Of The Ordinary

Workbook Project For those interested in DIY distribution, marketing and financing, Lance Weiler has constructed a great free resource called the ‘Workbook Project’, billing itself as ‘An Open Source Social Experiment for Content Creators’. As well as providing tools that help you remix and network video, it’s also a great place to find tips on audience building, and to pick up DIY film-making jargon that makes you sound incredibly ‘switched on’. Try these out for size: • MIG (media integrated game play): alternative reality gaming that is integrated into other media projects like films, music, and social networking. • Permission Culture: the opposite of DIY culture, where filmmakers believe the only way to get their features made and aired is to curry favour with “a handful of commissioning editors and the whims of their tastes.” • Open Source Cinema: film projects that allow members of the public to re-mix or reedit the footage.

ads and so on. When the cinema screen was trapped in the theatre, I think a lot of filmmakers were trapped there as well, thinking they could only create within that particular framework”. “With A Swarm of Angels, you’ve got more control over it than if you go to Channel 4 or the Film Council for funding, where you’ve got a script-reader giving you notes – ‘It has to be commercially viable, has to sell to X amount of territories!’ Well, we don’t need to sell to X amount of territories; we need to appeal to those who have joined the Swarm, and appeal to people who are similar.” And if raising £1 million sounds far-fetched, bear in mind that when Iraq for Sale ran into financing difficulties, Robert Greenwald contacted his network of interest groups and previous DVD customers, and asked for small donations. 3000 personal donations over 10 days raised US $267,892.

here is a balance to be struck in these adventures in the digital age. How many innovative online strategies and promotional side projects can you spend your time inventing before you become more of a professional marketeer than a filmmaker? Young American filmaker Lance Weiler is the creator of indie horror flick Head Trauma, which he made for US $126,000. After a limited 17 theatre release, which only managed to net US $18,000, he decided to look beyond theatres for other venues to air his film. He struck on a Trojan horse strategy of approaching museums and billing screenings as cinema Alternate Reality Game (ARG) ‘events’: with music, theatrics, gaming and technology accompanying screenings. At the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, viewers were invited to use cell phones to interact with Head Trauma: talking with characters and receiving cryptic texts. Weiler later used the captured phone numbers of guests to engage his audience after the screening, with actors calling them as they walked home. Those who continued interacting were eventually invited to play a special online comicbased game. Weiler’s company closely monitored the limited players of this online comic, and at certain points would execute phone calls to individual players. Their responses were captured as audio files and layered into personal version of the game – played back to them as they continued through the experience. The game proved popular and received national press, and so Weiler decided to create a mass-market online version, which it was hoped would promote the film in advance of a video on demand launch through Warner Brothers. He brokered deals with Stage6, MySpace and Xbox to host the game, called Hope is Missing, which exploded in popularity, attracting over two million views in a fortnight. At this point Weiler decided the game was its own property – potentially more popular and valuable than the film itself. He’s now raising money to relaunch a version of Hope is Missing as a stand-alone social media project. When Weiler wowed audiences with his story at this year’s Power to the Pixel Conference in London – an industry event discussing digital innovation in the independent film sector – not everyone was convinced. “But are you guys now marketeers or are you film makers?” asked an audience member. “The reality is that we find ourselves in a time where you can’t really wear one hat anymore. If you want to work independently you have to wear a business hat, a technology hat, a filmmaking hat… there is no real model for it.” Weiler replied. “It all kind of feeds itself. It’s like a Möbius strip or something. In this digital world there are no rules.” “There’s a big misconception where the [film] festival is the gate. You go to one of the major festivals, you sell your film and then everything else happens: the slipper fits, there’s lightning in the bottle and everything’s great. The reality is it isn’t like that, or for the vast majority of people it won’t be.” “And so I think you get to a certain point where you realise you can have control over your own destiny… or, you can sit and you can wait for somebody to give you permission.” Bad Idea

Out Of The Ordinary

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For our Creative Industries Issue, we conducted a comprehensive survey of senior figures from the UK’s leading creative institutions and companies (turn to pg. 78 for a full list), to find out from the horse’s mouth who were the best up and coming talents. What we found: hamster powered paper shredders, inflatable terrorist hideaways, YouTube dance classes, and a documentary filmmaker who hid behind trees to film elves as they put up tents. Read on…

Although the UK lags behind, it finally seems that mobile digital books have finally arrived. But in an industry that Amazon predicts will earn it $1 billion by 2010, whose format is going to win, and when are Apple going to wade in?information?

by Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Jack Roberts & Daniel Stacey. Photography by Sebastian Meyer, except Hudson Mohawke, by Simon Fernandez. Out Of The Ordinary

Bronwen Parker-Rhodes FILMMAKER

ronwen Parker-Rhodes on Kenneth Anger’s motor porn short-doc Kustom Kar Kommandos: “I want to do it with a woman grooming a horse. Obviously it will be suggestive, but not too much!” On Unser Täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread), Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s epic feature on modern food production: “It’s completely observational, no dialogue. It was mesmerising because it was so beautifully shot, and had so much in every shot. And it’s not even an antifood industry film – it wasn’t like there were loads of shots of animals being slaughtered, there was also fruit and vegetables, and the breeding of animals. I wish I’d made that film.” Parker-Rhodes’s first major commission – a respite from her night-job as a strip club DJ in London – came from Channel Four, where her ambition to create grand visual essays was condensed into a series of ‘Three Minute Wonders’, on hunting practices. Donna Hunts Moose: a dog (Donna) stares balefully from a kitchen floor, before we see it sniffing the air on a forest track. Two men walk with rifles. One starts aiming. A moose shifts in the distance before it’s felled with a loud crack. The men gut the moose, before heading home and stringing it up. As they skin it, steam from the still-warm body rises in the wooden shack. The dog gnaws on a bone while the family eat their fresh meat. These short documentaries straddle, as she says, the line between “fine art and documentary film”, exploring the potential of film as a “medium for portraiture.” As a student at London’s Slade School of Fine Art (BA, with 1st Class Hons, 2006), her first interests were sculpture and photography. “[When] I started making these films, I just saw them as a collection of photographs. I wasn’t interested in narrative at all: that came afterwards.” She rarely allows herself to speak in her films, and never appears in front of the camera. “I love following a group of people, quietly observing, and the fact that you can explain the whole thing without any words.” Her follow-up series for Channel 4 was themed around LARP-ing (live action role-playing, i.e. men dressing up as trolls and fighting each other with plastic swords). Skullduggery begins with light banter between the LARPers as they make camp. 66

“Gary. How many elves does it take to put up a tent? One. How many orcs does it take? Two!” The Clan of Gudash Kraun opens with another group of adult role-players in a forest. A young man in black face paint, halfway through make-up on his way to becoming an orc, explains his mission for the day: “We’re going up to the elves to kick some ass. Just give them an ultimatum, because they messed with us last year in spring. So we want something back. Maybe a child?” Rich with significant details, yet seemingly strung together with incidental, casual scenes, a ParkerRhodes short is the film equivalent of a punchy work of literary journalism, or a poetic Carver vignette. “The structure of the film only comes out when I’m editing it. For each of the ‘3 Minute Wonders’, I’d shoot five to eight hours. I was just scared of not getting everything.” Perhaps her best short so far is Ginger, the portrait of an Australian prostitute. Close-up of her heaving cleavage; close up of a cherry tattoo behind her right ear. Pull back, she is combing a blonde wig and chatting – no sound. Shot of her lower back and legs as she kneels on a toilet seat. Cut to her face and hands – she is counting piles of cash on the bathroom ledge, and applying powder to her face. White cowboy boots lie on the floor next to a cheap red roller case. Below her high-rise apartment, the sulphurous yellow sign of a high street café. Shag pile carpet in the living room. Ginger sits on her couch alone, wearing her wig, bored and waiting. Sighs. She scrolls through her mobile phone, rummages through the red suitcase looking for a book. Chopper 2 and Guitar for Dummies rest next to a ruby coloured 20-inch dildo. Close crop on a flat-pack shelving unit, its only contents a complete reference set of the A-Z of Family Health. Shot of a framed photo of Ginger as a child with Alsatian. Shot of a magazine opened to a spread with the title ‘Gore Whores’. Shot of her blue socks as she answer the phone: “Pardon? Um, yeah, like at my discretion only… Yup… Yup… Yup… [pause]… Yes I have.” Running time 3:48. What more do you really need to know? DS, BBT

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cutup COLLECTIVE VISUAL ARTISTS

ress in a high-visibility vest and you can pretty much get away with anything. The five young men sitting across from me in Hoxton Square, London, know this well: since 2005 ‘CutUp Collective’ have been tearing down billboards, cutting them into little pieces, and re-pasting them back onto their hoardings as the images of hooded teenagers, or pensive children. “Yellow jackets make you unnoticeable and forgettable,” says one of their founders. The group wishes to remain anonymous for this interview. But this is a strange time for subversive public art. When street artist Banksy painted a wall on London’s Portobello Road earlier this year, the reaction was swift: acrylic sheeting was placed over the work and drilled into the wall. The property’s owners then listed the artwork on eBay, and it eventually sold for £208,100: the wall itself will be cut out and rebuilt. Vandalism is trendy, and valuable enough to be sold as decorative art to wealthy collectors. In slightly more highfalutin terms, this phenomenon represents the two forces of detournement and recuperation: key tenets of the Situationist theory that informs much of CutUp’s work. Detournement: a disruption of the status quo created by manipulating the elements of the city (think ‘ad-busting’ and ‘culture-jamming’). Recuperation: when the status quo reclaims threatening events and activities by shifting ground, or co-opting the threat and selling it back to the public. Most of the members of the collective come from rural or suburban backgrounds, and found the atmosphere of London’s streets heavily ordered and curated when they first arrived to live in the city. “The systems of the city are very closed already. It’s something that’s already there. And we think that what we’re trying to do is interrupt that slightly and chip away at it.” In September CutUp will be attending the Conflux Festival in New York. It bills itself as a “festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice.” Its installations, happenings and adventures are a rich place for those in love with the practice of reclaiming and experimenting with urban environments. Events include: “The ‘$1k Giveaway’ by the Federation of Students and Nominally Unemployed Artists”, and “an iPod video and cell phone-instructed scavenger hunt through the East Village.”

“For public art to progress it needs to utilise communication technology and public interaction, instantaneousness and be capable of competing with, or at least working with, the ‘spectacle’,” the group tell me. “The foundations of such an art are evident in flash mobs, or in their worse guise the attacks on the twin towers.” Competing with the ‘spectacle’ – the term Situationist theory uses to refer to the idea of city environments – means staying ahead of the curve, of presenting the public with moments of pure spontaneity. I remember the first time I saw a work by CutUp – a chopped up and re-pasted billboard erected in London in mid-2005 on Kingsland road. Beautiful, confusing, it instantly made me laugh. I thought about it for the rest of the morning, and about what my initial surprise had meant. Why couldn’t I feel like that all the time? It was an invitation to play. Banksy perhaps once elicited a similar euphoria, and sense of freedom, in those who chanced across his stenciled satire. In 2008 though, CutUp’s billboard trick is well known, surprise is no longer on their side, and it’s time to evolve. Where do they see subversive public art going next? At Conflux Festival CutUp will be premiering a work called ‘Stages of Permissive Aphasia’, comprised of a British Gas television commercial cut up and reordered frame by frame into nine new individual films, showing scenes of riots, escapes and car crashes: they describe it as “an implosion of meaning in media and advertising”. It’s part of their continuing exploration of ways to disrupt and reclaim curated public environments, be they city streets, television, billboard advertisements, or popular music, as was the case with their recent installation ‘Temporary Access 1’, a giant hand-built machine with sequencers and samplers that aimed to “evaporate 20th century sound”. “Invariably commissioned public art has its roots in sculpture that portrays a higher sense of what is human,” they tell me, citing as an alternative Gustav Metzger’s Auto-Destructive Art. “Dating back to Roman sculptures and more recently, war memorials, many examples of ‘public art’ today attempt to celebrate community, achievement and a sense of pride – all presented on a pedestal. Public art should be demystified and stripped of its grandeur.” DS

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Cecilia Wee broadcaster

ut there in space, shall we find friends? Cecilia Wee is eight years old. She wants to be an astronaut. Is there a place where the universe ends? When will we find it? But she doesn’t have any science skills, probably won’t be fit enough, and doesn’t think she has enough money anyway. Never, never, space goes on forever. “I just like the idea of stepping out of a spacecraft, letting go, floating off into space and thinking: ‘I’m watching the universe go by, and I’m dying’.” Never, never… “What an amazing way to die.” Growing up in Streatham, Wee’s fascination with space travel is kindled by the BBC Children’s television show The Boy from Space, whose theme song, a gentle whirl of celestial synthesisers, is sung by the actor Derek Griffiths. From 10, playing music becomes her goal, and she starts to learn about composition and experimental music. A progressive tutor introduces her to the work of composers like Steve Reich and Conlon Nancarrow, experimental pieces that sound like heavy metal to a teenager who has just formed a metal band with friends. It’s a story she will always tells now – the musical ‘revelation’, or whatever… Jump to Bristol and a degree in Classical Music. An MA at Sussex, where she will later pursue a PhD, and dreams of academia. A job at The British Music Information Centre, where her boss puts her forward for a presenter slot on the groundbreaking London art radio station Resonance 104.4 FM. Art programmes on Resonance from 2002; interviews with Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller; Irish composer Gerald Barry; the Frieze Art Fair. Progress, fun, innovation – established artists appearing for an audience of their peers. Then in 2005, with the help of composer Matthew Shlomowitz and artist Russell Martin, Wee launches a monthly showcase of new music, film, art, performance and discussion at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. They call it ‘Rational Rec’, a Victorian nickname for instructive entertainment; an evening that blends the sweep of Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ with the noise chaos of one-off collectives like Genital Panic and their “dancehall meets black metal” compositions. Angular art types come to sup drinks, acting serious as their soles adhere to the beer-sticky floor. The night achieves notoriety when a Guardian 70

art critic rebukes a performer on a ‘no electricity’ evening for violently throwing himself onto tables covered by glass and candles. The temporary retirement of Rational Rec sees Wee moving into the field of sonic weaponry, co-curating an exhibition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 2009, provisionally titled ‘Embedded Arts’. It will focus on advances in security technology, future threats to global security, and the military production of culture – such as the U.S. government funded video game America’s Army. Says Wee: “I’m interested in the relationship between what technology makes possible and what limits we put on our actions. In a way, human nature dictates we will always fight in one way or another, and so I find it difficult to make any moral judgment about the use of weapons. …I think of what Georges Bataille said, that excess in any economy has to be purged, and there will be a way of purging it – whether that involves burning people or killing animals.” The British segment of the Berlin exhibition will consist of sculptural pieces, photography, performance, and sound installations; “Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich are going to be making inflatable hideaways for terrorists.” “It’s going to be amazing.” As a polymath cultural broadcaster – academic, art critic, classical music enthusiast, radio presenter, museum curator – she finds the popular arts media formats Newsnight Review, The Culture Show, and Radio Four too limited in scope to do justice to the green ocean of unreported culture that exists all around her. “I don’t need to hear Will Self talk about the Francis Bacon exhibition – there are a hundred articles on that in all the newspapers. Those programmes are about the cult of the personality of the invited panelists – it becomes more about them establishing their narrative in the media… a replication of the celebrity cycle.” At 29, she has ambitions of working with bigger broadcasters in the future, maybe the World Service, and presenting classical music and art in a fashion that will make them more valued by younger generations, but she’s at a crossroads right now; “I want to make sure I keep working on things I think are exciting, and which challenge me and other people, without losing the plot.” And on she floats, watching the universe go by. JR

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augusto Corrieri choreographer

ear the Internet? Go to YouTube and search ‘Augusto Corrieri’. Check out ‘Intro Video for “Dance Company” at the Exeter Phoenix, 26th February’. Play it, turn up the volume setting, and watch as an unshaven young man in a cream foulard scarf and knit jumper talks to you in a light Italian accent. “Hi, my name is Augusto. This is a studio in Brighton, from where I will be teaching you a piece called ‘Dance Company’. The piece will happen at the Exeter Phoenix. Some of these videos you can just watch and listen to. Others, you will have to watch two or three times, and also copy what I do.” Cut to Corrieri in a small and pristine studio with white walls. Dressed in denim jeans and a grey Tshirt, he jogs around the room before collapsing face first onto the floor. We are invited to copy him. “You will need an Internet connection, a computer, and enough space around you to rehearse… The idea is that the day before the show, we will all come together for one rehearsal of about three or four hours. That will be the first time we meet, so it will be good to say hello.” Now skip across the YouTube page to ‘Instruction video two’. Midway through the clip, we see 10 people standing in line on stage in a previous performance of the routine in Plymouth. A girl runs from the line, doing a single circuit of the stage before collapsing on the floor. Then, a man steps out of line, and walks across to the girl. “Zoe, are you OK?” “I’m fine,” she says. “Well if you’re fine, why do you go like…,” the man copies her, running a single circuit of the stage before himself falling to the floor. The audience laughs. No one is sure why this is happening. A third person, a girl, steps out of the line and walks towards the collapsed man. “Richard, are you OK?” “I’m fine…” “It just repeats,” says Corrieri, addressing you directly again, “Until everyone is on the floor.” This is an open participation stage show where dance, for so long the preserve of pearl clad fluffies and their gummy beaus, is being reinvented for the

interactive age. Goodbye Sadler’s Wells, encrusted art elites, passive audiences, and the professional technique borne of years of punishing practise. Hello local theatres, remote participation, democratisation, enfranchised amateurs, and (gasp) young people. Blurring the line between live art and dance, audience and performer, Augusto Corrieri’s work challenges the assumptions and values of the contemporary dance world, tapping into the meme culture of OK Go music videos, and web virals where 1500 Filipino prison inmates dance to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ for the world’s entertainment. “How can you think of a show as more than just a product?” says Corrieri, holding court from a pub in Victoria, London. “Where dance is not just a one hour set piece done by skilled performers, and watched by passive audience members. In the UK, ‘dance’ is skilled movement that’s nice to watch, with nice lighting and all of that, but I find myself bored to the point that I want to cry. It’s all given.” Growing up in Milan, the teenage Corrieri was obsessed with Michael Jackson and David Copperfield, teaching himself to moonwalk and performing close up magic. In 1999 he returned to England, his mother’s home country, entering the Magic Circle and enrolling at Dartington College of Arts, a cutting edge arts institution in Devon. After graduating in 2002, he co-founded the experimental performance company ‘Deer Park’, and has worked as a solo artist since 2006. Corrieri’s dance pieces typically disintegrate the barrier between audience and performer – in a recent work he removed a member of the audience, gave them a quick dance lesson, and then watched as they performed the solo finale to the show. He’s put on three such YouTube sourced shows now. His 21st century vision of dance production can be a solitary experience though: “I work alone, they work alone, and there’s this great climax, a coming together on the night of the show. Every time it simply puts people in a state of euphoria. But then it’s over, and I never really see these people again. We just scatter; I’m left without a dance company, and we start all over again.” He laughs, “Sad, eh?” JR

Tell It Like A Story

Tom Ballhatchet industrial designer

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his is the circle of life,” reads the post on Gizmodo.com, one of the world’s biggest technology blogs. In the lead image, a hamster in a cage runs on a wheel, powering an office paper shredder. The waste paper fed through the shredder falls into the cage to create hamster bedding. squarie damn it feels good to be a hamsta willyolio: genius! man, next they should combine... bananas and ice cream or something! woooooooOOoOOOooOoooo Lupison: BEST INVENTION EVER Waste and its re-use is not a topic known to froth the rocks of your average tech geek, but in the childlike proclamations of Gizmodo commenters lies an inadvertent endorsement for eco-design. This, in a large part, is the triumph of industrial designer Thomas Ballhatchet’s eye-catching designs, which make recycling, well, fun. “I did a lot of research that showed most people were sceptical about recycling,” says Ballhatchet in a pub in Kentish Town, close to the London offices of his employer, Maoworks. “Green issues are always about restriction, negativity, and loss… so I wanted to find positive stories related to the issue. The hamster shredder came from an idea to create ‘product compost’.” ‘Hamster Shredder’ was part of his final project for a Masters in Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins, and has since been exhibited in Milan by the British Council and in the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The idea came from his mother’s hand powered paper shredder, and stimulated excited chatter on leading tech and cool-hunting blogs (Engadget, ShinyShiny, and Gizmodo to name a few). Subsequently, the shredder featured in publications the world over, from Minneapolis (The Star Tribune) to Amsterdam (FHM). Emails started to rain down on Ballhatchet from across the globe; “Either they’d say ‘this is great’ or ‘shouldn’t you be thinking about the welfare of hamsters?’” he says, with a baffled shrug. His recent designs follow a similar line, and include a screw top lid that redeploys used Marmite jars as lampshades; a ‘Tetley Tea Pen’ that writes with 74

ultra-concentrated liquid tea, creating handwritten notes that can be diffused in boiling water to brew cuppas; ‘eBay spray’, a recyclable and non-sticky, starch-based spray foam, which acts as padding when mailing items (think ‘Silly String’ with beefed up foam); and a digital electricity and gas meter with a small TV screen, on which celebrities like Michael Caine offer you tips on energy efficiency. “The basic idea of the celebrity meter reader is that if you’re into Dizzee Rascal, and he tells you to lag your loft, then you might listen to him. It’s slightly ridiculous, I suppose, but I quite like having some degree of ridiculousness in my work.” Most of these products are development prototypes and blueprints, but Ballhatchet’s latest has real commercial potential. His ‘TV Packaging Stand’ is packaging for large televisions that, after a little reconstruction, doubles as a stand that also houses DVD’s and other appliances. It’s both ingenious and hugely practical, hinting at a future where all product packaging might be designed with its re-use in mind. There have been certain obstacles to making the TV packaging stand viable for the mass market though. The cost of production needs to be very cheap or close to free to prevent it from being dismissed as a novelty extra (Ballhatchet is still working on the solution to this one), while the packaging needs to be light enough for easy use and portability, yet strong enough not to buckle under a wide screen television. With the latter challenge in mind, Ballhatchet constructed the stand using expanded polypropylene (EPP). “TV packaging is usually made of polystyrene; polystyrene makes CD cases, which are very brittle and crack, but EPP makes bottle tops and is very bendy.” In this regard, he took inspiration from Colin Chapman, the innovative designer and founder of Lotus Cars, whose life work he admires. “He had the ability to make things very, very light. While he would make cars that would maybe break three laps before the end of the race, they were beautiful things” Ballhatchet’s designs echo the panache and intelligence of Chapman’s work, but his innovative ‘re-use’ products could be even more influential. His ideas have the potential to make eco-design entertaining, amending the wasteful ways of companies and individuals with a winning chutzpah. JR

Bad Idea

Out Of The Ordinary

Bad Idea

HUDson mohawkE musician

hose little noises, you know them, overlaid a thousand times. Jelly wobbles amplified, the snoring of a Red Loris sent through a sound granulator, where do they come from? Well, my father had a radio show on the now infamous Radio Clyde station in Glasgow in the mid ‘80s and so I guess it kind of starts there. At primary school nothing really interested me except music; I was really into a lot of early to mid-90s jungle/hardcore stuff. I started trying to DJ when I was about 10, mixing between a hi-fi turntable and a cassette player, and caught the bug from then on. Once I moved up to some belt drive turntables I spent every hour I could hunched over them. I spent a few years doing the DJ battle circuit – DMC and ITF etc. – around 2000-2003. I won some lost some, but I eventually got fed up with the whole scene. I started making music on my PlayStation around ‘98-‘99 and it has been my focus ever since. Through the time tube following a long history of theramins, of space basses, or Edgard Varèse’s. Into the production wormhole. What exactly is a new sound? I have a drum kit and various percussion instruments that I’ve collected, and I’m also into just recording whatever: lots of home made percussion and noises with my mouth, just whatever sound I need at the time I find a way to make it. I’m trying to create a sound where someone will know a track is mine within the first few seconds. Funk, pop, modern hip-hop, sampling, the death of live music, the birth of the DJ god. Dance and its drugged historians concocting microtrends and subgenres. A musical family tree suffering rapid mutation and extinction. An ever-splintering audience, a drifting apart, specialisation. Less money, smaller labels, more bedroom producers and less studio time. Undiscovered genius and forgotten heroes on every street corner. You decide to work with an MC called Odissee, a Sudanese-American rapper from Maryland and before you meet in person you’ve had a sonic introduction on MySpace, brokered trust, and are halfway through your second 12” together.

Most of the people I’ve collaborated with online in the last few years, I’ve since met in person, and done it the old fashioned way as well. But sometimes I actually find it easier to be objective when you’re not dealing with a vocalist in front of you; it takes a lot of wasted time out of the process if I can send something to a vocalist I’m working with, continue working on my other projects, and they can record in an environment they’re comfortable with, on their own time. A new breed of sophisticated, international urban music, a sound that is uncategorisable but similar: artists from Stones Throw, Ubiquity, some of Warp Records’ stable. Perhaps sharing a sensibility – a sunny influence, the modern reverberations of 70s funk, the intelligence and cosmopolitanism of early hip-hop, relaxed, beat-led, cosmic. Waiting for the spaceships. Madlib, Sa-Ra, dâm-funk? My dad is actually born and bred in LA, although I haven’t been for years and years, so maybe it comes from that connection, I don’t know. I was due to go over there in early July but I messed the dates up and ended up with too much work, so it’s rescheduled for October now. I’ve played alongside Madlib, Sa–Ra, etc., on this side of the pond though, and I’m working with dâm-funk on a few things at the moment also. ‘Emotronic’? That’s the name this 22 year-old Glaswegian producer is putting to his music, after rejecting ‘Wonky’ (Dubstep + Crunk) and briefly flirting with ‘Polyfolk’. What’s that mean to you Hudson Mohawke? In a literal sense I guess its just emotional electronic music. There’s definitely a nod to grime in my work and definitely mainstream R&B is a big influence also. I like to try everything though: there’s a place for it all in the aesthetic I’m trying to create. At the moment I’ve been trying to get in touch with a few 80s R&B/soul singers but it’s kind of difficult and they’re all getting on a bit. I’m trying to re-contextualise in some senses, blurring the unnecessary divide between what’s considered mainstream/pop and what is, quote unquote, underground music, and trying to just change peoples standpoint really. Whether it will work or not in anyone’s guess. DS

Tell It Like A Story

Thea Swayne graphic designer

or a graphic designer, it’s a pretty basic website: a single page, with a couple of contact details underneath an elegant sans-serif typeface. ‘Thea Swayne: Designer. Art Director. Idea Monger.’ Idea monger? “OK, I made that word up, but I find it interesting to be an ‘ideamonger’. What gets me going is ideas, whatever form they take,” says Swayne from her apartment in Chiswick. Vague? Possibly, but then Swayne doesn’t feel comfortable defining her work at the best of times. Her clients, however – who include the NHS, The Future Foundation, and Ambassadors Hotel in Bloomsbury, London – have a very clear idea of what she is capable of. Swayne’s speciality is ‘information design’ – the art and science of presenting information to be understood with maximum efficiency. In a technologically accelerated age, where the New York Times cites ‘information overload’ as costing the US economy $650 billion a year (and the UK economy £50 billion by the same reasoning), innovators in this field should not be underestimated. Swayne’s work has already had a hugely beneficial impact on the National Health Service. After finishing her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2004, she was approached to work on a one-year project for their National Patients’ Safety Agency division, and helped to redesign their pharmaceutical packaging. “Previously the NHS didn’t have a policy on design at all. The National Patients’ Safety Agency wanted to do something about it, because it was costing them a lot of money and obviously causing a lot of pain to a lot of people.” According to the British Medical Journal, the number of patients dying in England and Wales as a direct effect of adverse reactions to medication rose from around 200 in 1990 to approximately 1200 in 2000. By 2008, just under 11% of all the patients admitted to hospital wards had suffered adverse reactions to medication. But Swayne had a more personal perspective. “My step-dad was very ill when I was doing the project. He had leukaemia, and had to take nearly 10 medicines a day, all at different times. So it was very important that the information was clear and not confusing. You don’t want people dying by taking the 78

wrong medication or dosage.” The problems with the existing medication packaging were numerous: discordant colour codes, type that was too small, medicine packets that left no space for the required personal prescription stickers, too much glare on blister packs – all evidence of a fundamental lack of ‘joined up’ thought and praxis. To gain a fundamental understanding of the issue, Swayne studied the ‘journey’ of a piece of medication packaging – all the way from the factories of manufacturers like GlaxoSmithKline and their distribution warehouses, right through to pharmacy practises and the lifestyles and habits of patients. This research became the basis of a book written for the NHS entitled Information Design for Patient Safety, which set out a number of practical guidelines for a safer, more logical approach to medical packaging design. The project culminated in Swayne making a presentation to a ‘stakeholder group’ of industry and NHS figures, a highly political affair in which heated arguments broke out over details as innocuous as the proposed use of 14 pt. as a minimum type size. “That upset a few people. It seems ridiculous, but a number of the stakeholders were quite resistant to any changes that were concrete. I think change is quite difficult to the NHS in all honesty; things that were matters of common sense to me got people quite animated.” The bureaucratic niggles didn’t prevent the changes being implemented though, and in addition to her NHS victory, Swayne has notched up successful commissions for consumer think tank The Future Foundation – where she investigated how social data might be visually communicated in “more human” graphic representations than pie charts and graphs – and The Ambassadors Hotel in Bloomsbury, for whom she has designed a visual identity that encompasses everything from disabled access logos to giant signage. About to move with her boyfriend to Finland for a short career break, she’s considering entrepreneurial options for information design when she returns to London. “I have to do something BIG,” she says. “I doubt that it’d be the traditional graphic design studio. I love graphic design, but I’m not sure that if I gave it my whole life it would be enough for me.” JR, BBT

Bad Idea

Who we surveyed: 2LK Design Ltd.

Kingston University

400 Communications Ltd.

LAMDA

AKQA

Late Junction (Radio 3)

Allan Tod

Leo Burnett

Anzenberger Agency

Loughborough University

Arup

M&C Saatchi

Baltic Centre

Magnum Photos

Barbican Museum

Mooarc

Bartlett School of

Mother

Architecture (UCL)

Newcastle University

Bloomsbury

NFTS

Boomkat

Partizan

The Brand Experience

Partizan (France)

Browns

Partizan (US)

Brighton University

Phaidon

Broadway Cinema

Phonica Records

(Nottingham)

Polaris Images

Cambridge University

POP

Capsule

Profero

Central St. Martins College

Proximity London

Checkland Kindleysides

Pure Groove Records

Cog Design Ltd.

RADA

Cornerhouse Manchester

Redux Pictures

Creative Review

Resonance FM

Curzon Cinemas

Roundhouse Studios

Current TV

Royal College of Art

Dare Digital

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Dartington College of Art

Second Layer Records

Daunt Books

Seymour Powell

Development Hell

Sheffield Doc/Fest

Designer’s Republic

Sounds Of The Universe

Edge magazine

St Luke’s Communications

Elmwood

Tate Media

Endemol UK

Text Matters

Eyevine

Tindal Street Press

Euro RSCG

Traveller’s Tales

Fabric

Venn Festival

Fallon London

Victoria Miro Gallery

Farm Communications

VII Photo Agency

Filmhouse Cinema

Vogue magazine

(Edinburgh)

Wallpaper*magazine

Futuresonic

Warp Films

Future Systems

Whistles

The Guardian

Whitechapel Art Gallery

Getty Images

White Cube Gallery

glue London

The Wire magazine

Goldsmiths University

World Picture News

Hat Trick Productions Hyde Park Picture House (Leeds) Ikon Gallery John Pawson

Bad Idea

the game changer

ALEX EVANS is co-founder of Media molecule, A SMALL british gaming company about to release one of playstation’s biggest titles of the year. inspired by musical improvisation and the modification culture of PC’s, is ‘Littlebigplanet’ a turning point for the conservative console market? alastair harper reports. Alex Evans at the Media Molecule offices in Guildford

Photography by Ben Turner

n July of this year Alex Evans, wearing a mismatched and slightly baggy suit, stood on a podium in the LA Convention Centre, a PlayStation 3 controller clutched in both hands. He stared at a screen embedded in the ground, ignoring hundreds of video game industry leaders assembled in front of him. The small rag-doll character whose destiny he manipulated bounced across the house-sized plasma screens behind him, while his fingers twiddled nimbly on the controller, his bald and slightly bulblike head nodding in rhythm. He danced his doll past PS3’s Latin American sales figures, caught a toy train along a track made of third-party releases, and rolled down a hill built from Sony’s financial quarter report. On a second podium stood an older, rounder, rather better-groomed Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, delivering his company’s quarterly sales presentation. “NPD has been estimating that the gaming industry revenue will soar as high as US $23 billion in 2008,” Tretton’s voice announced, while Evans studiously pressed buttons, his lanky body swaying. He jumped his avatar across onto a rising yellow graph bar. “And the PlayStation brand is a key driver of this growth. With three powerful platforms we have the industry equivalent of ocean front property!” On cue, Evans leapt his rag-doll off the yellow bar and into a swaying ocean scene, with waves crashing onto a beach in front of a Walter Gropius inspired coastal mansion. And the underlying point to all this, aside from discussing growth, new markets, new releases, was to show off the flexibility of the game LittleBigPlanet, developed by Evans’s company Media Molecule. Tretton’s presentation was meant to say to the assembled audience: ‘Look, this Christmas our big release for Playstation won’t be another epic fight in a dingy corridor against big-breasted mutant women carrying rocket launchers. This year we’re doing something revolutionary, this year we’re making something new. This year we are putting our stock in something thoughtful; something artistic; something weird. Something where you can be the creator. Something where anything is possible. Look, we did it here – see the sales projection that the doll is somersaulting past now!’ As the rag-doll reached the end of its level, dressed in a Celtics costume in homage to Tretton’s Boston heritage, the tanned jock CEO beamed across at the pallid British programmer. “So Alex, this is some incredible stuff, and you helped me out a lot! What is the Tell It Like A Story

target consumer for LittleBigPlanet?” Evans starts to talk but his voice is drowned out by applause. As he waits for it to quieten he nervously looks down, still idly twiddling the knobs on his controller.

alking from the train station to Media Molecule’s offices takes me through a section of Guildford’s apparently rejuvenated centre. Friday afternoon drinkers sit outside an upmarket chain bar. Most of the tables are angled away from the canal and face a multi-storey car-park. Down the road is Guildford’s crown court; a solitary photographer waits outside, sweating and smoking on the hottest day of the year so far. A few metres down the street, Media Molecule hovers above the Wilky Bathroom Centre, the region’s largest specialist bathroom showroom, as a sign informs me. A salesman watches me approach with more suspicion than hope,

One man has a digitised penis on his 40’’ screen; as I stare at it, I realise that its tip is rimmed with vicious teeth looking away as I round the building without pausing. Through an open pink door, I head up a flight of stairs, passing a locked trophy cabinet crammed to bursting with bottles of champagne – waiting to be opened on LittleBigPlanet’s completion. A large, brightly decorated and inevitably open-plan office is filled with 30-odd people, mostly unshaven men. Each is sitting in front of at least two oversized monitors. They are all lost in their own private task, each drawing or programming or tweaking a section of the game, the whole thing the product of no one man. The sight of them busy in their own worlds, working on their different fragments, is slightly monastic. The stereotype of the sexless, pale programmer is not too far from that of the medieval monk, slaving away at his section of parchment, all coming together into a single book. As the sound of the medieval halls would have been filled with the scratching of quills, this office carries an orchestra of typing. In keeping with the style of the Luttrell Psalter, one man has a digitised penis on his 40’’ screen; as I stare at it, I realise that its tip is rimmed with vicious teeth. My shoulder is patted and there, also marvelling at the penis dentatus, is Alex Evans. “The submissions of censored images from our moderators. Since you can make anything in the game, we need to,” his long, thin fingers flick towards the screen, “watch out for certain things.” He leads me to a back room filled with one giant screen connected to several PlayStations. Pausing to peer disapprovingly at an errant copy of Grand Theft Auto, he fumbles with the machines, trying to press the right buttons in the right sequence to get his own game to appear on the screen. A woman comes in and offers us a cup of tea. Alex asks if she took yesterday off to do anything fun; the woman fixes him with a familiar, patient stare and tells him she’s been in all week. His confusion seems genuine, but I sense that his absent-minded eggheaded persona may have become exaggerated over time, making people, and journalists, easier to deal with. The screen fills with Kareem Ettouney’s art style for the game – layers of fabrics, zips, stitches and dolls. The look they’re aiming for, as Evans explains, is “like an old children’s TV show… Bagpuss, or something like that.” Suddenly, the room is filled with the voice of Stephen Fry, introducing the idea of the game in his inimitably benevolent manner. It seems that the idea is that there is no idea. The player is free to make the game whatever he wants it to be. The point of LittleBigPlanet is you build the game yourself. The emphasis is not on finishing levels and following a structured storyline (although this is included), but to be presented with a blank canvas and then to play and build together with friends in the room or over the Internet. Alex loads up levels built by other people 84

Bad Idea

billions of pounds offered by Electronic Arts in an unsuccessful attempt to purchase Take Two Interactive Software, who publish the Grand Theft Auto games

Out Of The Ordinary

in the company, as well as some by artists and filmmakers they have commissioned. Cog-based machines have been used to make physical calculators: switches releasing rolling balls like some Rube Goldberg invention. Alex takes me to a level where, thanks to the engine he has written, our characters are free to make any shapes, combine them, apply gears, and bring the creation to life in 3D; for example, you could put wheels on a block and have it go down a hill where it will leap over a building you have set on fire. There are limits though: toothed penises uploaded to community sites are quietly flagged and deleted. As with content on Facebook or YouTube, you do not own your creation. Spend a month working on a bizarre contraption that proves hugely popular and you will have no intellectual ownership rights at all. Media Molecule could quietly whip it away and sell it in a future release. Of course, that would instantly alienate their user community. It’s this community on which LittleBigPlanet will be reliant, more than anything that happens within Media Molecule. Without its participants, LittleBigPlanet would be little more than a set of simplified game-making tools. It’s the diehard players who will be spending days creating platform versions of the plot of Hamlet or Scarface. And just as important are those gamers that will discover and promote other people’s creations. “The aggregators that find and share the great content and then promote it to millions are like the new version of magazine editors,” believes Evans. The ideas in LittleBigPlanet aren’t completely new, though. Opening up the process of creation to more than the makers of games themselves has been a major part of the hardcore world of PC gaming for years; for instance, Garry’s Mod, a popular indie modification tool for a PC game, gave casual players with no knowledge of programming the opportunity to build their own worlds.

“It was actually when thinking about music and musicians jamming that we found the answer, at least conceptually” “‘Modding’ is a thing we looked at a lot. Garry’s Mod took modding to a bigger audience but we wanted to go further than that,” says Evans. Media Molecule wanted the tools to be much simpler, and more refined. “Process constraints are vital as an artistic tool. Like abstract art rejecting representational styles,” Evans continues. “The idea of deliberate, seemingly arbitrary constraints, completely stimulate creativity. It’s sometimes hard to explain to people how much it improves things to add constraints.” He is trying to play the game as he speaks to me, but his rag doll is being repeatedly stamped into the roof by a steam powered press.

t 15, Evans made a bet with a friend that he could get work experience at a British video game company called Bullfrog. He won, and continued to work for Bullfrog throughout his A-levels and while reading for a Mathematics degree at Cambridge. His loyalty was due to Peter Molyneux, the man in charge, who designed games slightly different to everyone else’s, often placing the player in the position of an omnipotent deity. It started in the 1980s, with Populous. Aesthetically dated, involving brightly coloured blobs intended to represent classic civilisations, Populous is nevertheless revered by the spectacled hordes who hold Internet vigils in honour of classic games. Molyneux’s follow-up, ideas-wise, happened in 2001 with Black and White at his new company Lionhead, where Evans had followed him. This game cast the player as the hand of God, looking down on an occupied island. The 86

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intention was, through acts of benevolence or fiery wrath, to convince the people of this world of your existence and have them worship you. It proved very popular, especially with the kind of videogaming chap who felt the world should be doing precisely that. But the game also showed a different way of playing, one where you didn’t so much control a character as manipulate and influence the world around the characters in the game. You were a creator and destroyer of worlds. Narrative was limited, emotional detachment inevitable. You had the power to corrupt or enlighten all that you oversaw and no moral yardstick pointed out which direction you should take. Evans and the three others who left Lionhead to found Media Molecule, were all profoundly influenced by Molyneux. These four – Mark Healey, Kareem Ettouney, Dave Smith and Evans – broke out of their protégé roles in January 2006 with no plan as to what game they wanted to build or how they were going to build it, but sharing the idea that it should question what a video game was. Players would be in control of everything within the game’s environment, and they’d be able to share everything they made over the Internet. Most importantly, they wanted it to appeal to a lot of people: not an underground classic like Molyneux’s games but swimming strongly in the HMV charts alongside the traditional console blockbusters. But what was the game going to be? “It was actually when thinking about music and musicians jamming that we found the answer, at least conceptually,” says Evans. “You plug yourself into the amp and aimlessly make noise with a couple of friends and that actual process is enjoyable, and we wanted to recreate that process, of mucking about with some friends, but then also the idea that when you’ve made something interesting together you can release it to the world to be enjoyed. We Screen shots from LittleBigPlanet, release in October 2008

Tell It Like A Story

didn’t know what form it would take initially. I thought it would be music. I was programming drum machines.” Evans’s interest in music goes beyond gaming. He worked with Warp records and the London Sinfonietta to combine electronic experimenters like Aphex Twin with the avant garde orchestral pieces the Sinfonietta specialised in. They toured Europe, and Evans worked on the video installations that accompanied performances. “For me it was always about music and art and how to apply those to my interest and work in games. I did maths at university and found that as I was never any good with a pen, my pen became programming. I did visuals for Warp and the orchestral stuff, and they were still not doing what games could do. I thought games could be something so much better, and I felt I was pushing from the games and Warp side and trying to reach something in the middle, something completely different to what we think of these two worlds. But I haven’t got there yet.” Part of the problem of rethinking the limits of gaming is that gaming, as an artistic medium, is still in a youthful state, and doesn’t command reviewers’ inches

While a Girls Aloud album will receive a whole page of a respectable broadsheet newspaper’s review section, a video game that will far outsell the album will be begrudgingly given a paragraph somewhere behind the TV reviews or respect. While a Girls Aloud album will receive a whole page of a respectable broadsheet newspaper’s review section, a video game that will far outsell the album will be begrudgingly given a paragraph somewhere behind the TV reviews. “I remember a friend saying about five years ago games were in the zoetrope period of their development. I think now we’re in our silent movie stage, Grand Theft Auto and things like that have moved us on.” But they still emulate gangster films? “Well, games are too reliant on movies, as graphic novels were when they started to come about in the 1980s. What we’ll see is games discovering how they can work in their own right without standing on the structural shoulders of movies.” What is interesting about LittleBigPlanet and Evans’s approach to programming games is that it shows how much more intelligent and experimental video games are becoming. That Sony is pushing the game so much, using it to demonstrate their quarterly reports, shows how the weird world of indie gaming on the PC is pushing through to the mainstream of the consoles. Evans is enthusiastic about Sony publishing their game. “Many of the films I thought were Hollywood with a capital ‘H’ turned out to be informed by an indie cinema sensibility, and made in the same way. This is the kind of thing we want LittleBigPlanet to be: something built out of the indie sensibility but existing in the mainstream.” Alex is called outside. It is someone’s 30th birthday and a cake has been brought forward, lit. They start singing ‘Happy Birthday’, something that Alex does quietly while leaning against a wall. I, not sure if it is appropriate or not to sing, decide to take my leave. As I walk through the office I notice the other programmers are not only singing, but also, perhaps despite themselves, typing 88

Bad Idea

Staff toilet at the Media Molecule offices.

Tell It Like A Story

Turbo-folk Tycoon Alen Borbas has a one-kilogram gold chain, a disco he commandeered during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and an entertainment empire spanning magazines, music, festivals, and TV.. Matthieu Aikins investigates this â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;New Balkan Businessmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, and his role in Croatiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s popular and politically charged turbo-folk scene.

Bad Idea

hough he’s only about five foot six, Alen Borbas is an imposing man. With his thick legs, long, muscled arms and low centre of gravity, it’s easy to see why, at 18, Borbas was one of the Yugoslav Army’s top karate champions, and why he would later go on to win international shotokan sparring tournaments in the USA, Australia and Japan. The top of his shaved, bald head is shaped like the hull of a Merkava tank, while under his black top there bulges the hard, convex abdomen of a world-class athlete past his physical prime. Right now he is smiling a slightly crooked, Eastern-European dentistry smile, pleased perhaps that a foreign journalist has come to his remote corner of Croatia to pay homage to him. Or maybe Borbas is just in a great mood. He has every right to be happy. This year – his 37th – has been a good year, perhaps his best ever. His first child, Iva, was born in February, weighing in at a healthy three and half kilos. He met his 26 year-old wife Ivana in his night club, where he hosts topless dancers, the city’s wealthy and wannabes, and, most importantly, turbo-folk artists from all over the Balkans. Turbo-folk, that peculiar Balkan pop familiar to kitsch aficionados the world over, has been the rising star to Borbas’s wagon. His music business is growing rapidly into a modest empire. In April, he unveiled the first monthly issue of Folk Magazin, now being distributed in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. The satellite television station that he cofounded, Balkanika TV, is beginning to rival MTV as the Balkans’ most popular music station. His yearly showcase of turbo-folk artists, ‘Folk Hit Godine’ (Folk Hit of the Year) had its highest attendance yet, an indication of the music’s growing popularity in Croatia. It was, for the first time, held in Osijek’s biggest arena, Zrinjevac, denied to him last year by the town’s mayor Anto Dapic, a hardline nationalist who is this year out of a job as a result of the region’s constantly shifting political coalitions. Never mind the fans of the local football club, Kohorta Osijek, who spraypainted, on walls outside the venue that are still pockmarked from 15 year-old shells, messages such as, ‘There is no room for chetnik music in the Unconquerable City’: references to the brutal Serb irregulars, and also to Osijek’s nickname, Tell It Like A Story

Previous page: fans of turbofolk star Ceca gather at a rally in 2003, to protest her arrest in Belgrade. Photograph by Koca Sulejmanovic (AFP/Getty Images)

‘Nepokoreni Grad’, acquired during the months when it bore the brunt of the Yugoslav Army’s northern offensive. Never mind his detractors on the right, like Dapic, who call turbo-folk fans traitors for the music’s past associations with the Milosevic regime. Never mind his detractors on the left, who scorn turbo-folk as a “musical tumor” for its vapid lyrics and hyper-materialism. None of that matters, because Borbas’s career is thriving. He has seen the future of pop in Croatia, and that future is turbo-folk. And who better to run it than him, a shining example of the ‘New Balkan Businessman’?

12 hundred civilians killed during the shelling of Osijek in the Croatian War of Independence (source: Croatian news portal Index.hr) 92

o get into the OKS Nightclub, you need go around the back of Osijek’s Studenski Centar, through a side door and then down a wide set of rubberised black stairs. Midway down, the stairs double back on themselves and there, on the landing, is a large, black iron cage, shaped like a birdcage but big enough for one, maybe two, girls. Once at the bottom of the stairs you enter the nightclub proper. At night you will have to pass by a member of Borbas Security, who will be dressed in black paratrooper pants, a black patent leather belt, and a black shirt with epaulets and a red, blue and white armband—Croatia’s national colors. He will probably be a former soldier or karate fighter, or perhaps both. The nightclub itself is a standard affair: a low, black ceiling, disco lights, plastic beer flags from the local brewery Osjecko, more cages and dancing poles, and a crossed pair of gleaming axes above the central bar. On this hot July afternoon, there are about a dozen female dancers practising in front of the mirrors in the club’s secondary dance hall, most of them long-limbed beauties who would be extraordinary anywhere else but are common here, in a region where blood from east and west has mixed for millennia A back door in the club gives access to Borbas’s modern music studio, which is furnished in red and black. The gear here is a bit of a change from the dingy equipment common in businesses and government offices in Osijek. There are two big Apple flat-screen LCDs, and a hoard of expensive recording gear. One corner holds a red bench press with 130 kilos on it, and a large window looks into an adjacent, soundproofed room with a microphone set up. Borbas sits down in an office chair and fiddles with a computer for a moment. This is his command center, where he administers his business concerns. After a moment, he turns and addresses himself to his visitor. Affable and direct, he has an imposing presence, but not an unpleasant one: when he grins, which is frequently, it’s hard not to smile in return. He likes sly, locker-room humor and gesturing vigorously with his meat-cleaver hands. “Okay,” he says in decent English. “What do you want to know? You will see… I am a simple, local guy. Everybody knows me as that.” His childhood certainly began that way. Borbas (pronounced Bor-bash; ‘borba’, coincidentally, means ‘fight’ in Croatian) grew up in Jug II, a rough, industrial suburb of Osijek, as a citizen of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. His father, Zvonko Borbas, worked as a security guard at a stateowned shoe factory, but his real passion was karate. A former Yugoslav champion, Zvonko started training his son at the age of four and by the time he reached his teens, young Borbas was winning competitions throughout the East. At first, he competed in both fights and skill displays, called katas, but soon turned exclusively to fighting. “I always said that katas were for girls,” Borbas says with a grin. Like all healthy Yugoslav men, when he reached the age of majority he reported for compulsory military service and was posted, according to custom, outside of Croatia. Because he was a star karate fighter in the army, he was given a job at a military hospital in central Serbia, allowing him to focus on his training. This was at the beginning of the 90s, and Yugoslavia was on the brink of collapse. Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic, who dominated the federation’s collective presidency, was attempting to concentrate power in Belgrade while at Bad Idea

the same time Slovenia and Croatia were pushing hard for more autonomy. Civil war seemed increasingly likely and when, on June 5 of 1991, Croatia declared independence, Borbas, like many non-Serb conscripts in the Yugoslav National Army, deserted, and furtively returned home to his parents by bus. He was 19 years old. These were desperate times in Osijek. Open warfare had broken out between Croatia and Yugoslavia, and this ethnically-mixed region—the only place where Serbia and Croatia share a border—would see some of the war’s heaviest fighting. At the time of Borbas’s arrival home, the Croatian city of Vukovar to the east was already besieged by JNA units and Serb paramilitaries. By October, Vukovar would be destroyed, its remaining defenders captured (several hundred of whom were murdered), and Osijek would find itself at the front line, under heavy shelling. But the war was a formative time for Borbas. It was here in Osijek that he would form his most important political connections, and meet many of the men who would later work for his security company. After arriving from Serbia, Borbas enlisted with the newly-formed Croatian National Guard and was soon transferred to the military police, where his karate skills were of obvious use. There Borbas was often assigned to provide security for top military and political figures, and in this way met Branimir Glavas, one of the principal organisers of the defense of Osijek. After the war, Glavas would go onto to become a leading political figure in Croatia, and, despite being currently on trial before a Croatian war crimes court for his alleged role in the torture and killing of local ethnic Serb civilians, remains both a member of parliament and a prime regional power, revered for his military service. “Glavas stood up for Osijek,” Borbas says. “He’s okay.” Borbas’s connections with Glavas and the HDZ, Croatia’s right-wing nationalist party led by the country’s founding president, Franjo Tudman, would prove essential to him in the tumultuous years following the war, when the state was in an embryonic stage and much of its property was up for grabs. Prior to the war, Borbas had worked as bouncer at nightclubs in order to fund his karate tournaments, and in 1997, when Croatia passed its privatisation laws, Borbas and his father founded Borbas Security, drawing their manpower from Borbas’s karate and military contacts. At a time when the country was awash with weaponry, paramilitary groups, and political turmoil, a security company like Borbas’s was in high demand. He was soon providing his services for officials, singers and stars (he proudly mentions model Nina Moric, a paramour of Ricky Martin) and was able to secure a number of contracts with local banks and government offices. Eventually, Borbas Security evolved into a quasi-paramilitary operation in its own right — an asset that was seized upon by Glavas during an internal crisis in the HDZ precipitated by the death of Franjo Tudman and the party’s subsequent loss of power in the 2000 national elections. At that time, Ivo Sanader, Croatia’s current prime minister, was seeking to purge the party of its hardline rightists and take the HDZ in a more pro-European, centre-right direction. He was challenged at the party’s 2002 convention by Ivic Pasalic, who represented the hardcore right. Though Glavas was himself one of the HDZ’s most nationalist and right-wing politicians, he took the opportunity to ally with Sanader and contracted Borbas’s company to provide security at the convention. Borbas’s black-clad armed guards stood watch over the meetings and ballot boxes; the result of the convention was a victory for Sanader. Recently, a disgruntled former HDZ member of parliament, Ivan Drmic, has claimed to have witnessed ballot stuffing at the convention. In any case, in 2003, Sanader led the HDZ back into power and last November secured a second, though more tenuous, election victory. Borbas is proud of his role in the 2002 convention. “You can read what they say on the Internet — that I won the convention for Sanader,” he says. But he downplays the benefit he has received from his political connections. “I don’t use it Tell It Like A Story

Alen Borbas models with his Audi TT in Osijek, 2008 Photography by Matthieu Aikins

– how I could use it?” he says, waving his palm in the air. “They once were saying I would be chief of police here. Everybody says I am crazy not to use it more, but I like to be here in my disco with friends.” The disco, and a Yugoslav-era nuclear shelter downtown that he uses for his gym and karate club HUS were acquired by Borbas after the war from the government under opaque circumstances. Indeed, the club still technically belongs to the students of Osijek (in Croatian, OKS stands for Osijek Student Club), though Borbas has signed an agreement that gives him perpetual control. “In the book it is Studenski Centar, but everything here is mine. I have it for next 100 years,” he says, breaking out into laughter. He explains that the agreement was in both parties’ interest. “Back then, the security situation was bad, I was the only one who could make it secure and put anything on here.” At this point, in early 1995, OKS was just another regular nightclub playing pop and dance on the weekends. The turbo-folk scene didn’t exist in Croatia, though it was becoming wildly popular in Serbia. Borbas hardly knew the music, and didn’t much care for it. “I liked hip hop before the war—Public Enemy, Snap. I didn’t like folk music,” he says. That would soon change.

ou don’t have to go far from the OKS nightclub to find yourself out of turbo-folk territory. A few blocks down the road from the Studenski Centar is K-Bar, which everyone knows as Kesten. Kesten is typical of the many kavane scattered around Osijek—a cramped little interior and a large outdoor patio with lawn furniture, tables, and an awning sponsored by a brewery, in this case that of Karlovacko, one of Croatia’s oldest beers, brewed in Karlovac and purchased by Heineken in 2003.

“The music is cheap trash. We have a word for it: sund. That means there’s no artistic value” The bar is a popular hangout for the town’s punks and metalheads. As such, it’s a bastion of more liberal sentiment, though in Croatia this can have its limits. “I am a punk but I am also a nationalist,” one of the patrons, wearing a Rancid t-shirt, explains. “I love Serbs, but if someone fucks with my country then I have to fuck them up.” Of course, nothing brings out nationalism like football and today the bar is crowded with people watching a game via satellite. It’s the Germany-Turkey semi-finals in the Euro 2008 tournament, and the locals are shouting their vilest epithets at the Turks, who knocked out Croatia in the quarter-finals and who also, as part of the Ottoman Empire, occupied the Balkans for centuries. (Turkey ends up losing.) At the back of the patio, attentively watching the game, is Tin Kovacic, a tall, slender young man with a mop of dirty blond hair and a pair of thick glasses that he has to wear after nearly losing his left eye in a freak football accident as a child. Kovacic is a reporter with a local TV station, Osijecka, and the lead singer with Debeli Precjednik (Fat President), one of Slavonia’s better-known hardcore punk bands. He used to work for Osijek’s football club, but lost his job there after Glavas found out that some his songs were about the ‘Cellophane Incident’, where a local Serb civilian was found floating dead in the Drava River with his mouth taped over, and the ‘Garage Incident’, where a local Serb civilian was forced to drink battery acid and then shot. “Turbo-folk — it’s really not my scene,” says Kovacic. “The music is cheap trash. We have a word for it: sund. That means there’s no artistic value.” 94

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Alen Borbas during a promotional appearance on Serbian talk show ‘Prslook Again’. Dancing in front of him is Dajana Penezic, a young Serbian turbo-folk singer. Photography by Matthieu Aikins

Those familiar with the Eurovision Song Contest can guess at the levels of kitsch achieved by turbo-folk, but the music must really be seen and heard to be believed. It rivals Japanese interpretations of Western pop culture in its postmodern excess, but in this case the operative memes are sex and money. In turbo-folk videos, surgically-enhanced singers dress and behave like porn starlets while the men, who are invariably older, boast enormous gold chains and luxury cars. Yet while the aesthetics are a parade of hormones and machismo, the lyrics are always about melodramatic love. “You should really read through some of them,” Kovacic says. “I heard one lately that was great, something like ‘I wallpapered the room with my tears for you’.” This is the result of music’s abiding links with traditional Balkan folk, which it evolved out of in the late 1980s; besides a fixation on heartbreak, it has kept the keening, ululating vocal style (which bears a slight resemblance to flamenco singing) and accordion riffs, while adding a heavy drum machine beat. Now, however, the vocals are heavily synthesised and most of the instrumentation is done electronically. In Croatia, turbo-folk — originally a pejorative term coined by Montenegrin rock legend Rambo Amadeus, but now universally used — is strongly associated with Serbia under the Milosevic regime, where the worlds of politics, organised Tell It Like A Story

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Turbo-folk Superstar Svetlana Ražnatovic, also known as Ceca, is Turbofolk’s greatest star, with a career spanning 20 years and 13 albums. In 1995 she controversially married the Serbian paramilitary leader and renowned gangster Željko Ražnatovic Arkan. Following Arkan’s assassination in Belgrade in 2000, she inherited large parts of his estate, including the football team FK Obili, who were Yugoslav champions in 1998. Often branded a war criminal by Croation and Bosnian commentators for her involvement with ultra-nationalist Arkan, she is honorary president of her deceased husband’s political organ the ‘Party of Serbian Unity’ (SSJ), and in 2003 spent four months in prison after being arrested in relation to the assassination of Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic (a charge she was later cleared of).

crime, and entertainment often fused into one glitzy mess. The music first became popular there during the 90s, and its biggest star, the Madonna of turbo-folk, Ceca, was closely associated with the regime and married Arkan, the notorious warlord-cum-mobster whose paramilitaries participated in mass rapes and ethnic cleansing throughout Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Times have changed, though, and while most of the turbo-folk music industry is still centered in Belgrade, today the singers and their fans are just as likely to come from Bulgaria or Macedonia as Serbia. Arguably, the music scene has evolved and diversified into a sort of pan-Balkan ethno-pop. Even here in Croatia, where resentment against Serbia runs deepest, turbo-folk has reached a near ubiquity among young people, who blast it from their cars and dance to it in the clubs—though it is still vilified by the media and politicians. It was Alen Borbas who put on some of the country’s first turbo-folk concerts with Serbian and Bosnian artists. “He’s the godfather of the Croatian folk scene,” says Kovacic. There is a perverse irony in the fact that OKS has become the pulsing heart of turbo-folk. In its days as a student club, OKS was home to some of the best punk acts around: a thriving, grungy Mecca for the underground scene in Yugoslavia. Borbas, in fact, had worked there as a bouncer before the war, occasionally cracking the heads of punks who stepped out of line. After the war, he took on a more managerial role at the club, and then, one day, it was his. “Everybody knew what was happening, and no one did a damn thing,” says Kovacic bitterly. “We just gave it away.” But he insists he has nothing against Borbas personally. “I really have no feelings about him. I think he’s a smart businessman.” Kovacic has done business with Borbas before. Before he undertook an extensive renovation of his venue, Borbas had allowed it to be used occasionally for punk shows on slow nights. “He’s very professional and very easy to deal with,” says Kovacic. “Better than most punk club owners, in fact.” Another patron sitting near Kovacic takes a more sanguinary approach. “If I could, I would throw a Molotov into that place,” he says, sloshing his beer around in his glass.

“

My favorite is Ceca,” Ivana tells me. “I want to be like her, she is so beautiful.” Ivana is a 19 year-old student who comes to OKS frequently; turbo-folk is her favorite music. Tonight, they are celebrating her friend Marija’s 20th birthday. They are drinking a Balkan favorite, rakija, a potent liquor distilled from fruit, which here costs 10 kunas, the equivalent of £1. Two men in their 40s are buying the rakija for the girls. One of them stands behind Marija, caressing her thighs. He has his black V-neck shirt pulled up over his hairy, swollen belly (a common enough practice here during the summer heat). The air in the club is sweltering and blue with cigarette smoke. “I like Alen Borbas,” Ivana says, leaning forward. “He is my friend.” We are sitting in the VIP corner of OKS, where periodically a waiter brings over a tray of drinks, which Borbas signs for. Borbas himself no longer drinks alcohol, and he’s never smoked, making him a rarity in a nation of heavy drinkers and smokers. At his table are two young women. One of them, Andrea Akmadzic, is a model and a go-go dancer for Borbas – one of his favorites. She danced in a cage at the Folk Hit Godine this year, and she has appeared on the reality show Croatia’s Next Top Model. Akmadzic, a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, has legs that reach up to Borbas’s bellybutton. She fawns on him, whispering into his ear and resting her hand along his thigh. But she is not the only one showering him with attention: throughout the night, a steady stream of women come to see Borbas, greeting him and exchanging a few flirtatious remarks before fading back into the press of the club. Borbas, who is famous for the girls that surround him, says that his wife (who is at home with his child) understands that all his interactions are just platonic, just Tell It Like A Story

business. “She knows that she is number one,” he says. “I am a family man now.” He laughs. “You know, they say my job is to be with girls.” Performing at the club tonight is Drago Matijevic, an Osijek native who functions as Borbas’s house signer. It’s a Wednesday and there’s just the standard bare-bones set up: a drum machine, a microphone with heavy reverb on it, and a DJ playing the riffs on a small MIDI keyboard. Simple and inexpensive, these two-man turbo-folk shows have become popular at weddings and birthday parties, as well as nightclubs. Matijevic tours around with his wireless mic, joshing the crowd like a lounge singer, crooning at the women and winking at the men. At one point, he comes up to Borbas and sticks the mic in his face; in response, Borbas ululates some surprisingly good verses. It was in a club like his own that Borbas first became properly introduced to folk music, while returning from a karate tournament in Los Angeles. He became intrigued by the commercial potential of the music and agreed to host a Serbian singer in his club, Dorde Balasevic, on a Wednesday, typically a slow night. The show sold 800 tickets, and so Borbas started bringing over turbo-folk artists from Bosnia and Serbia. He would drive to pick them up at the border in cars laden with men and automatic weapons. “In those days, I had everything in the car with me,” says Borbas. When word got around that Borbas was safely and professionally hosting foreigners in Croatia, more and more singers started approaching him: Croatia, which has a considerably higher standard of living than Bosnia or Serbia, represented a lucrative market. Borbas estimates he was soon providing security for about 80% of the turbo-folk singers who came to Croatia. Just as essential as his security force were his connections with the ruling HDZ party, which allowed him to undertake such politically sensitive ventures. “Everybody who started with this music had problems,” Borbas says. “I didn’t have these problems.” But Borbas wasn’t content simply hosting turbo-folk concerts. He began to single-handledy assemble an industry in Croatia, building from the ground up his magazine, television station, and Folk Hit Godine. Now he has plans to form a turbo-folk record label and possibly a turbo-folk radio station, though he admits that, even for him, getting a radio license would be politically difficult. “That is all I need to have everything,” he says. Borbas has now become, by Croatian standards, a very rich man. He affords himself and his family a lavish lifestyle: a fleet of cars, including an Audi TT and a yet-to-be-delivered Hummer; a two-story downtown apartment decorated with crystal chandeliers and leopard-skin couches; a one-kilogram chain with his name spelled out in solid gold block letters. With turbo-folk gaining a new respectability in Croatia, his social capital is on the rise. He is routinely photographed and shown on TV with top entertainers, and the tabloids gushed over his lavish marriage and the recent birth of his daughter. He has become part of Croatia’s nouveau riche, rough around the edges but very much on top of the pile. It’s the same class that has emerged throughout Eastern Europe, where, under communism, there were no business elites or private property empires, just wellto-do professionals and a handful of high-living apparatchiks. Those who came out rich from the scramble in the 90s tended to be people with good vertical sense and an ability to make connections. In the former Yugoslavia, where the old order was shattered by war, this new group’s elevation from their previous lives can be particularly vertiginous; Branimir Glavas, one of Slavonia’s wealthiest men, was a secretary in a high school before the war. But unlike Glavas, who seems likely to be convicted and put in jail, Borbas didn’t soil himself with war crimes or blatant corruption and so has managed to steer his laden galleon into a safe commercial harbour. He has understood that the future of business success in Croatia lies with its consumers and has provided a product tailored for the post-war generation currently coming into adulthood, the country’s first to grow up in a market society. They are modern kids, more cynical, 98

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64 Croatia’s position in the

International Corruption Perceptions Index, placing it below Tunisia, and above El Salvador

more ahistorical, more westernised, bereft of the socialist idealism of those who lived in Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, and bereft of the inner tension of those whose young adulthoods were brutalised by the war and its horrors. This group will soon see their country join the European Union, a process that has already led to significant political and economic reforms in Croatia. And, just as Croatia will be inhabited by a generation distant from its past, so too will the current upper class give rise to a generation that has only known legitimate wealth, whose future privilege will be based on their education, connections, and business inheritances. The infant Iva Borbas, heir to her father’s success, will grow up surrounded by cars, clothes, and luxury goods: mute objects that cannot testify to their heritage. She will grow up as a prosperous citizen of the EU. As the night draws to a close, Borbas and Akmadzic get up and start drawing slips out of a box for a promotional giveaway, with prizes like spa days and gift certificates for sports betting shops. Standing off to the side, swaying slightly, is Ivan, a lanky 20 year-old policeman with a wispy goatee. He has been dancing all night with a male friend of his. “I come here to relax,” he explains. “I like this music. Also, I like American country music.” He grins, and then looks at Akmadzic wistfully. “They have the best girls here.” After the draw, a lineup of young women forms in front of Akmadzic. They wait patiently for their turn to stand with her while a friend takes a photo with a cellphone. Others simply snap photos of Akmadzic herself. These will be taken home and uploaded to MySpace and Facebook, talismans of their brush with something above the ordinary

Out Of The Ordinary

Art To L ast a 1000 Years Artist John Gerrard is a pioneer in the rapidly emerging medium of 3D digital realtime, creating virtual worlds that ‘live’ and evolve incrementally over time. But is this the future of art or just more special effects? Robert Collins reports.

‘One Thousand Year Dawn (Marcel)’, John Gerrard, 2005 100

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’m looking at an unmanned pig farm in Eva, Oklahoma. Eight long corrugated iron sheds gleam in the sunlight, each housing around 2,000 pigs. The feedlots, as they’re known, recall the neatly aligned barns in which prisoners were lodged in Nazi concentration camps. What I’m seeing, in fact, is a real-time 3D work by 34-year-old Irish artist John Gerrard. I’m watching it on a 30-inch screen in the production studio in Vienna, Austria, where Gerrard’s artworks have been painstakingly put together from hundreds of photographs he has taken of real agricultural scenes in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. If I nudge the screen right and left, I can pan round the scene. Behind the feedlots is a deserted road, lined with telegraph poles. Nearby is a large black lake, containing the pigs’ excrement. There are no humans here. The pigs are fed from a pair of stout, aluminium corn silos at the end of each stall, as they are fattened for slaughter – a process that lends the feedlots their eerie industrial name: ‘grow finish units’. The detail is so realistic that I struggle to decide whether what I’m seeing is real or imaginary. Down to the way the sun glances off the tops of the aluminium silos, this is a perfect, living reproduction of reality. The sun sets and rises in the scene exactly as it does in Eva, Oklahoma. Right now in Vienna, it’s 5pm. In Oklahoma, it’s midday. As I pan round the scene, I can see that the sun is at its highest point. The telegraph poles in the scene cast no shadows. When I see the same work again the next day, at Gerrard’s gallery in Vienna, the light in the scene is totally different. It’s 10am in Vienna, Austria

– dawn in Oklahoma. There’s a diffused, pink haze in the dawn sky; the shadows are long. As I’ve slept, Gerrard’s scene has continued to unfold. This virtual scene is not repeating on a daily loop. It’s not even repeating the same year again and again. It’s happening in real-time. Every six to eight months, a transport truck will appear on the deserted road behind the feedlots and pull up at the colossal barns. After an hour, it will leave. It’s the only human presence to touch this desolate, agricultural landscape.

eside me sit Helmut Bressler, Gerrard’s software programmer, and Werner Poetzelberger, Gerrard’s producer. Their production studio, two floors up a spiralling, stone staircase on a quiet street in Vienna’s Alser Strasse district, is small, and tidy. There’s no hand-towel in the bathroom (“We’re guys. We keep forgetting to buy one,” Poetzelberger confesses to me) but I spot a well-kept stock of beer in the kitchen. Perhaps appropriately for an artist working in a virtual medium, Gerrard himself isn’t here. He’s in Santander, Spain. Next week he’ll be in his native Dublin. And just after the end of our interviews, he’ll be leaving for Iran, to photograph oil fields in the Persian Gulf for a new piece. Wherever he is, we talk by Skype. Sitting in his Viennese production studio, I feel suitably displaced myself. Though I know the scene on the 30-inch screen before me isn’t real, the sheer level of detail keeps tricking me into thinking I’m looking through a magical window into a distant reality on the other side of the planet.

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“When the light bounces off a correctly modelled surface using a real-time material,” Gerrard tells me, “this isn’t far from what we call reality. There’s so much of the real in the physics of representation now. It’s like creating a golem.” A golem - without wishing to upset fans of The Lord of the Rings – is a clay figure from Jewish legend: an animate being brought to life with inanimate matter. At present, Gerrard is one of the very few artists in the world working in this medium. For the last few years, he has struggled to gain legitimacy for his work in the mainstream art world. But this now appears to be changing. Last year, he was invited by the renowned curator Linda Norden to participate in a group show at the prestigious Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. Then, earlier this year, Gerrard received praise for his work at the Art Chicago art fair, from the famously truculent art critic of the 102

Chicago Tribune, Alan G. Artner. “Not many times in life can anyone see an artist pioneer a significant new medium,” wrote Artner. “But that is what we see in John Gerrard.” By adopting real-time 3D, a technology pinched from online computer gaming, Gerrard has created living sculptures that exist, in Artner’s words, “between painting and cinema.” Photography, painting, cinema, sculpture, have until now captured the world as a matter of instants. (Film, when slowed down, is after all a single frame.) Gerrard’s scenes evolve in precisely the same timeframe as the real world. They are independently living forms that look and behave exactly like reality: golems, in other words.

n 1997, soon after graduating from The Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford University, Gerrard decided to create a portrait of someone by taking a 3D scan of them. He found a

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‘Grow Finish’ by John Gerrard, 2008

company in Hampshire, England, called Wicks and Wilson, and asked if he could borrow one of their white-light 3D body scanners to make a scan of a friend of his sister. Gerrard called this scan an ‘image object’ – neither a photograph, nor a sculpture, but a hybrid of the two. To bring his image to life, he went to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where computer technology was being strongly encouraged. But he found there was little room for the kind of work he wanted to produce. “Everybody was making dragons, heroes and babes,” Gerrard remembers. “Most of them were headed for California, to places like Pixar [the Disneyowned computer animation studio]. They were just learning how to make 3D monsters.” So, in 2000, he returned to Dublin to study for an MSc in Computer Science at Trinity College, before embarking on the first of many artist’s residencies at the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz, Austria, a renowned centre of technological innovation. But as in Chicago, Gerrard felt institutional resistance to his purely artistic intent. “What I wanted to do was considered excessively simple,” he says. It was in Linz, though, that Gerrard met Poetzelberger. In 2002, they produced ‘Portrait to Sadden Over A Hundred Years’, a real-time portrait featuring a young man, Florian, whose expression is gradually saddening over the next century. Somewhere in the world, as you read this sentence, his expression is growing imperceptibly more maudlin. In 2005, Gerrard and Poetzelberger then produced ‘One Thousand Year Dawn’. In this piece, a lone male figure stands on a beach, watching a sunrise. In a thousand years’ time, he will walk away from the scene and never return. And finally, in 2006, Gerrard and Poetzelberger

‘Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez, Richfield, Kansas)’ by John Gerrard, 2008

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created ‘Portrait to Smile Once a Year’. In it, a young woman gazes serenely from the frame of a computer screen. Every year, for a single day, she will smile from midnight to midnight. The woman in the portrait is Mary, Gerrard’s sister’s friend whom he scanned back in 1997. Nearly a decade after he had first conceived of his ‘image object’, Gerrard and Poetzelberger had finally brought the golem to life.

By adopting real-time 3D, a technology pinched from online computer gaming, John Gerrard has created living sculptures that exist, in Artner’s words, ‘between painting and cinema’

round the world, there are currently 90 or so collectors of Gerrard’s work. From one hour to the next, they are able to watch their pieces changing, as I saw Gerrard’s work change overnight in Vienna. At a cost of around €40,000 (£31,500), these people have bought their very own pictures of Dorian Gray. In galleries and collectors’ homes, the works come encased in a smooth white material called Corian. Part polymer, part mineral, Corian can be either moulded like plastic or sanded like wood. Once polished, it is completely seamless, making it a favoured – though costly – material for kitchens and science laboratories. Gerrard’s works are themselves like self-enclosed laboratories: sealed systems harbouring independently living worlds. The white Corian-cased tables on which Gerrard’s screens sit also house the custom-built computer that runs his real-time scenes. Encased completely in white, the works look like altarpieces, if altarpieces were made by Apple. Gerrard’s portraits, in the last few years, have started to give way to the kind of desolate landscape I saw in his studio in Vienna. The piece hailed by Alan Artner at Art Chicago was ‘Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas)’. It shows a giant black cloud of dust looming over a swath of Kansas – a recreation of one of the dust storms that engulfed the southern Great Plains of the States in the 1930s, after 100 million acres of land were stripped of their topsoil by an intensive agricultural boom. “It was the first petroleum-driven catastrophe,” Gerrard explains. “The worst environmental disaster

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in American history.” Hundreds of thousands of families (the ‘Okies’, as immortalised by Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) fled their homes, facing starvation and dust pneumonia. For Gerrard, 20th-century agriculture is intimately tied to oil. Oil powered the mechanisation of agriculture that devastated the Great Plains. It also provided the colossal quantities of heat needed to fix nitrogen for modern-day fertilisers – fertilisers that have helped the human species double in size in the last century. As a result, Gerrard calls his recent pieces “memorials to the oil age.” We are at the end, he says, of a hundred years of accelerated human activity made possible by our sudden, rapacious consumption of oil. Gerrard’s work ‘Animated Scene (Oil Field) 2007’ is made up of two screens – a real-time diptych. Each screen shows an oil pump tirelessly extracting crude from the ground. The pumps face east, bowing like devotional figures, worshipping the sun that rises before them. The modern world, Gerrard suggests, is as devoted to fossil fuels as early pagan religions were to the sun. Which is appropriate. “Oil comes from swampy shallow areas where an abundance of light has hit plant matter,” Gerrard points out. “Oil is essentially old sunlight.” Gerrard’s latest piece, ‘Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez, Richfield, Kansas)’, premiered at the Art Basel art fair in June this year. The scene shows an enormous, silver-lined corn silo at the edge of a remote road. Each morning, a Mexican labourer, Angelo, arrives for work. From dawn to dusk, he paints the exterior of the silo with an oil stick – a medium favoured in the sketches of American artist Richard Serra, whose muscular Cor-Ten steel sculptures (you can see one outside Liverpool Street station in London) Gerrard views as the pinnacle of all that was most brazenly self-assured in 20th century American art. I watch Angelo at work in Vienna. His movements are breathtakingly realistic. It’s like watching someone in the distance, through binoculars. Occasionally, he stands back to assess his work. In the summer, he works longer hours than he does in winter, because of the later sunset. He takes Sundays off. When he’s finished the lower sections of the silo, he’ll bring a ladder along to work, to reach the top of the walls. After that, he’ll climb onto the roof. And some time around 2038, Angelo will have covered the entire silo in black oil stick. He’ll have turned it from a resplendent industrial storehouse into a black memorial to a once invincible oil age. On that day, Angelo will leave the scene, and will never come back.

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fter a few weeks of studying Gerrard’s work, I realise it’s no coincidence that human beings

‘Portrait to Smile Once a Year’, John Gerrard, 2006

keep leaving his pieces. Because they use real-time technology, they unravel over vast, non-human timescales. They offer us an entry-point into a realm of time that we are not usually able to conceive of – a geological timescale that will eventually leave us behind. When Angelo finishes his memorial in ‘Oil Stick Work’, will the person who owns the artwork still be alive? When the pumps in ‘Animated Scene’ are still nodding a hundred years from now, will there even be oil left in Texas? When the black cloud in ‘Dust Storm’ is still roiling in 500 years’ time, will some new environmental cataclysm have engulfed the human race?

By their sheer timescale, Gerrard’s works presume to have no viewer at all. When you look at a Turner landscape, you see the landscape necessarily through Turner’s gaze. When you look at one of Gerrard’s scenes, you are simply observing a landscape, which, like the planet itself, will survive long after you have stopped looking. These are post-human portraits – portraits of a world that will be here when we are gone

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GEORGIA vision Television reporter Nevine Mabro writes from South Ossetia on shelled towns, evidence of ethnic cleansing, and dead journalists as she goes on an â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;embedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; with the Russian military.

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e were picked up by the Russian military at the Kaspi checkpoint. It is only 30 minutes drive from the Georgian capital Tbilisi, but Russian tanks stood confidently on the road, blocking anyone from passing. Over the past week the Russian army had advanced from South Ossetia, past the Georgian town of Gori and down the road towards Tbilisi. All the talk was of a ceasefire, but the soldiers just didn’t seem to want to leave. I was on assignment for Channel 4 News, travelling with a reporter and cameraman. We had been in Georgia for a week and were desperate to get to South Ossetia, to see the damage in the capital Tskhinvali, which had been at the centre of the fighting between Russian and Georgian forces. Russian officials were saying that at least 2000 people had died in the fighting, but so far had failed to provide any proof. We wanted to see for ourselves. What was left of the town? Who were people blaming for the conflict? The only way to get to Tskhinvali was with the Russian military. Journalists who tried it on their own earlier in the week had horror stories to tell – or had not lived to tell any stories at all. Two Georgian journalists, photographer Alexander Klimchuk and Grigol Chikhladze who was on assignment for Newsweek, had been killed in Tskhinvali: pulled from their car and shot dead according to witnesses. A Dutch cameraman was killed by a cluster bomb in the centre of Gori. Several other journalists had been badly injured and two were missing. It’s an incredibly high death toll for such a short conflict. We knew the Russian military would tightly control our every move. They would take us only to the places they wanted us to see, and let us talk only to people they wanted us to talk too. But we decided it was still worth going: you never know what you can see or hear when your minder turns away for a moment. It was Saturday afternoon and the sun was fading. We drove from Kaspi towards South Ossetia in a military convoy. We took our own car; the other 12 or so journalists were transported in a truck accompanied by soldiers. Before the Russian advance deep into Georgian territory we had been doing this drive everyday – traveling down the straight road from Tbilisi to Gori to report on the fighting.  The drive was simple and took 45 minutes. But today it was different. Fields and trees along the road were on fire. We passed a burning tank and in the distance were huge plumes of smoke.    The Russians blamed Georgian farmers for the destruction, but it seemed systematic and we saw no farmers as we drove past. We could see Russian soldiers though, digging trenches and consolidating positions deep in the countryside. We trundled past Gori and towards Tskhinvali.

This road was too dangerous to travel along without Russian protection. Villagers and journalists had told of snipers and attacks by South Ossetian militiamen. The small villages we passed along the 20 km journey had reportedly been the scenes of some of the worst atrocities in the conflict. Those who fled the area told tales of executions and kidnappings, and of houses set on fire by Russian soldiers and the shadowy irregulars that followed them. The Russians had no intention of letting us stop here, so we filmed with small cameras out the car window. The streets were deserted. One of the few people we passed was dead, his rotting corpse on the roadside. The stench was overpowering: he had obviously been there for days. In Tskvanvalli buildings were devastated, burnt vehicles lay overturned on the street. This, the Russians said, was the result of Georgia’s bombardment. They took us to a residential area and told us we had 40 minutes to look around. “Talk to anyone you want” the commander said. The only problem was there were very few people to talk to.

Fields and trees along the road were on fire. We passed a burning tank, and in the distance were huge plumes of smoke There were, however, lots of armed soldiers: two on every corner, wearing balaclavas. Many had come from fighting insurgents in Chechnya. “Don’t stray,” the soldiers warned us, “it’s not safe.” The Georgians had laid mines before they left, they said, and they were in the process of deactivating them. The South Ossetians we did manage to speak to were angry with Georgia, with her president Mikheil Saakashvili, and with America for funding Georgia’s army. They spoke of a devastating Georgian air bombardment. Now they were left to pick through the wreckage, and bury the bodies. One couple told us they had to bury a relative in their backyard. We walked around the streets, interrupted frequently by the overpowering, distinctive smell of death. But we didn’t see any more bodies. They were hidden, maybe under debris or hastily buried. Next on the tour was the South Ossetian Interior Ministry. It was a shell of a building with every window and door blown out. The destruction was eerily beautiful, framed against the snow capped Caucasus Mountain range in the distance.  “Look around for 30 minutes,” our Kremlin guide Sasha said, “and then you can interview the South Ossetian interior minister, Mikhail Minzayev.” Minzayev told

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us the building had been the victim of Georgian shelling, and that the South Ossetian officials were still trying to work out the number of dead from the fighting. It was getting dark. “You can’t go back to Georgia now,” Sasha told us. “There is a curfew in South Ossetia from 6pm. We will overnight here in our military base and then we’ll take you back [to Georgia] in the morning when it’s safe.” The Russian camp was in the grounds of a bombed out hospital.  Rows of grey tents had been set up and soldiers wandered around or sat near campfires. They appeared tired and many were drunk. There was limited electricity and even less food. It was hard to believe this was the camp of a conquering army. Dinner was hulks of dry bread and a cup-a-soup. Our group’s different demands were increasingly irritating Sasha, a short sturdy man full of nervous energy. Some of us wanted to file our reports straight away. Others were working to North American deadlines and wanted to work late into the night.  He was irritated but accommodating. By 9pm the night was pitch black.  The air was dry and cold, punctuated by the sound of automatic gunfire.   “What is going on out there?” I asked. “Big problem with looters,” Sasha said, “… Oh, and rabbits.” The shooting continued throughout the night. They obviously have a real problem with rabbits in South Ossetia. He showed us where we would sleep: a huge tent in the middle of the camp.  Camp beds were lined up for us, each with a pillow and a blanket. Sasha threw himself down on one of the beds. He was going to sleep there with us: “To make sure you don’t annoy the soldiers!” he joked in his perfect American English. But he warned us not to leave the tent under any circumstances: “The last thing the commanders wanted [when they agreed to let us stay] is a bunch of journalists running around.” I needed the toilet. I asked Sasha if there was somewhere I could go. He asked my name again. He then looked me up and down and said, ‘’Listen Nevine, you can go in that tent over there. But I advise you not to go on your own because… well how can I put this... The soldiers here haven’t had it for a while if you know what I mean. Get a male journalist to go with you and be quick.” We woke at 6am and after some gentle persuasion, Sasha agreed to take a small group of us out on another tour of the city. He accompanied us without any soldiers, so we finally managed to speak to the town’s residents without armed men breathing down our necks. A young boy showed us his devastated apartment block: he and his mother 108

managed to get out before the building was bombed, but he wasn’t sure about his neighbours. He hadn’t seen them since. Everyone we spoke to criticised Georgia and welcomed the presence of the Russians.  It struck me that only the very old and the young were left in this city. The rest had fled to refugee camps in North Ossetia.  We asked Sasha if we could speak to some more people: he took us to the city’s graveyard. I was beginning to get used to his dark sense of humour. The tour was over and we drove back to the camp to collect our stuff and be escorted back to Georgia. The Russian military were driving us back in a convoy and told us we would be slightly delayed because they were waiting for two other journalists to arrive. They were headed back to Georgia too, we were told. We waited. An ambulance arrived carrying two coffins. It was the bodies of Alexander Klimchuk and Grigol Chikhladze.  The Russians were going to hand them over to the Georgian authorities later that day, a week after they had died. But first the bodies had to be moved from the ambulance and onto our bus.  One American photographer was asked to help the soldiers lift the coffins. “How did they die?” we asked. “They were shot,” Sasha said. “Who shot them?” He laughed. “We are investigating. Now come on everyone get on the bus.” We had our own car but the other journalists were told they must travel back on the bus with the bodies.  A Canadian journalist protested that they must have another vehicle to transport the coffins. Sasha turned round, smiling: “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to travel back with your colleagues?” The convoy drove slowly out of Tskhinvali towards Georgia.  As we drove back to Georgia, at least 30 Russian tanks were headed in the same direction.  The politicians were talking of a pull out, but the Russian army was reinforcing their presence in the area. We passed the dead body we had seen when we entered the city. He had not been moved.  I wondered how he died and how long he had been lying on the street. Would he ever get moved or just rot as the soldiers drove by? We pulled up at Gori military hospital and the bodies of our colleagues were handed over to the waiting Georgian officials. Our Russian ‘embed’ was officially over now.  Sasha and the soldiers accompanying us were no longer concerned about our movements. They said their goodbyes and headed back to Tskhinvali.  A few days later the Russian military revised the number of South Ossetians who

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had died during the conflict. It was just over 300 officials said, not 2,000 as previously stated. There are several Georgian villages that sit nestled between the South Ossetian border and the town of Gori. It’s a diverse area. Many villages are Georgian, others mainly Ossetian, and many are mixed.  Again it was mainly old people who remained. Trapped by the fighting and contending with looters, they had little food or medical supplies. We were the first outsiders to arrive in these areas. The Red Cross hadn’t managed to reach them as both Georgia and Russia had failed to guarantee the organisation a safe passage.  Russian tanks now patrolled the streets, but South Ossetian irregulars were still operating in the area: attacking convoys and stealing vehicles often right under the noses of the Russian soldiers. There were also mines to contend with, laid by the Georgian military as they retreated from the Russian advance. The village of Karaleti was one of these villages. It’s small and ethnically mixed, and now the streets were mainly deserted. A group of old women

were walking down the street.  They were clearly traumatised by what had happened in their village.  They spoke of masked men breaking into people’s homes and marching the young men out. Others were shot in the street, they told us. One man said his brother had been taken away with four other men and not heard from since. Many of the villages had also been shelled, by both the Russian and Georgian armies. An old woman shuffled slowly down the street. She was hunched over and walked with a stick. She had white hair and was dressed all in black. She wore a black scarf over her head, a sign of mourning in this Orthodox country.  She spoke quietly and in Russian. “I’ve seen so much, so many terrible things. I don’t know what to do.” She could hardly speak from crying

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Are Indian Designers the new Polish Plumbers?

Art by Jake Blanchard

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Rumours plague Britain’s graphic design community, with reports of cut-rate Indian outsourcers and Russian companies offering to create websites for as little as US $200. But when does concern about foreign workers turn into hysteria, and what are the assumptions that make us fearful of a global creative marketplace? Sam Jordison gets post-Oriental on Britain’s Photoshop wizards…

ot so long ago, from the point of view of the layperson, there appeared to be a definite, palpable craft to be learned in order to earn a buck in the graphic design industry. Back in the days of actual physical drawing boards, squared paper, complicated sliding rulers, set squares, compasses and measuring devices there were physical skills to master as well as intellectual and creative challenges. Even when computers came along the industry remained shrouded in mystery for most outs iders. QuarkExpress and Photoshop were, for many years, too complex, strange and expensive to be accessed by anyone without glasses with thick black rims and sculpted facial hair. Designers could ply their art safe in the knowledge that few had an idea how they did it. It’s all changed in the past few years. Just as it has in so many other industries, the Internet has blown the whole thing open. It’s globalised the market and created infinite new opportunities with all those design-heavy websites. But the web revolution has also demystified, democratised and – to reclaim the phrase from sports’ commentators – quite literally cheapened the process. Now we all have the keys to the kingdom. Anyone with a bit of nous can get hold of photo-editing software. We can all take infinite pictures on our digital cameras. We have all the fonts in the world just one click away instead of in huge and distant ledgers. We too can make halfway decent looking pages, websites and adverts. Or at least, if you’re like me, our more talented friends can. For free. As Patrick Burgoyne, the editor of industry magazine Creative Review points out: “ It’s made it more difficult to convince clients that what designers do is very special and worth paying money for. Clients can see their daughter playing around with Photoshop and creating a MySpace page, or creating a poster, and because those tools are in the hands of so many people they completely demystify the design process. So once that happens and anyone can do it to a reasonable degree, it becomes much harder to argue for a professional version.” Just as journalists have had to justify their existence and their wages in the face of competition from millions of bloggers writing for nothing but pleasure, writing faster and writing with more direct accountability to their audience, so designers have had their working models ravaged by the Internet. There’s still a lot to be said for experience, faceto-face contact and the professional training that established studios can offer, but the industry is understandably nervous.

Perhaps it’s this feeling of insecurity and fear for the future that has started the increasingly loud murmuring within the UK graphic design community about offshore companies and cheap third world labour. People aren’t yet shouting, “they took our jobs”, but the fear of foreign competition that infects most industries contemplating their own destruction certainly seems to be gnawing at graphic designers. The worry is that their work can be done almost as well and far more cheaply in the new computing and technology colossus, India. Patrick Burgoyne again: “There’s a couple ofsites who already offer logo design for US $50 or something, who’ll design you a business card, and for some clients that’s all they need, and it’s very hard then for people who are used to charging a lot of money for a corporate identity system to justify what they do in the face of something like that, to clients who ultimately want something quick and cheap and easy. The other phenomenon is where clients will upload a brief, and designers will upload things on a spec basis, almost like a matchmaking service. It’s on quite a low level, but you are starting to see that sort of thing happening.” The other fear is that the more successful studios will also begin to take advantage of the cheap labour offered abroad. They’ll take the contracts, do the thinking and map out the process, but will get outsiders to do all the dirty work with pixels and detail. They will, in effect, get people on the subcontinent to do their colouring-in for them. As Burgoyne explains: “It may well be that in the UK you get a design version of what’s happening in manufacturing where the actual doing gets outsourced somewhere cheaper while the thinking stays here. So the strategy and positioning is done here, but the actual work of producing the materials is done somewhere else for cheaper. I can certainly see that happening, especially for large corporate projects where they apply the same sorts of rules to everything else they buy.”

his offshoring suggested to me a powerful metaphor for the precarious nature and inequalities of Western Capitalism. I had what I thought a rather neat post-Orientalism thesis all worked out: investigating the idea that because wages are so much lower on the subcontinent, the brains there should only be used for the lower functions of colouring in and ‘detail,’ while the Westerners would have control of the overall vision and delivery.

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My preliminary research brought up evidence of what seemed to be dozens and dozens of the kind of offshore companies Patrick Burgoyne suggested might exist. They were mainly in India or Russia. One, oddly, was in Iceland. Never mind that one. I wrote to the others, asking them all about this new practice of finishing of designs, and dropping what I hoped weren’t too patronising hints about whether they found it demeaning. None of them had a clue what I was going on about. Most didn’t bother to reply. Some told me I had it all wrong and that they only saw contracts all the way through. Some tried to help, but ended up baffling me all the more. I thought I’d hit the jackpot when I located a company called designwebgraphic.com, with a

I realised the non-story was actually a story in itself – that we in the West could so blithely assume that Indians would want to do our ‘colouring in’ spoke volumes about the assumptions we still make website that bears the tagline: “Website design India, Outsource webdesign.” Especially since the CEO Mitul Bhavsar was keen to talk to me. When I asked him if he saw a new trend of people from the UK looking to India to get their design work done he was clear that it was happening. ‘Very much,’ he told me in an email. ‘As we are dealing with outsourcing; not only from the UK but from all over world. I have clients from the UK as well. They are dealing in media, accounting, wooden tools etc. It is a global trend and very much like a revolution in global economy. Few years ago, mostly giant companies used to outsource but these days lots of SMEs [small to medium enterprises] do this and I am expecting many small businesses will start outsourcing in coming years.’ The problem was that when it got down to specifics, we were clearly talking at cross-purposes. It was understandable that he didn’t want to tell me which actual clients he had worked for, but nailing any kind of detail was extremely difficult. Especially when it came to the rumours I was most interested in about UK graphic design companies outsourcing some aspects of their work to companies abroad. 112

When I suggested that this might be happening (using the example of the way cartoonists had employed Koreans in the past to ‘colour in’ sections of their work) the answer I received baffled me as much as my question clearly had Mitul: ‘It is a global trend and helps global economy to rotate strongly. This is benefited to both the countries and government (and then overall to common men). Imagine – Country ‘A’ outsourcing to Country ‘B’. Now in ‘A’ people will save money by outsourcing and will spend those saved money to either re-invest or for luxurious life style. In ‘B’ people will surely be able to buy more stuff as they earn more by working on outsourced projects. Thus, it helps to rotate economy of both the countries and overall life style goes higher.’ I wrote back: ‘An interesting aspect of all the above is that it could potentially revolutionise the working model within graphic design... I guess you could say that the UK graphic design industry is still running on a Henry Ford model of business – that is, everything is made in one studio and comes out the other end in a complete package. This model has been superseded in most industries though, and now it looks like a similar process is taking place in graphic design. I’m wondering if you see such change happening, and what the implications might be for the future?’ Mitul replied: ‘FUTURE will change a vision of seeing a world not from all direction but also from a single direction.’ Now, it’s hard to grasp the nuances of mood and expression while dealing in emails sent from different time-zones and between people with very different language practices, but I was slowly starting to understand that even though Mitul was trying to oblige me and answer my questions as best he could, he clearly thought my questions were, well, a bit weird. I tried to direct things back to my central thesis: ‘More trickily, it also seems strange to me that European studios are trying to outsource their more tedious work. There’s certainly an uncomfortable relationship here in that – surely – companies in India can do the entire project just as well, so why should they just be employed to do what you might term “the boring” bits?’ I received the answer: ‘Outsourcing is all about letting someone do everything. In other way, it depends upon what 1st person is willing to let 2nd person do. For example: when you dial a number, you are the only person who has to take a charge to talk first. It is about to kick a ball and throw it in a goal post as and when you want. (what to outsource and what is a deadline – only a buyer can decide not a provider) Something like, government decides “what rules to be followed”

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not public who say “we will follow only these sort of rules”.’ So we were both speaking English, but by this time I really didn’t have much of a clue about what Mitul was saying. Nor did he seem to understand me. I concluded after a few yet more baffling exchanges that the reason we were at such cross purposes was that I wasn’t just barking up the wrong tree, but making a whole lot of noise about a problem that didn’t even exist. On further investigation, most of the websites that first cropped up on my Google search turned out to be portals to nowhere. They were so much Internet trash: strange hosting platforms built to collect Google hits rather than fulfil any practical function. Some did seem to offer a kind of offshore design service, but only for complete projects and only, it seemed, on the off chance that someone would hunt them down on the net. There was no evidence that I could find of offshore work in progress. All of their portfolios actually seemed to be built up of local work for local people. They did offer offshore services – perhaps with an eye to the future and a canny understanding of what’s likely to happen in a few years – but I could find no hard evidence that such work is going on now. I was getting a similar story when I tried to contact people in the UK. John Walters, editor of the suitably stylish graphic design trade magazine Eye told me that he too had heard rumours about all this offshore work going on, but had come across no hard facts. Nothing more than “a regular flow of junk emails offering to do websites for US $200,

which I can’t imagine anyone in the business actually following up.” John suggested that it might be a bit like the urban myth of the Polish plumbers. The above-mentioned ‘they took our jobs’ fear within the industry – even though no one really seemed to be taking anyone’s work away at all. At this stage I felt like I was chasing my tail. Except I realised, that the non-story was actually something of a story in itself. First it says something about the general fear within creative industries that such rumours could spread so quickly. Also that there’s a clear perception that digital technology has at least made offshoring a legitimate possibility even if it’s not happening yet. Finally, there are also a few tasty post-imperial implications that might well fit in my original trendy thesis after all. The fact that we in the West – and in that I very much include my guilty self – could so blithely and easily assume that Indians would want to do our colouring in spoke volumes about the assumptions we still make. Never mind the fact that they have one of the world’s biggest design industries entirely independent of ours, and business in general in cities like Mumbai is booming in a way that ours hasn’t since the industrial revolution. The reality is that in the digital age, power structures aren’t so vertical as they once were. The chances are that the design companies who really maximise profits in the next few years won’t be the ones thinking about offshoring the more tedious labour intensive aspects of their work, they’ll be the ones looking offshore for new contracts and new markets

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CONTRIBUTORS Matthieu Aikens (pg. 88) is a Canadian journalist and a regular contributor for newspapers including the Halifax Chronicle-Herald and the Toronto Sun, as well as the alternative weekly The Coast. He is currently travelling through eastern Europe and Asia, where he is pursuing documentary journalism work. Jez Burrows (pg. 54) is an Edinburgh based designer and illustrator. A graduate of the University of Brighton, he contributes editorial illustrations for the New York Times. Robert Collins (pg.98) is a novelist and journalist, and a regularly writes for the Guardian and the Observer newspapers. Half-English, half-Brazilian, Collins is the author of Soul Corporation (Heinemann). Alistair Harper (pg. 80) is a regular contributor for the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. His interests span from the House of Lords to Alan Lomax field recordings. Oliver Harris (pg. 32) is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Masters programme, and also has a Masters in Shakespearean literature from UCL. Aside from his ongoing work for BAD IDEA, he is a regular contributor for the Times Literary Supplement.

Special thanks to Ben, Michael and Hetty, James Ashworth, Leona Baker, Polly Barker, Oliver Beatty, Natalie Brady, Tom Bromley, The Brian Jacket Letdown, Sarah Broom, Charlie Campbell, Julian Carrera, Ben Caulfield, Bob Ciano, Harry, Richard & Sarah C-T, Elizabeth Choppin, Malcolm Croft, David Cross, Harry Deansway, Luis De Jorge, Ed deVroome, Henry deVroome, Sarah Dohrmann, Helen Donohue, Clay Felker, Paul Gravett, Rebecca Gray, Green Gartside & Scritti Politti, Robert Greene, Stephanie Grodin, Amy Hall, Nancy Harrison, Sharon Hemans, Chris Houghton, Andy Hounslow, Ruth Killick, Lydia Lewis, Max Lister, Gavin MacFadyen, James McDonald, Lou McLeod, Madeleine McLeod, Danny Miller, Nick Mills, Iain Mitchell, James Nash, Patrick Neate, Laurie Britton Newell, No One boutique, David Peace, Lally Pearson, Helen Ponting, Polly Powell, Dan Radclyffe, Andrea Marchesini Reggiani, Troy Rice, Steve Richards & Lucky Number, Naomi Richmond- Swift, Gwynne Roberts, Tom Roberts, Alex Robinson, Francesca Sears, Louise Shannon, Gail Sheehy, Tom Simpson, Anushka Sinha, Wesley Stace, The Staceys, Tomo @ Onagono, Daniel Trilling, Thomas Turner, Tom Wall, Gunter Wallraff, Simon Wheatley, Max Wheeler, Chris Wheedon, Dom Williams, Oliver Winchester, Joel Wykeham, Sadie Wykeham

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Nevine Mabro (pg. 104) is a Channel 4 News producer, and formerly worked as a producer for Association Press Television News Television (APTN) and CNN. Originally from Oxford, she is a graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Ben Beaumont-Thomas (pg. 12) is an MA graduate of Sheffield University’s Magazine Journalism programme, and has previously written for magazines including Arena and FHM. He also writes a blog about music with his girlfriend: www.playitasitlays.net. Ben Turner (pg. 26) is a London-based photographer whose work has featured in the Independent and Evening Standard newspapers, and also Clash magazine. Simon Wheatley (pg. 114) became a member of Magnum Photos in 2005 and is currently living in Calcutta, India. In recent years his work has focused on marginalised inner city areas such as Amsterdam and east London, and he is working on an upcoming book called Don’t Call Me Urban.

Special Mentions Arts Council England www.artscouncil.org.uk The Fix magazine www.thefixonline.com Foto 8 magazine www.foto8.com Friday Late at the V&A www.vam.ac.uk/fcfridaylate Le Book www.lebook.com Little White Lies magazine www.littlewhitelies.co.uk Multilink magazine www.multilinkmagazine.com Penpusher magazine www.penpushermagazine.co.uk Plan B magazine www.planbmag.com Portico Books www.porticobooks.co.uk Stones Throw Records www.stonesthrow.com Super Super magazine www.thesupersuper.com Vertigo magazine www.vertigomagazine.co.uk Warchild www.warchild.org.uk

Bad Idea

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www.badidea.co.uk/shop Out Of The Ordinary

115

Burma’s Refugee Trail by Simon wheatley

his picture was shot soon after the break of dawn in a Kuala Lumpur apartment where I had slept the night. It was overcrowded with Burmese refugees, sleeping wall to wall. As some of them began to stir, their legs piled up... the moment didn’t last long and I snapped it in a semi-awake state. As the room became lighter I waited for it to re-occur – but it never did, and I preferred this blurry moment to the many other frames I made. My assistant says my best pictures are the moments that somehow didn’t happen, and though I don’t think this is an outstanding photograph I feel this was one of those moments. Burmese refugees are persecuted in Malaysia. The repression in Burma is as much about ethnic as democratic rights, and the people in this frame are Christians from Chin province. They are smuggled by trafficking gangs to Malaysia where they try to find work that can be hard to come by and is very badly paid when it does. There’s a strong community ethic – most refugees’ apartments are filled with people from the same village – and those who do work will support those who don’t. For me this picture is a reminder of those deep bonds. The world media doesn’t buy quiet stories of suffering like this, they want sensational pictures of bloodied street demonstrators or bloated bodies. Yet my job is to gain people’s trust and get into difficult 116

situations, and this story – shot in grim urban enclaves and secret hidden jungle camps – was hard to access. Many refugees were concerned I might be a secret policeman and those that did believe in me might now be wondering who the mysterious stranger they let into their lives was. I once met a man at a refugee community centre who was trying to find his family. He’d been seized in a raid along with his eight-month pregnant wife and their child. At a detention centre they were separated and eventually he was sold to gangsters on the Thai border where people are reportedly placed into two groups: those who can arrange US $500 from friends for a passage back to KL and those that can’t, who are sold as slaves to Thai and Indonesian fishing boats or to prostitution rackets. He was rescued but upon returning discovered his family were no longer at the place he’d last seen them. He was obviously very distressed and seemed relieved to meet me, thinking I’d somehow be able to help him. But how could I if his story won’t sell? Should I be wary of entering the lives of simple people and deluding them, however good my intentions? I do wonder about my own practise. Worryingly, an NGO activist once said that the way that Malaysian authorities would react to criticism in the foreign press would be to clampdown harder – as a lesson

Bad Idea

The Butcher’s Shop

A new writers’ workshop and theatrical experience hosted by BAD IDEA’s editors. Prepare your prose for the taste of cold editorial steel. Workshops are on the final Thursday of every month, beginning 30 October 2008, at the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, 9a St. Thomas’s St., London SE1 9RY. Places limited; all stories must be submitted in advance of the event. Visit www.badidea.co.uk/thebutchersshop for details.

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