television – matt finch / mechanical dolphin

IMAJINE: “Levelling up” and the future of media

February 2, 2022Mechanical Dolphin

The British government has announced its “levelling up” plan to address regional inequalities across the UK.

The IMAJINE project, delivered by a consortium of 16 institutions across 13 countries, investigates questions of inequality and injustice within and between Europe’s nations and regions.

To give us a unique vantage point on what “fair treatment” means for different parts of Europe, the team worked with stakeholders to develop four scenarios for Europe in 2048 (PDF download): SILVER CITADEL, GREEN GUARDIAN, SILICON SCAFFOLD, and PATCHWORK RAINBOW. The scenario set includes responses from experts at the OECD, European Trade Union Institute, Capgemini, UK Space Agency, and many other institutions, exploring the implications for a range of sectors.

One key insight of this process was that it’s never sufficient to merely “run the numbers” when it comes to questions of what is fair or just between regions. We define justice through the stories we tell about what matters to us. Addressing regional inequality is not merely a case of measuring the difference between today’s “haves” and “have-nots”, then seeking to narrow the gap according to today’s metrics. It’s also about understanding what, where, and who we will value, now and in times to come.

The scenarios provide one way of reflecting on those questions of value, and how things are changing compared to the past. SILVER CITADEL sees regional policymakers lobbying centralised bodies for their fair share of an economic “pie” carved up by artificial intelligence. GREEN GUARDIAN explores a climate-ravaged future where Europeans have given up on consumer values and choose to live by new measures of sustainability and wellbeing. In SILICON SCAFFOLD, tech corporations dominate and the nation-state is on the wane, in a world where almost all of our daily life has migrated to privatised virtual spaces. And in PATCHWORK RAINBOW, Europe fragments into a jigsaw of regions with wildly different cultural and social values.

Since the scenarios’ publication in October 2021, we’ve received additional expert commentary from Madeleine Gabriel at Nesta on sustainability implications, the Danish Design Center’s Oskar Stokholm Østergaard on the future of design, and Belgium’s EU Digital Champion Saskia Van Uffelen on how “digital society” might develop in each scenario. And there’s more to come.

The latest expert response, published today, is from Cardiff University’s Caitriona Noonan, and explores what the IMAJINE scenarios mean for the future of media production in Europe. Who will make the content that appears on our screens? How will it be distributed? Caitriona notes that we are at a critical moment for the future of Europe’s film and television sector. IMAJINE’s scenarios offer a unique viewpoint into how that moment is going to play out.

Find out more about IMAJINE at www.imajine-project.eu.

Interview with Mark Stewart, Part 2: Beyond the Valley of the Clueless

March 30, 2021March 31, 2021Mechanical Dolphin

Earlier this year, I interviewed the academic and researcher Mark Stewart about the changing nature of television in the digital age. Our discussion, presented in two parts, explores the geography of televisual culture: who gets access to what TV and when? Whose content is privileged and whose is excluded? What happens when you can’t get the shows you’re looking for, because you find yourself in the “wrong” part of the world or wanting the “wrong” content?

Mark also talked about his personal journey to becoming a television studies researcher and how he found himself reading his way into a culture of shows and movies which had not featured in his New Zealand childhood. You can read the first part of our interview here.

I want to return to this question of networks, and awareness of what is out there, from online Buffy fandom, to the streaming services’ cornucopia, to the grey market trading in unlicensed material. How do you map the television landscape?

Mainstream content providers are locked into a framework which is colonial. It consists of a set of privileged spaces which generate and export content for the rest of the world – both as a capitalist endeavour but also to establish certain values and norms.

In the age of subscription streaming, you enrol into the system, you accept that you’re its subject; you play by capitalist rules as you subscribe, you accept that they’ll tell you: “This is what comedy looks like, this is what drama looks like, this is what sexy looks like…”?

Part of the intent is to share a set of cultural values and assumptions that make the environment more hospitable to the content provider. One of those assumptions is that there is a homogenous nation of television watchers. Yet in every corner of the world, we’re way beyond that kind of homogeneity; we understand that the nation is an imposition. Its boundaries are permeable, it’s filled with diverse and ill-fitting and resistant elements.

Interview with Mark Stewart, Part 1: Don’t you have an elsewhere to be?

March 26, 2021Mechanical Dolphin

A few years back, you wrote about “the myth of televisual ubiquity”, this notion that despite the sense that television is abundant and easily available worldwide now, there are still barriers, restrictions, and friction when it comes to global access to television. The “tyranny of distance” still applies thanks to national borders, licensing deals, and the assumptions made by content providers about what kinds of show people want to watch.

What does that look like in 2021?

Endlessly repeating days

February 7, 2021February 7, 2021Mechanical Dolphin

It was Groundhog Day this week. Inevitably that became an excuse for media outlets to return to the 1993 movie, in which Bill Murray’s misanthropic weatherman becomes trapped in an endlessly looped February 2nd. It’s hard not to draw parallels to the rhythms and routines of COVID lockdown.

The New York Times had a feature on the top five time loop movies, saying that they might feel “a little too close to home this year.” Tor.com also reheated a Groundhog Day piece from three years ago, and at the tail end pointed towards two more recent examples, Palm Springs and Russian Doll.

The Times suggested this was a genre “you may not want to relive” under current circumstances, but there’s something to be learned about repetition and release from these oddball shows and pictures.

All Things Good and Strange

October 28, 2017October 29, 2017Mechanical Dolphin

I love TV, and I don’t think I watch enough of it.

I’d watch more but it’s so slow*. You can spend weeks of your life trying to hammer through season after season of just one show. In Douglas Coupland’s 1993 novel Microserfs, characters “blitz” movies by watching videos on fast-forward with subtitles switched on.** My friend Katie, equally impatient, listens to audiobooks on chipmunk speed, but I don’t think I could sustain either approach for a full season of TV.

I watch television to get ideas for work. TV shows and community experiences like the ones I design have a lot in common. You need a central conceit which draws people in, and on which you can hang a series of recurring episodes. Action-adventure, problem solving, and play are closely entwined. This year’s non-speaking, musical keynote was inspired by dialogue-free sequences in the TV show Legion.

The teams I work with are pretty explicit about this link between TV and the events we run. The working title for Ann Arbor’s Wondrous Strange event was ‘Weirder Things’.

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Stranger Things is a difficult one for me because I’m not super into it, and that makes me feel bad. It’s so popular, I feel like I’m missing something. Like I’m out of touch. It’s doubly bad because I grew up immersed in – and totally in love with – the late 80s/early 90s world of Stephen King novels and pirate horror movies on VHS.

Celebrate All Monsters! Emmet O’Cuana, Carol Borden, Frank Collins

October 19, 2014January 29, 2015Mechanical Dolphin

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning in Parkes, and life is grand, so I thought it might be a good day to share three great writers with you. These are all pop-culture pundits whose essays make excellent weekend reading.

Emmet O’Cuana – Challenger of the Unknown

From "The Suburbs" by Emmet O'Cuana, Sean Rinehart, and Tim Switalski, in Outre 3: Xenophobia — “The Suburbs” by O’Cuana, Rinehart, and Switalski

Emmet is a Melbourne-based comics writer, critic, and occasional radio host who has interviewed me on a couple of occasions. Each time he forced me to question my opinions and raise my thinking to a new level. The first time our chat ranged from Star Crash to Kierkegaard; the second he asked smart and challenging questions about the live-action zombie games I’d been running in Australia and New Zealand.

My favourite pieces by Emmet are still forthcoming – he wrote an insightful chapter on comics creator Grant Morrison in Darragh Greene and Kate Roddy’s Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renaissance, plus a great essay for the comics site Sequart which made me re-evaluate James Robinson’s Starman, a comic which I love and thought I knew everything about. Watch out for them next year.

In the meantime, you can read Emmet’s work and find links to all he’s published and recorded over at his own site.

Carol Borden – Nothing Ape Is Strange To Her

Carol has featured on my site a few times before. She quietly produces meticulous, poetic criticism, taking apart icons from the past and present to examine what it means to be human. I’ve previously raved about her writing on Mario Bava’s Danger:Diabolik (“If we had a lesbian cinema that took Danger: Diabolik as its starting point, I, for one, would be much happier”) and on Superman as a positive burlesque of masculinity:

I’ve come to see Superman’s greatest powers as not his strength or heat vision, but his restraint and his theatricality both in restraining that power while pretending to fight as hard as he can and in passing as Clark Kent. As I see him now, Superman is always performing one way or another.

Carol is an editor at The Cultural Gutter, a website devoted to “disreputable art in all its forms”. In pulp fiction, old movies, cartoons, and comic-books, she excavates nuances of gender, identity, and cultural power. She compares Adventure Time’s hapless Lemongrab with Frankenstein’s monster; to discuss Planet of the Apes, she paraphrases the Roman playwright Terence: “I am Ape. Nothing Ape is strange to me.” Her latest piece in this vein looks at Dracula and even finds something new to say about the near-exhausted topic of vampires…

Frank Collins – May Not Be Used Where There Is Life

Frank writes on classic television for British site MovieMail, and at his own site Cathode Ray Tube. I’ve long had a fondness for old television shows, but through Frank’s chronicle of twentieth century telly I discovered obscure gems like the fourth-wall-breaking Strange World of Gurney Slade.

Frank’s current MovieMail series tracing the history of British TV sci-fi showcases his critical strengths: erudition, insight, and elegance. Frank can capture the essence and wider resonance of a TV show in a single descriptive paragraph, as he does here for the wildly different Red Dwarf, Space:1999, and Sapphire and Steel:

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That’s all for today: three clever souls thinking out loud about the stories we tell ourselves on the page and screen. Go check them out, if you’re looking for a Sunday read. And have a great weekend!

Matt takes on the modern cowboy in TV’s “Justified”

February 1, 2012February 1, 2012Mechanical Dolphin

When I ran workshops for high schoolers at the University of London, I always encouraged the students to discuss gender roles. Whenever possible, I included sessions on Angela Carter, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, and the great Leonora Carrington.

Timothy Olyphant and Erica Tazel star in TV's Justified — Two different faces of the US Marshals in Justified

This week, I’ve got a new piece up at the culture and gender site Role/Reboot, discussing the TV show Justified.

In ‘The Marshal and His Women’, I ask if this sharply written show will have a positive impact on definitions of masculinity, or merely perpetuate the same old stereotypes.

You can read my thoughts on Justified at http://www.rolereboot.org/life/details/2012-01-the-marshal-and-his-women-can-tvs-justified-reboot-t

For more on Angela Carter, see my review of a 2010 youth theatre adaptation of her collection The Bloody Chamber, at http://thefairytalecupboard.blogspot.com/2010/05/guest-post-matthew-finch-on-playbox.html

We Don’t Know How Lucky We Are: Updating Myths for Today’s Culture

November 25, 2011April 10, 2017Mechanical Dolphin

As I leave Australia and New Zealand for a while, graphic designer and former newspaper cartoonist Hugh Todd pointed me to John Clarke’s song, ‘We Don’t Know How Lucky We Are’, and got me thinking about the power of myth and storytelling.