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CONTROLLING THE PRODUCTION OF MEANING

>Play Flyingdales, 2011 Candice Jacobs on constant loop in the background<

>CANDICE INTRO<

Thank you all for coming to this In Conversation event – Controlling the Production of Meaning. As I know many of you here, I won’t go into too much detail about who I am, so I’ll keep this brief. I am an artist and I use other artists and artists’ works to generate meaning and a further understanding of my current practice, thinking in particular about meaning, manipulation, control, repetition, boredom, popular culture and political strategy.

An action, event or other thing that occurs or happens again is a project that explores how repetition is used as a tool to influence meaning or generate meaning.

Thinking of the television as a sound, image and text provider through its programming and advertising, and advertising and marketing as the manipulation of these subjects, repetition and repetitive techniques are employed to create structures and narratives that are key elements to the success of many TV programmes and magazines. This type of marketing strategy is able to draw in an audience and keep them there transfixed.

It was the Swedish Philosopher Lars Svensson who said that Without Meaning Comes Boredom…..

“That boredom is probably more widespread than ever before can be established by noting that the number of ‘social placebos’ is greater than it has ever been. If there are more substitutes for meaning, there must be more meaning that needs to be substituted for. Where there is a lack of personal meaning, all sorts of diversions have to create a substitute such as in the cult of celebrities, where one gets completely engrossed in the lives of others because one’s own life lacks meaning. Is our fascination with the bizarre, fed daily by the mass media, not a result of our awareness of the boring?”

"Does the rush for diversions precisely indicate our fear of the emptiness that surrounds us. Boredom is not connected with actual needs but with desire. And this desire is a desire for sensory stimuli. Stimuli are the only ‘interesting’ thing.”

For many people, it is their jobs that provide structure and meaning to their lives. Working and having a job are familiar to most people, most people have had one at one time or another, and many believe that one should “earn a living”. However, one should not consider the terms work and labour without discussing the term leisure or debating the idea of leisure-time. Workers produce products and services – this is their job, however at the end of this work-time it is time to embark upon leisure-time. It was in the philosophical theories of Marxism that the idea of the weekend is said to have been invented. The same workers who make products and services tend also to use them in their leisure time. Work and Labour are essentially part of a continuously looped system in perpetual motion feeding and consuming itself.

For me, I tend to watch a lot of TV when I’m not working. It provides me with a sense of escapism. In the lecture at NTU earlier today I talked about how repetition through boredom created a similar sense of escapism and senior lecturer Emma Cocker briefly described the concept of super-boredom established in the essay Boredom and Danger by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in 1966. Super-boredom describes a state of immersion made possible through a form of repetition or an intense experience of boredom. This idea of zoning out or escaping reality seems especially relavent within the context of discussing television.

The cultural communications theorist John Fiske suggests that

“television watching should be conceived of as a process of meaning production in which ‘text’ is merely a substratum from which the viewer may construct various realizations. Television must be analysed not in terms of political economy, but in terms of cultural economy, in which viewers reject their role as commodity and become a producer of pleasures and meanings.”

The artist Pierre Hughue believes that the representation of life and work is an artificial construct undertaken for political reasons. He believes that the television set is a place of collective elaboration, a space of interactions between different people and is an ideal miniature of the working community.

For me, the Soap Opera and the sitcom are constructs that can be used to highlight this. The Soap Opera and sitcom provides us with a great example of what we mean by collective elaboration, collective experience or shared experience, it provides a structure for shared meanings. I can also see this idea of collective meaning or collective experience being present in far newer constructs than the soap opera or the sitcom with things like Facebook and Twitter.

For me, it is the idea of the collective self that especially interests me, a future state where we all share the same thoughts and ideas, the same experiences, pleasures and meanings to essentially create a meaningless society.

To investigate these ideas further, I have invited Sally O’Reilly and Rachel Coldicutt to both present for about 30 mins, after which there should be time for open questions.

>SALLY<

Sally O'Reilly is one of the artists presented in the exhibition here at OTS showing her video piece For The Curious. However, she tends to call herself a writer. Sally will be introducing us to a sitcom that she has written and performed over the radio called The Last of the Red Wine and will be opening up the discussion to debate the operations of clichés and the importance of repetition to their received meaning.

Sally contributes regularly to Art Monthly, Art Review, Cabinet, Frieze and Time Out, and has written many essays and short fiction for international museums and galleries. Her book The Body in Contemporary Art was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009 and she was co-editor of the thematic, interdisciplinary broadsheet Implicasphere (2003-8). She has also curated and produced numerous performative events and was co-curator of the Hayward Touring Exhibition ‘Magic Show’ (2009–10) and writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11).

Rachel Coldicutt will be discussing her time working at Big Brother 4, 7 and Celebrity Big Brother to reveal how reality TV is a fundamentally choreographed experience. Rachel has been creating digital content, making interactive experiences and working with online communities for almost 15 years, for BT, the BBC, Endemol and the V&A. She was until recently Head of Digital Media at the Royal Opera House, and now runs a creative agency called Caper, which specialises in disruptive thinking. She is the founder of Culture Hack Day and blogs atfabricofthings.wordpress.com.