FUTURES RESEARCH

9015 - HOME ON THE RANGE - 1998

I won't even start to describe my work. Suffice it to say that I am a teleworker. That says it all. My fellow workers and I do all the things the rest of the world rejects. In a strange way we are the new untouchables. Most of us have, however, chosen this role in life. Even so, you can't expect us to enthuse about work that the rest of society finds so mind-blowingly boring that nothing will persuade them to take it on. On the other hand, that means we - recently unionised - can charge respectable, perhaps even exorbitant, fees; and make a reasonable living or better. But, more important and what it is all about, most of the day is ours, to do whatever we want with it; indeed, the whole of our life is ours, and that is what I will celebrate.

If you could find our community, and you won't be able to for it is a hard three hours drive over dusty roads from the nearest inter-state, you might think we had time-shifted to the nineteenth century. Log cabins line a single main street and you might expect the sheriff to any minute come riding by on the town's one horse; and sometimes he does! But we are not hypocrites. This merely represents a front, almost as on a movie studio backlot; the image we want to present to a world that won't - in any case - ever get to see it! We are not distant relatives of the Amish. We do love our community, and who could fail to love the mountain views that surround us, the tranquil lakes and primitive forests. But we also love our home comforts and our thoroughly modern lives. Behind the antique facades, and especially underneath these, lies a very modern community.

Nor are we really isolated, except when we want to be. We have our own shared jetcopter - so the theatres and galleries we love to visit are only an hour away. But, above all, we live in cyberspace. Of course, that is the source of most of our short-term income; working as the untouchables of the knowledge industry. As I have said, this is essential to fund our way of life. We couldn't live on the income from the art some of our members produce, or from the web pages - off-line or real time - others work on. Even so, it is these that are the real focus of our lives. Outsiders might think what we do here represents our hobbies, but we prefer to view such work - if you can call anything so enjoyable and fulfilling - as our investment in the future. Of course, we would like someone to pay us a great deal for this 'art', so that we could expand our facilities, but even if this never happens it still represents an investment in the personal satisfaction we get out of our lives.

Again, I would repeat, we are not isolationist. We share our lives not just with the rest of the community but - in cyberspace - with similar communities scattered around the world. Most are, like our own, located in areas of great natural beauty. You can bring everything else to the community but, for such grandeur in your surroundings, like Mohammed you have to go to the mountain. So there are such communities in the foothills of the Himalayas and on top of the Andes. But some prefer the tranquillity of the great forests, in the Amazon basin for instance, or the peace of the great deserts, even in the middle of Australia. But all of us are linked by such sophisticated communications that we might seem to be just a few hundred yards apart.

Each of our homes is different, but that is a matter of taste rather than function. The tools of our trade, whether we are sculptors, artists, authors or web-page producers or whatever rely on the ubiquitous computer workstation. Maybe some of our input devices are different, I have banks of keyboards and drawing boards in front of my vidwall and screens - for my work as a web-age producer - and this is not too different to the set-up a number of our artists favour. The sculptors favour a VR helmet and glove, but in the context of the whole 'studio' these differences are minimal. Indeed, we often collaborate with each other, jury-rigging three-dimensional inputs, say, from the selection of unlikely tools to hand. The real differences only comes in the shared facility we call the factory; where the eventual output is delivered. It is, in fact, much like an old-time factory workshop, with prototyping machines depositing layers of plastic for the sculptors, and industrial printers and copiers giving shape to the artist's grandest ideas. On the other hand, most of our output, even our artistic work, goes straight to the web or to other networks.

Perhaps it might be best if I explained just how I might put together a half-hour media package; after all, that's my speciality. Most of the 'production' takes place in the 'studio' which, in my case, is next to the bedroom; so I can just roll out of bed and go to work - I don't want anything to get in the way of one of my creative urges! But, romantic as it may sound, my studio is just the most comfortable chair money will buy - surrounded by banks of monitors and keyboards along with a mouse or two. Unusually, I also have a helmet and glove; for I find these especially useful when I am assembling my material. As one final touch, where I do a lot of interviewing across the web, I have a chromo-key screen behind me - so I can paste in any background I fancy. But those are my personal preferences. Other package producers use less, or more.

Before I can get to use this equipment, however, I have to endure some essential bureaucracy. We don't just work informally as a team, but we also work formally as a co-operative. This means that my fellow workers, my peers, have to agree any project the community is funding. This is not censorship, I can produce anything I like; and the community will back me up. It is, instead, about resourcing. If I need resources, beyond the simplest ones available to me, then others must have their say in how the community's money is to be spent. In fact the outcome is rarely in dispute. This not to say that projects never get the thumbs-down; from time to time we all have hare-brained ideas - and need others to bring us to our senses! The ones which consume a deal of time, which fill the agendas of the resourcing board for weeks on end, are the ones we all agree we want to do, but are so ambitious we don't really know how to do them. This is where the committee system proves its value. You will have heard many times that creativity is the province of the individual, but is destroyed by committees, but that needn't always be true. If you have half a dozen minds working in creative harmony - on the editorial board which works in parallel with the community council - the result can be mind-blowing. In our case we find that it provides an excellent way of setting up the initial frameworks for such projects; the part which usually causes the worst writers' blocks. Anyway, no matter what anyone else thinks, we don't just tolerate it we find it great fun.

The example I am going to follow - in order to bring some life to the descriptions of the process itself - is that of the threat posed by the possible re-emergence of the political parties. In other words, those groups who would ask us to sign over all our democratic voting rights to them on mass - so that they, rather than us, can decide our future! It is, of course, unfair to constantly refer to these parties, as do some commentators, in the same breath as the Fascists and Communists who killed so many millions of people in the twentieth century. But the conservatives or liberals or radicals or socialists, of that century, were cast in much the same mould; though they possibly killed fewer people and may be seen by some to have had a valuable role as a counter to the real ideological monsters. The question we were exploring was whether, if they were brought back, they might have any equivalent role in the third millennium. It is easy enough to shrug your shoulders and say 'no way, they have passed their sell-by date!' But there are some very vocal, and some other quite subversive, minorities who are advocating such a return, to 'the good old days' as they put it. We have, regrettably, forgotten how such minorities were, in the twentieth century, able to subvert power from the mass of the population.

Anyway, the debate with other members of the community was an intensive one; and, as such, an especially enjoyable one. It was not just about artistic values, or even market opportunities, which pre-occupied many of our other debates. Once we had highlighted the dilemma, most people became involved - some passionately so. It might, after all, pose a threat to each and every one of us. At the same time it held particular resonances for us, not least in terms of how we ourselves ran our own community. So, the meetings often degenerated into mainstream council meetings rather than resource allocation boards. But that was no bad thing, since it often threw new - very practical - light on the subject to hand. The downside was just how long it all took. The opening debate, by itself, lasted more than a year! Even though it gave a considerable degree of legitimacy to the opening framework, this might have been a high price to pay if - as we suspected -these minorities were already on the move.

The next bit of the process is exactly the opposite; the loneliness of the long distance author! First, the leg-work, the most tedious for an author - but you have to do your research, to find out all you can on the subject. I begrudge the other artists the fact that they can miss this stage, though they then may spend weeks getting a single line right. It's a paradox, though, for when I started out I thought it would be the best part. I loved reading, learning ever more about new subjects; and I thought that doing this every day as part of my work would be heaven. It is still true that, when you find a piece of material which sparkles like gold amongst the rest of the dross, it can feel almost like heaven - as you savour it, knowing that your audience will feel the same. But that rare moment really is buried in a whole mountain of dross, and to find it you have to spend months digging! It's a pity that you never know under which stone, or worse, you will find that sparkling gold. But you carry on, mainly out of a sense of duty to your audience, spending endless hours of terrible boredom sorting through the great mess of worthless trivia so that they don't have to. It's something of a sacred trust which I, we, feel we cannot betray. So you steadily fill up your filing cabinet, well actually a few gigabytes of space on disk in our shared computer centre.

Due to the overlong discussions in the resources board, we had this stage well under way - indeed nearly completed - by the time we got the go ahead. The initial challenge was the literally millions of hours available on the twentieth century - much of which revolved around this form of politics. But, in any case, using those stereotyped images - not least those of Fascists marching through burning towns - would be too glib. It would add nothing to the audience's understanding of the more subtle problems posed by the rather different political parties of our own time. It wasn't even enough to illustrate the effects of almost all these parties had on the under-classes of their time, creating conditions for them in the US ghettos which - in retrospect - we find appalling. The problems was that all the nations at that time experienced similar conditions; for instance, the armies of unemployed in Western Europe and the drastic reductions in life expectancy in Russia. In any case, in terms of the story we were trying to report, none of them really generated memorable images. Indeed, the few images which were memorable ultimately led nowhere, they merely distracted from the story.

The next problem was the paucity of comparable modern material. Most of us saw the political past as a bad dream, which we had put behind us. We didn't even want to talk about it. We deliberately chose to ignore the old political parties; something that had almost fatally damaged them - but, our new evidence suggested, only made the more extreme elements that had then taken over all the more determined to regain power, by whatever means. What our generation had forgotten, in choosing to focus on the arguments the single issue groups put forward, as part of the national debate on each of these issues, was that previously the political parties had just one goal; power at any price! That power, when they garnered it, was shared out amongst their friends and collaborators, which left little for the rest of us. But that single-minded concentration on achieving power made them a force to be reckoned with. No matter how much their personal involvement in an issue clouded their own judgement, the single issue groups engaged in a national debate which brought in the whole of society. Their essence was, and still is, openness. By contrast, the political parties were closed societies, working only for their patrons - a very narrow sector of society.

We found that, though much had been written on the politics of the previous century, there had been little recently; and what there was had been largely confined to the academic journals. Even I find these almost unintelligible, and our general audience wouldn't understand a word of what they wrote! So we had to use more direct means. Thus, as a next move, we flattered our way into the archives of the opinion pollsters. There we found a gold mine of statistical evidence about the progress of the new political parties. The pollsters were happy to help, because the parties would not trust them enough to buy data from them - which offended their sense of self-importance. As a result, it was easy to persuade them that they might as well get some useful PR from helping us.

A more dangerous move we had to make was infiltrating the political parties themselves. It was also unwelcome, for it took us away from our beloved community for extended periods. But, weighed down by hidden cameras, we attended rally after rally, and were eventually able to build up a suitable video dossier on these new revolutionaries. It wasn't easy, however, for they had long ago learned to be circumspect. The days when they took airtime for commercials to tell everyone what they thought were but a dim memory; now the last thing they wanted was for their target audience to understand their motivations. But, bit by bit, we got the comments we wanted; usually as a result of unexpected departures from the script or surprisingly honest answers to questions from the audience. In many respects the compilation was grossly unfair, if you looked at it in the totality of all the meetings we attended, but we believed it reflected the underlying facts we had unearthed from our other research. Individually these were not monsters, indeed we very much liked most of those we met, but somehow their creation, the party, turned them into a collective monster when they acted together. In any case, our compilation was definitive and, more important, should draw large audiences.

So, on you go - to cut the programme itself. But, needless to say, it is never quite as easy as that; otherwise the hordes of amateurs who fancy themselves investigative journalists would be hogging the ratings. All too often the framework you are working to turns out to be wrong, so it's back to the editorial board; who all look to you to solve the problem yourself - for now only you have the many hours of experience, and all they can offer is moral support. How exactly do you, in producing say an artistic critique, compare a Da Vinci with a Turner, or a Mondrian with a Pollock, and produce a programme which hangs together as a whole? So is back to your lonely studio, albeit with the blessing of your colleagues which is what you were really seeking, to bring all those impossibly diverse strands together into a meaningful whole. Mind you, the feeling when you finally realise you have achieved the impossible, and put the whole package together, and the editorial board agrees, is magical!

In the case of our party exposé, we were in fact lucky. The compilation of speeches clearly offered the main backbone, to which the interactive modules - which were so necessary to attract large audiences these days - could be linked. As a result, we thought it could be a nicely coherent package, something that was usually difficult to achieve where you were allowing for interactivity. It should also still remain powerful in impact, again difficult to achieve when you relinquished control to interactivity. I began to feel almost guilty about the way we were treating the 'heroes' of our programme - for they alone had no right to answer back - but, as any journalist will tell you, even now we are constrained by the various ethics laws, the story comes first!

Then it's back to editing all the material which has so far not been rejected. It may sound as if there couldn't be much left, but there is nearly always three or four times as much as can be fitted in - even when all the branches needed to support the interactive excursions are allowed for. I have rather simplistically suggested that our standard output was a half-hour package, but the additional material needed to cover the interactivity typically pushes it up to two hours or more. It is only the length of time taken by the average viewer that is used to denote the 'standard time' which the net distributors work to. Clearly, though, as the individual viewers use the interactive links to in effect create their own programme, the actual run time may vary from fifteen minutes to an hour or more. Anyway, back to the editing proper. You might typically start with five or six hours of material, none of which - at that stage - could you conceive of ending up on the editing room floor; or, if you put the language from a previous era behind you, disappearing into an electronic limbo.

As I have already indicated, editing down the twentieth century material was a nightmare. On the other hand, as it was now only peripheral to the main story, I solved the problem by almost ignoring it - hiding most of it beneath the opening titles just to create a suitable flavour for what was to follow - and being almost arbitrary in my selection. The body of the programme was concerned only with the here and now. As there was much less material for this, it made my life much easier. Indeed - allowing for the need to branch - we had almost edited in the camera as we went along.

Even so, there is always the need to add perhaps an hour or so of talking heads. That is, paradoxically, often the easiest part. The targets nearly always have vidcoms up to professional standard; which means we can interview them across the wire. The few 'amateurs' are more of a problem, but we can enhance even their images to near professional standard. The worst problem is usually the lighting rigs they have. You don't notice the lighting on your vidwall image, but that's because we put so much effort into artificially making it look natural! Amateurs often just have normal room lighting. I have lost count of the number of times I have had them holding a table lamp, or even a torch, as a fill-in to reduce the shadows cast by their room lights. Otherwise they can look like something out of the curse of the mummy! In addition, the 'professionals' are used to regularly giving interviews, whereas the number or retakes with amateurs is legendary and - as they often get worse with each retake - I reckon to allow at least twice as many takes overall for them. I once spent two hours just getting one twenty second sound-bite! But, despite all the aggro, this part is usually great fun. Over the year you acquire a number of favourites, I have some who will comment on almost anything - and will usually make sense on the subject in hand. One of my very favourite interviewees actually asks me in advance what I want him to say, and how I want it said - even to including the spontaneous responses. The real professionals will occasionally do as far as to appear to fluff an answer, simply to make it seem more spontaneous - and hence more authoritative.

This part should have been particularly easy for our party video. In fact, we really didn't need any talking heads; the speeches of the participants said it all. Yet, such was the strength of the standard format expected by the industry, we felt we still had to include a few. In the event, it proved well nigh impossible. The many issue-pundits, even those who we had used before, simply wouldn't play ball. They either knew nothing about the subject and weren't willing to show their ignorance, though that didn't normally cause them to hold back. Or they knew just enough to realise how explosive the material might be, and they didn't want to risk their contacts across the issue scene by getting too controversial. We had never expected much from the leaders of the issue groups themselves, and as predicted we did just get the usual anodyne comments about our 'great democracy' where everyone should be 'free to speak their mind'. At the other extreme, the few academics who were prepared to speak their mind were almost totally incoherent. As a result it took us far more hours than we had budgeted to get even the bare minimum of sound-bites out of this part of our material - often having to take them totally out of context to match the needs of the programme.

The most fun of all comes, though, in putting the whole thing to bed. It satisfies the artist in me, and I suspect that of my colleagues too. This is when I wear my VR helmet and glove, for hour after hour; assembling wondrous jigsaws, and then destroying them again. Balancing one scene against another, especially when the viewer may have a choice of routes through them, and inserting real meaning into the story-line which is building, is a true act of creativity. I sometimes feel the ghost of Jackson Pollock standing at my shoulder as I do this, dribbling a few interviews here, splashing a few location takes there, and melding them all together with a judicious sprinkling of establishing shots. The end result, familiar to all vid-producers, is the cutting script; which will be handed over to our in-house specialist who finally lays in the correct transitions and special effects - as well as balancing all the various sound tracks. Of course, our packages are usually modular, where the end result needs to be interactive, and that demands more discipline to handle the resulting complexity. Indeed, that nicely leads me to the next stage, building the program that drives the interactivity. We use complex software packages for this, but underneath all of these you are still left with your own desperate attempts to think of all the possible combinations of paths an audience might want to take. It is not easy, you have no idea how perverse some people can be.

Thankfully, after the unexpected delays of the previous stage, the programme structure of our party material proved much simpler to handle than I had allowed for - it clearly revolved around just the few big issues - so we were able to pull back closer to schedule. We ended up with the basic question being 'What is democracy?' We had addressed this very topic in a previous programme . It was one of the topic areas where we had special expertise - so the work was already half done and, as the elements here were even more limited in scope - though no less powerful for that, we moved ahead very quickly.

At the same time as programming the interactivity, which can really make your head hurt, I usually work on the design elements - almost as a soothing antidote. I love participating in this aspect of the work, but I well know the limits of my artistic skills. So I use my neighbours; Jean for the title graphics, Jon for the diagrams, Ted for ordinary graphics, Alice for the stills - now usually pulled off the net but we still have an ancient rostrum camera in the factory - and Jane for the simple animations. The more complex animations, which we rarely use since they are very expensive, are always let out to an independent outfit in LA.

The graphics for the party package turned out to derive from those so often used to support election programmes. They might have seemed hackneyed, but they nicely conveyed the feel of authority and carefully argued comments; and they were cheap!

Finally, it all comes together. I write the voice-over links, which we then record as a group, and enter the computerised text links. After just a few months, or more likely a couple of years, the package finally sees the light of day; and our audience, if we get one, probably think we tossed it off on a wet Sunday afternoon! We then sit, biting our nails, for a further few weeks, seeing how many hits we get on the various sites; hoping, above all, that one of the top web jockeys picks it up - since that pushes up hits by an order of magnitude - but they rarely take any notice of serious documentaries.

At the end of the day we, on average, just about cover our costs. We haven't yet made a fortune; though we live in hope. We believe, however, that we help make the world a better place, though we have no way of knowing how well we succeed in this ambition. Indeed, governments tend to think of groups such as our own as subversives who damage society. But, if we didn't have that belief in our mission our community would not exist and our lives, if not yours, would be that much poorer.

So what happened to the party package we have been following? When I left the group it was still early days yet, too early to be definitive, our packages have a lifetime of years rather than the hours of an entertainment programme. Even so, our tracking showed that it was already performing much better than any of our previous efforts. The hits on the sites were literally ten times as good, for that time in its life, and that was before a few of the top ten jockeys took it up. So the community might well have made some money at last, and maybe exerted some influence on public opinion.

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