WRITTEN ON April 29th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Pertinent Art
Pff. I’ve struggled for years trying to express what happens when government goes computerised, and I’m frustrated. It doesnt feel as if we’re winning the battle to create cheap online services based on a foundation of trust. We’re not even winning the battle to have a good conversation about it so we start with the right quality of understanding of what we’re letting ourselves in for.
When I spoke this week at my x-zillionth e-government event I even bored myself. We’ve still got to get this conversation going. Now as I’m prepare for the next (Sydney 10 May) I’m trying to take stock of a different dimension:
How much artistic expression there is of this dilemna?
I mean have painters, sculptors, filmmakers and musicians expressed how we retain humanity, dignity and common sense in the face of machines operating mechanical rules-based discrimination? Surely as artists express these deeper realities people will star to see it differently, and eventually – after some early retirements and die-offs – we’ll have Perm Secs and a Cabinet that gets it too.
We’ve touched on some examples in the past on Ideal Gov-
The new BBC Dr Who series described war and ID cards better than anything else on TV
Banksy shows how intrusive bureaucracy is
Splendid stuff by Claire at Ecletech especially Swizz of the Cards and Notional Identity
and going back in time –
Yes Minister was brilliant on FoI, hospitals, ID cards, smart bombs and Big Brother databases
Orwell gave us a whole paradigm and vocabulary
Kafka is if anything even more relevant
I feel lost in the Kafkaesque corridors of government IT world and a bit of a nitwit about culture – what else is out there?
3 Responses to “How much artistic expression is there of our condition?”
The best critique of Iraq and its historical context was the February 2003 Rory Bremner satire: “Between Iraq and a Hard Place.”
Sadly, too few MP watched or understood it.
There’s a track on the new Pet Shop Boys album about ID cards. I’m not aware of another mainstream music artist covering this kind of topic.
http://petshopboys.co.uk/
“We’re moving to a situation
where your lives are simply information”
Certainly there is a long history of works about people who retain their humanity in the face of a mechan*ist* regime — eg, the many stories, true and fictional, about people in the Holocuast. Also 1984, Huxley’s Um the name escapes me [Brave New world? - WH]. similar time period, babies born from testtubes IIRC. Also Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, which no one but me seems to have read now, in which people wear bracelets and must pass scanners any where they want to go, and are fed drugs to keep them complacentand calm.
YOu want to watch The Prisoner, which encapsulated almost all of the issues we talk about every day.
But really — and I’m going to blog this response myself, since I haven’t thought about this in quite this way before — what they are promising us is a utopian society in which everything works. And there is a *long* history of Utopian fiction (going back to the Greeks at least, I think), in which the utopia always proves to be a dystopia. Of course you see this move right into today’s sf.
You might also want to take a look at Geoff Ryman’s book The Child Garden. I don’t remember it very well, but I do remember that a key element of it was using viruses to educate people.
I have long wondered why folk singers haven’t taken up Internet freedoms as a cause,and you’ve given me some interesting thoughts about how they might.
Intel, btw, used to sponsor artists to explore the digital age.
wg