6:05 pm - Mon, Nov 28, 2011

1 note

trying to explain things:

I ended up sketching out some more general notions of the musical while trying to explain it my brother max on facebook chat. They maybe a little vague and unclear, but my attempts to explain it produced a relatively accurate overview of some of the main narrative devices, movements, and elements. It started with me showing him an advertising company called HUGE which was a good reference to try and explain and construct an entity in the musical which i call “the agency”, from which i ended up going through a sketch of concepts.

http://www.hugeinc.com/news/shipped/former-borders-employees-hit-the-streets-to-promote-huge-ceos-new-book

doesnt that have such a tragic feeling to it?

trying to make that into part of the musical

the ex-employees hawking his book

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HUGE_(digital_agency)

that company is awesome

“HUGE employs around 300 people. Most employees work in the company’s DUMBO headquarters. Staff work across seven main disciplines, including strategy, analytics, research, visual and interactive design, technology, interactive marketing, and social engagement. The company also operates an audience monetization division. HUGE’s designers are evenly divided between graphic designers and interaction designers who collaborate with each other while also working with others in the company from other disciplines.” WTF

(note from Max’s response)

jesus this really is the worst: “to highlight the consequences of not taking the Internet seriously for companies and their employees” its like shaming the border employees feels medieval. 

i dunno how much u remember of my scattered explanations of the musical but HUGE is definitely a reference point for the sort of ominous arch-agency which I want at the center of the musical…somewhere between the CIA and HUGE, a dream like coalescence of research/intelligence and communication/narration to give para-national interests a presence and sort of embodiment “on the ground”. I mean, just look at the names of their divisions: “….strategy, analytics, research, visual and interactive design, technology, interactive marketing, and social engagement. The company also operates an audience monetization division.” This agency, for which one of the three protagonists works…is one of the centerpieces of the musical.

 

The Congress, which is a vaguely constituted group of old, decaying personalities who think themselves as the holders of order and power, hires the agency often to fulfill its vague and absurdly self-important needs. The whole joke is that the agency doesn’t really “do” anything, but then again neither does the congress, whose member’s are lost in their own senile confusion about what it is they actually “do”.

Im developing a language for both the agency and the congress that would allow for this sort of illusion of action through hyperbolic, humorously self-important dialogue.

For the congress: Imagine a brazil/Gilliam-esq self-proclaimed total projection of the personality or psyche of modernity, with its different compartments of self represented by different mythic/dreamlike figures, but the psyche they form has Alzheimer’s and is constantly at odds with its different elements as they bicker and argue over a proper history and true their reason and purpose. the congress speaks in the most abstract and vacant ethical arguments philosophical cliches of modernity-objectivism, liberalism, democracy, capitalism-they seek to justify or sustain the various precepts born by the social contract and use them to further their interest for greater control and order. The four members of the congress hold certain ideological stakes. (One is a captain of industry, production, and materialism. One is the chief justice of law, land, and debt. One has faith, pacifism, and fear. one has democracy, will, and government) but they are lost in their own bitter feuds and debates, each fighting with one another over who controls and lays claim to what spheres of their imagined power. something bad is happening “IRL”, and the congress is worried. it could be the housing crash, or loss of western power to china and japan.

the agencies language is that of the social-sciences, as they have been abstracted by the world of corporate motivational speech. the agency has three directors: Creative, Information, and Communication. They use the most abstracted terms of motivational psychology and corporate PR to discuss their various projects and accounts, it is all very west-coast zen. They are ordered by the congress to do a full investigation into the current crisis. The middle eastern revolution that are upsetting oil control, the housing and debt crisis that is undoing the balance of 1st world consumption economies, the growing power of supposedly 3rd world economies (india, china, brazil). All of these may be the root of the crisis. The agency realizes during its investigation that the real crisis, the real change in occurrence is the dissolution of the congress. Ebay, paypal, google, facebook and their leaders hold the new technologies which are adapted for the necessities of control and power in the “global village”, environmentally friendly and anti-materialist, socially motivated, globally connected . The agency makes a play to betray the congress and align themselves with the new powers, which i am tentatively calling “the network” only to realize that they the selves are simply a technological apparatus created by the congress, and their own existence is futile ill write more later but tell me if this makes sense. the second and third acts are only hinted at above, the first act is the congress, its crisis, and the agency’s investigation. but read it all openly, its not set in stone so it may seem a little too abstract. its supposed to feel like the ultimate conspiracy theory/wet-dream, a hallucinatory dream/nightmare which forms a satire of the schizophrenic split, the contradiction at the core of liberal/bourgeois psychology and ethics—-the conspiracy that the myth of a true individual is exactly that, a myth, and that there must be some shadowy body truly directing all of this. but no one is in control, technology is simply the ultimate weapon to vie for it. and as the world burns to ground from the physical police state, the pollution of mass production, and impossibility of global relations, new facilitators arise with the technoglies to overcome the grief from there funerals