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In his wonderfully deranged book Never Split The Difference, hostage negotiator Chris Voss talks about his experience working as a counsellor on a crisis hotline. One of his first conversations is with a regular caller called Daryl, who is scared of going outside and being attacked by strangers.
‘[Daryl] launched into his shtick about how he was going to lose his house and with it his will to live if he couldn’t work.
“Seriously, when was the last time someone tried to hurt you on the streets?” I asked.
“Well, I mean, it’s been a long time,” Daryl said.
“Like …?”
“I can’t really remember a date, Chris. Maybe a year, I guess.”
“So it’s safe to say that the outside world hasn’t been too hard on you, right?”
“Yes,” Daryl said. “I suppose so.”
We went back and forth like this for a while, as I made him admit that most of us had little to fear in the world. […] It was all flowing, and our rapport was great. I even got Daryl to laugh a few times. By the time I was done with him, he couldn’t give me one reason not to step outside.
“Thank you, Chris,” Daryl said just before he hung up. “Thanks for doing such a great job.”
After the conversation, Voss is delighted with himself - he thinks, ‘how often do you get a compliment like that from a man in pain?’ - until his boss summons him into the office and tells him that this was one of the worst calls he’s ever heard.
Voss’ boss explains that it’s a big warning sign if a client congratulates the counsellor. “They don’t need to be congratulating you. That tells me you did too much. If he thinks you did it, how is he going to help himself?”
The goal of a counselling session, Voss’ boss outlines, is that the client needs to own the conversation. Rather than being persuaded into a set of conclusions, the client should feel that they came to these conclusions themselves. The counsellor should not be the focus - rather, they should be the medium for the client’s own realisations.
Voss goes on to outline how this approach translates to hostage negotiations and business deals, but I’m thinking about it in relation to the craft of sharing science content through art.
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There are many ways that science shows up in art. One version is pure science communication or science journalism. In a TV documentary about physics, for example, the presenter might break down the science of gravity using metaphors, showing footage of a bowling ball on a sagging mattress to illustrate how mass distorts gravity. The goal here is to communicate the ideas in the clearest possible terms. For the show to be successful, the audience must understand what you’re communicating.
Another version is the science in a TV cop drama. In a show like Law and Order, the science is a sort of sideshow. The forensics officer explains how the victim died using technical jargon, but there’s no need for the audience to understand it. The function of the science is to lend the plot some legitimacy, and the show wouldn’t be improved if it spent ten minutes spelling out the underlying biochemistry behind the forensics tests.
In the art I’m interested in, science is the starting point, but the goal is to go beyond pure science journalism. My favourite kind of art transforms science concepts into stories, images and characters. It weaves together research with narrative, it imbues the science with living texture. It doesn’t just make the science clear, it makes it meaningful.
But for artists working with science, there are risks. The biggest danger is that you might make something clever.
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When you’re working creatively with scientists or research, the temptation is to be smart. You want to do justice to these ideas, you want to express them in an insightful and unique way. Especially if you’re working with the researchers themselves, it’s easy to feel that you have to match the complexity of the ideas with an equally complex artistic expression.
But that’s a mistake. In fact, the more complex the ideas you’re working with, the simpler your expression of those ideas needs to be. If you ever hear the audience say of your work, ‘Wow, that was clever,’ then you’ve fucked up. You’ve produced a work of technical virtuosity and in doing so, you’ve made your audience feel stupid.
Playwright Lucy Prebble talks about being called ‘clever’: ‘So much of my work has been referred to with that word, and it’s actually not a very praising word. It’s either ‘clever-clever’, where you’re dismissive of somebody being tricksy, or ‘clever clogs’, which is someone showing off… It’s not a word that we use much in praise, and I was always very aware that it was attached to my work. I feel like there’s more to me than that, or at least I wanted there to be, and so I started to try to avoid it.’
I’ve had the experience of being called ‘intelligent’ or ‘clever’ by audiences and reviewers, and it never feels good. What it means is, ‘I didn’t understand it’, or perhaps, ‘I didn’t care enough to try to understand it’.
As Rebecca Giggs puts it, ‘When audiences reach for the word “clever” to evaluate a performance they’re frequently expressing the conclusion that they bounced off the surface of it. While they took the work to be meaningful, they didn’t grasp the meaning. They didn’t feel they were the target audience. And maybe a part of that is that the work was too deterministic: it told them how to think and did the thinking for them, rather than being a forum in which to think.’
Or as Chris Voss’ boss argues, you want your work to be the medium for the audiences’ conclusions, rather than giving them the conclusions directly.
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In the best case scenario, you want an audience to engage with an idea that sits on the boundary of the familiar and the new. You want to show them something strange in terms that they already recognise, or give them a novel way of looking at something they already know.
I think when it’s done well, this kind of art enriches an audience more than a work of science journalism can.
Giving people new language to describe things that they already recognise is powerful. Helping them make connections between familiar and unfamiliar things is a gift. And when an audience thinks that they’re smarter than you, that’s something to be grateful for.
You don’t want the audience to think you’re a genius. You want the audience to feel that they’re a genius.
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But of course, this is easier said than done. The truth is, it’s punishingly hard to be simple.
As Prebble says: ‘Now when I write, I think really hard: ‘What would this be if it wasn’t clever?’
Finding the simplest possible language to express a science concept is a gruelling process. Sanding down the unnecessary words until you’re left with something clean and clear is exhausting.
And for artists, getting the language right is only half the job. Even more challenging is the effort to animate these science concepts in non-verbal ways. We’re not just journalists - our job is to to manifest ideas through narrative, character, images and sound. If you get it right, you can almost avoid text altogether. The ideas find their expression in forms more vivid and lasting than language.
For me, this is perhaps the most exhausting part of the job - the endless effort to simplify without over-simplifying. But there’s another side to it, too. Part of understanding a concept is being able to express it in different ways.
By being forced to re-imagine and reformulate a concept over and over, using different words and different mediums, our understanding of that concept becomes richer and deeper. Every time we describe it anew, we learn something new. By thinking through these ideas over and over, we scrub away the surface patina and get closer to the truth.
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NEWS AND PROJECTS
Shooting Stars
This was the big one. Over seven and a half hours on one Saturday in May, the Shooting Stars project went live in Manila - we filmed four episodes of this show back-to-back in front of a live audience.
This epic and unhinged unreality TV show talent contest is one of my favourite things that I’ve ever been involved with. You can soak it up the videos of the episodes below.
Scenes from the Climate Era
I was delighted to get to attend the Esplanade Singapore’s production of Scenes from the Climate Era this July in Singapore - a fantastic piece of work by director Ellison Tan and her team.
I am equally excited to share the link for the upcoming production of Climate Era by the Gate Theatre in London. If you’re around London between 23 Sep - 25 Oct, please come along!
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RECOMMENDATIONS
Books
I spent a lot of June and July at an artist residency in the US reading a flurry good books on climate and the environment. Some highlights:
Ma Tianjie’s In Search of Green China was the concise and thoughtful summary of three decades of Chinese climate policy that I needed - a great text in its own right, and sent me spinning off in a hundred different directions following various ideas down rabbitholes.
Ferris Jabr’s Becoming Earth was a fantastic primer on earth system science, beautifully illustrated through case studies and on-the-ground journalism.
Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown was an unsurprisingly bleak read on the history and future of the concept of net zero and ‘overshoot’. I quibbled a little with some of the history, but their assessment of the current state of the conflict with fossil fuel companies is bracing and sharp.
James Bradley’s Deep Water is possibly the best book I’ve read so far this year - a stunning, evocative exploration of ocean science and history. He starts with the history of water itself, and the emergence of the first oceans, and then follows fascinating threads in all directions. Worth it for the chapter on dolphin communication alone. Absolutely gorgeous and highly recommended.
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Music
I was lucky to catch two exceptional and very different gigs at Cafe Oto this last month:
Senegalese percussion ensemble Ndagga Rhythm Force touring their brilliant Khadim EP, the best kind of fevered sweaty dance party.
And my dearly beloved drone psych lifers Jackie-O Motherfucker doing a gorgeous drifting set, including this highlight:
Both took me right out of my head and somewhere else entirely, in the way we all hope for.
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As ever, you can get more background on my practice in my New Rules for Modelling series, or you can check out my website. And if you have any questions or offers that might make my life more interesting, feel free to get in touch.
Peace!