{"id":11080,"date":"2020-05-30T06:45:40","date_gmt":"2020-05-30T06:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=11080"},"modified":"2026-04-18T19:34:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T19:34:31","slug":"were-all-islanders-in-a-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2020\/05\/were-all-islanders-in-a-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re all islanders in a pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Flashback. One sultry Saturday night in the south of France last year I caught a glimpse of the near future hurtling towards us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn’t know it then, of course.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Before going on holiday last September \u2013 from Edinburgh to Montpellier and back by alluringly long train journeys \u2013 I had been part of a team researching attitudes to digital technology among creative folk in remote parts of Scotland\u2019s wildly beautiful but often digitally challenged west coast. Could live streaming, for example, help them reach a wider audience?<\/p>\n

Some of the people I spoke to would soon be participating in a bold, interactive live event to be streamed from Oban. One item on the programme promised to be delightfully unpredictable. \u2018Jeopardy is inbuilt\u2019 musician, producer, sound sculptor, and all-round innovator Giles Perring<\/span><\/a> had told me with what sounded like maverick mischief.<\/p>\n

So, there I was crammed into a tight corner of a crowded tram speeding through downtown Montpellier, trying to tune into his \u2018garage gig\u2019 some 2,000 km away.<\/p>\n

And, yes! There it is on my battered old iPhone screen. Giles Perring<\/span> in his studio overlooking the Sound of Jura. He\u2019s streaming an extraordinary collaborative performance to a live audience packed into St John\u2019s Cathedral in Oban. With the help of many more mobiles, the event known as The Exchange<\/span><\/a>, is connecting and broadcasting the collective input of ten individual musicians phoning in from ten different distant places \u2013 from Stavanger to Rhode Island, Dublin to Dunoon, London to Lyth \u2013 in real time. And no breaks in transmission.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018Amazing\u2019 is the word that bounces from the mainland at the end of the show.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018All thanks to the good old phone,\u2019 says Giles.<\/span><\/p>\n

httpss:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=oWEP7S5sxWE&feature=youtu.be<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Simpler than Zoom<\/b><\/h2>\n

Fast forward a few months to another world and time. In retrospect it all seems eerily prophetic. Turns out The Exchange was part of a peculiarly prescient experimental project. The inaugural showcase<\/span><\/a><\/span> for Argyll’s Art and Culture organisation CHARTS<\/span><\/a> \u2013 live-streamed on 14 September 2019 \u2013 set out to explore and demonstrate how digital technology might open up a sustainable living for creative enterprise in remote parts of the west coast highlands and islands.<\/p>\n

Prophetic was the word used by a journalist who contacted Giles recently. Those faces framed in small screens, their distant voices interconnecting in the ether. Yet that\u2019s not really it.<\/span> Giles has been working on different versions of The Exchange for 18 years since its first manifestation in an upstairs room in\u00a0 <\/span>a London pub. What interests him is something simpler, but more profound than a Zoom event.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really about connection,\u201d he says, \u201cHow the telephone maintains intimate contact, person to person. It\u2019s me connecting with people I know, using the telephone to establish a social engagement that is musical.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I first \u2018met\u2019 Giles by mobile phone last August when I was gathering case studies in collaboration with Inner Ear UK<\/span><\/a> for the CHARTS event. That led to fascinating conversations with truly enterprising people; adventurers in visual art, community cinema,<\/span> music. Responses raised stimulating questions about the meaning of culture, collaboration \u2013 and connectivity, or lack of it. \u00a0 <\/span>They had mixed feelings about the potential for digital developments in places where upload and download speeds can be painfully slow.<\/p>\n

Giles was disarmingly frank. <\/span>Live streaming held no real interest for the musician who runs a croft as well as a recording studio.\u00a0 <\/span>He moved 14 years ago to Jura from London with his wife and two of their four children when the older two had started higher education, ‘It was our chance to leapt.” Since then he had felt no need to \u2018consume culture\u2019. \u00a0 <\/span>Theatre, concerts, art exhibitions\u2026 they had become \u2018just another industry, financial transactions\u2019.<\/p>\n

But he did see great value in online social connection, especially for young people, in isolated communities. And weekly Tuesday night music gatherings in his house were a real-life social activity, \u2018nothing bought or sold\u2019 \u2013 people go back down the road \u2018singing new songs\u2019.<\/p>\n

Living on the edge<\/b><\/h2>\n

One comment in particular stuck in my mind. <\/span>Living on an island is a challenge, Giles said. \u2018It makes demands of you. But you learn you can survive.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

And he had been up for taking his own very personal challenge to the CHARTS event in Oban. \u00a0 <\/span>He\u2019d always been attracted by the unpredictability of late night phone-in, the gleeful happenstance of the radio ham. \u2018<\/b>Maybe we will<\/i> pull this off, \u2018 he said last August,\u00a0 <\/span>\u2018Audiences want some sense of authenticity. They will be seeing something that could go totally wrong. That\u2019s what excites me.\u2019<\/p>\n

Tuning in now (from my Edinburgh inner city island), the recently uploaded YouTube video<\/a> hangs together beautifully. \u00a0 <\/span>There were some hairy moments on the night \u2013 not least the need for split second timing in making connections with contributing artists standing by their phones.\u00a0 <\/span>Something the speakers on the stage in Oban seemed in danger of forgetting. \u201cI got a bit sweary,\u2019 says Giles.<\/span><\/p>\n

But some of the inbuilt jeopardy was reduced. For the first time, The Exchange had tech support. Edinburgh-based video producer Pete Linnemann travelled from the mainland to assist the event, and ended up spending three days on the island which he describes as an unforgettable experience, \u2018a truly fantastic trip.\u2019\u00a0 <\/span>Tech challenges sparked enthusiastic geek talk as video stream editor and creative director assessed the risks. In the end, Pete explains, \u2018We dispensed with Giles\u2019 woeful internet connection but used my iPhone as a hotspot to grab a decent and minimally contended 4G connection from the mainland. And that provided sufficient upload speeds with enough to spare that it wasn’t too nail-biting.\u201d<\/p>\n

As is the way of island life, Pete met someone, a visiting GP who knew his dad, a GP on Mull, and ended up at a 90th<\/sup> birthday party in the village hall.<\/p>\n

Coincidental connection, virtual and real life experience: that’s all part of The Exchange and the unique intimacy of island life. The live event, streamed to Oban via Pete\u2019s hotspot, was also enjoyed at close quarters by a local audience, the Tuesday night singing crew, over a drink of wine in the studio.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Real rebels do physics<\/b><\/h2>\n

So how is island life now?\u00a0 <\/span>All things considered, Giles says when we speak in early May,\u00a0lockdown on Jura (population around 200) has not been too challenging. \u2018We\u2019ve got the island to ourselves, the weather has been beautiful and everyone is very well behaved.\u2019\u00a0 <\/span>In fact, it would have felt \u2018pretty wonderful\u2019 apart from personal anxiety for his adult children working and living in places on the mainland where \u2018They are fine, but not not at risk.\u2019<\/p>\n

Lockdown has also exposed the imbalances of the cultural economy,<\/span> the commercial exploitation of creative expression in general. With rueful self-examination he says he often feels he is the only one of his family not doing anything useful (notwithstanding his lockdown labour cultivating 80 square metres under glass, and designing an irrigation system for raised beds to grow crops for sale).\u00a0 <\/span>His admiration is for young people who defied cultural trends to become nurses and doctors, anaesthetists, architects..<\/span>.\u00a0 <\/span>\u2018They are the real rebels today.\u2019 Prevailing culture has tended to disparage that kind of commitment, \u2018They are the ones who have persevered, against the odds \u2013 sod media studies, I am going to do physics!\u2019<\/p>\n

Even so, he also perseveres. There are other collaborative projects such as Exposure<\/span><\/a><\/span>, a work in progress with artist Andy Metcalf and another mind-blowing experiment still in the beta phase.<\/p>\n

But for now, most memorably there is the Exchange: 20 oddly dream-like minutes of hauntingly beautiful echoing sound.\u00a0 <\/span>At times, for reasons I can\u2019t put my finger on, it is deeply moving. Then, suddenly uplifting \u2013 the look of mirthful pleasure on Catriona Price\u2019s face as she stands in Lyth, near Wick, phone in hand singing into the late summer night, interweaving with Melanie Pappenheim in London. The sheer pleasure of making contact. And, it\u2019s actually working!\u00a0 <\/span>Or, as Giles described on XpoNorth<\/span><\/a> when he completed his work on the video in April, pulling together the original streamed video with movies and audio sent from all the participants calling in from all over Argyll and the world: \u2018an evocation of our solitude, and our connectedness\u2019<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Catriona Price sings \u2018Go to sleep you little baby\u2019<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Exchange 2019 features<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melanie Pappenheim<\/a> [who was situated in London], Catriona Price<\/a> [Lyth], Teitur<\/a> [Faroe Islands], Esther Swift<\/a> [Edinburgh], John Cayley<\/a> [Providence, Rhode Island], Kevin Godley<\/a> [Dublin], Lorne MacDougall<\/a> [Dunoon], Ian Stephen<\/a> [Isle of Lewis], J\u00f8rn Snorre Andersen<\/a> [Stavanger], and Kirsty Law<\/a> [Oban].<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In retrospect it seems eerily prophetic. Those faces framed in small screens, distant voices interconnecting in the ether. Yet that\u2019s not really it. What interests Giles Perring is something simpler, but more profound than a Zoom event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":11088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[102,604,270,468],"class_list":["post-11080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-community","tag-covid-19","tag-music","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18684,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11080\/revisions\/18684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}