Update Fellows September 2016
"As part of my proposed endeavor to directly translate the research into ‘exhibitable’ materials, I have illustrated my way through Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Owen Hatherley’s The Chaplin Machine, drawing out critical details, passages and processes. I have also been watching documentaries on the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the century, and gaining a better understanding of how the Taylorist-dominated American industrial machine became so alluring to the Soviets, who sought (and ultimately failed) to achieve the same kind of output and efficiency while still retaining some measure of worker dignity.
Via Hatherley’s book I have dipped back into Walter Benjamin’s writings on ‘the eccentric’ and the eccentric vein in early Soviet avant-garde theatre and cinema. The Eccentrics were heavily influenced by the slapstick comedies and Disney animations of the period, and were effectively attempting to manufacture the new satire for a new social and political system, what Trotsky had brilliantly termed ‘the new stupidity’. This has led me to contemplate, as a conceptual starting point, a satirical adaptation of The Jungle as if produced by Eccentrics, one which turns the stockyards into a grotesque carnival, replete with sideshows, rides, and musical and dance reviews."