So, I just spent two hours or so discussing my seaside sci-fi Houdini Window with Claude (AI).

Welcome to the Design-Intelligence Substack. Where we discuss the highs and lows of the creative process. From the latest in AI-assisted design to digital storytelling in ‘Houdini Window’. Audio; Elevenlabs voices Debbie Irwin and Houdini Window character Laurie Lovelace. Sound design by Studio-thinkamigo.

I haven’t touched the story in at least two months. Well, because it’s been a very busy time. Too much real life. Do you know what I mean? It’s not as if I’m lazy or anything. I’m ninety-thousand words in. So I haven’t exactly rested on my laurels for the past year or so.

It was a fruitful exchange, where I played around with some ideas for a new website. I have some visual ideas and even a bit of code knocking around that I toyed with previously.

I find that Claude is good for this kind of exercise particularly on Friday evenings. I’ve written a couple of Substack posts this way. Just reflecting on the week and going into a flow-state of ideas, and Claude adding the necessary structure because I am compelled to explain my thoughts and convert them into prompts that the Large Language Model can respond to.

Ah yes, its an LLM its not actually intelligent of course.

This week on Substack, some members have been discussing the implementation of an AI-spotting application called Pangram which sounds a bit like penguin. You know, the black and white bird that waddles around in packs in the cold, in Antarctica.

Seems a lot of folk are upset by Pangram. And I guess like many other writers (is that what I have become?), I wonder what my score will be.

Yes, score... just like being at school. Being judged, by a machine no less, trying to determine the amount of reliance I have on a machine.

Well, I’ve been reliant on machines, computers I mean, for a very long time. There can’t be many writers who don’t use a word-processor, or a grammar checker, or any of those annoying autocomplete wizards that complete the word before you’ve finished, except it’s the wrong word!

So, where does AI begin and end? Because it’s not even intelligent, and the results can be abysmal if you aren’t paying attention and absolutely focussed on the task. So what is this AI screening about? I’m bound to fail the test.

Oh yes, I’m writing this without any reference to AI but I’m guessing this comment will get flagged and shadow-banned or whatever punishment this new teacher sees fit to dole out. I thought Substack was a place for free expression not control.

Anyhow, I wont let some bossy penguin deter me. I had a good session with Claude and it helped focus my semi-autistic brain on some practical tasks I need to complete.

You see, Claude is really good at that - at creating a task list I mean, and that allows me to get on and write my story, and that is the whole point of Substack - it’s like this giant echo chamber that I can empty my thoughts into on a Friday evening when I’m chilled after working - I don’t need marking or scoring, I just need to write.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to ignore the bossy penguin and just write my mad stuff! Then next week I’m going to take some time out to record my voice clone - I suppose I’ll be penalised for doing that too.

Do I care? No!

And I’ve told the people I follow not to care either. I’m going to keep reading your stuff. And listening. And I’m going to keep on writing. But first it’s time for a nice cup of tea.

Anyway, ‘toodle-pip’ as we posh TV celebrities say.

And remember. You Make Magic Real.

Paul Fillingham
Sound design by Studio-thinkamigo

If you’re on your phone, wedged between a damp stranger and a closing door somewhere between Stratford and Stanmore on the Jubilee line. I want you to know that I’m in Sherwood Forest.

It’s about nineteen degrees under the oaks. There’s a wood pigeon somewhere to my left, a rabbit straight ahead and a dragonfly buzzing above me. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like. I tried to get a picture of the rabbit. Here it is. But you’ll have to take my word for it.

Welcome to the Design-Intelligence Substack. Where we discuss the highs and lows of the creative process. From the latest in AI-assisted design to digital storytelling in ‘Houdini Window’. Audio; Paul Fillingham and Francis Finn with Elevenlabs voices Debbie Irwin and Houdini Window character Laurie Lovelace. Sound design by Studio-thinkamigo.

I was you yesterday. Jubilee line, end to end, Stratford to Stanmore. No aircon. The hottest day in years. I’d spent the afternoon in a room - some of us, actually in the room, others on screens, huddled around pixelated Post-It notes on a digital whiteboard, mapping services of the future, end-to-end.

Very twenty-twenty-six. Very serious. Very warm.

And then the workshop ended. And I descended into a Tube-system that was designed for a climate that no longer exists.

You know the one. Somewhere in the carriage, a girl in a buggy was making her feelings about the situation absolutely clear. I had every sympathy. My earbuds were zipped deeply in my carry case. Inaccessible. I had packed them there at some point during the day with the casual confidence of a man who did not yet know what the next hour had in store for him.

So, I did what everyone does. I started to think. A big lateral think, where your mind wanders. We’ll talk about that at a future date. Anyway, I’m letting my mind wander, like the others in the carriage. Occasionally resurfacing to glance at the tube map. Such a wonderful piece of design. Based on the original map by Harry Beck. 1931. The most elegant solution to a complex information problem our capital city has ever produced, sitting quietly above the window of a sweltering carriage, doing its job perfectly while everything around it was failing.

Then back to the thinking.

I thought about the air-conditioned vehicle waiting in the car park at Stanmore. Thought about it quite a lot actually. Forty-five minutes of quite detailed thinking about it. Thirty degrees outside and a German-manufactured miracle of potential cool air, waiting in what I can only describe as a brickyard. Black bodywork, highly polished surface, hot enough to fry an egg. Just waiting.

There’s a particular kind of suffering that comes with knowing exactly where your comfort is and being unable to reach it. I’m told this is called commuting.

Eventually I reached the brickyard. The Mercedes was exactly where I left it. I touched the roof to confirm my egg theory. I was right. I got in, started the engine, felt the aircon begin its quiet German miracle and pulled onto the M1 northbound to Robin Hood County. Home. And a commute I know by heart.

I reached for a podcast. Something to decompress with. Two hours seventeen minutes of motorway thinking time on a good day. One of the underrated pleasures of a solitary drive home. More when you factor in phantom jams around Luton. They have no cause and no explanation. They simply exist, somewhere between junctions ten and eleven, as a reminder that some things resist all attempts at mapping.

The Bluetooth wouldn’t connect. This is how you actually achieve solitude in the digital age.

The garage had reset it. They serviced the car last week, reset every setting with the methodical thoroughness that you pay for then resent. Somewhere in that process they had inadvertently wiped the connection to my phone. I was driving and couldn’t fix it. The podcast stayed wherever podcasts live when nobody is listening to them. There must be millions!

So, I did what you do. I thought about getting home. I thought about cats, strangely enough. Poor cats. All that fur, I thought.

The M1 and I, go back a long way. Thirty odd years of northbound and southbound. Different cars, different decades, different job titles. In the late-eighties I was driving it as a Print Publishing specialist for the UK’s largest Apple Authorised Reseller. That got me through some interesting doors. Saatchi and Saatchi among them. The road doesn’t actually change much. But the person driving does.

Back then I had a silver photographer’s flight case. Bulletproof. The kind of case that suggests the contents are either extremely valuable or extremely dangerous. The case contained an external hard drive. Forty megabytes, enough for a single ‘Residents’ pop promo which we used to demonstrate QuickTime video. Typically though, I would hook it up to clients’ systems and watch their faces as I loaded up high resolution graphics files into Adobe Photoshop 1.0.

The beige monolith sitting on their desk like a small refrigerator, humming with quiet authority. They couldn’t believe the capacity. Forty megabytes, wow! The trade typesetters didn’t know what had hit them. Thirty years in the business, hand setting type, cutting film, running bromides - and suddenly here’s a man with a silver flight case and a beige monolith telling them the world has changed. They were like rabbits in the headlights. Which is appropriate, given where I’m driving.

Our Sales Director put it best. Old school charmer - you know the type. Anachronistic even back then, but cheeky and lovable with it. “There’s a printer on every street corner” he said. And he was right. Desktop publishing didn’t just change the industry - it liberated it. Out of the trade houses and hot metal shops and into every office, every bedroom, every corner of the economy that had anything to say and now had the means to say it.

Sound familiar?

And I think about trees. Because there are lots of them. Here I mean, in Sherwood Forest. It’s One Hundred and forty-six miles to Stratford. But it feels more like One Hundred and Forty-six million!

The Major Oak is somewhere to the north of me. I’m not standing at it - it’s a bit further into the forest than my usual walk takes me. But it’s here. Same forest. Same Robin Hood. You don’t need to stand at the thing itself to feel its weight.

The Woodland Trust, they declared it dead last week. A thousand years old. The oldest, most storied tree in England. The one that supposedly sheltered an outlaw who took from the rich and gave to the poor. Centuries old. Survived everything. Everything except this. A thousand years of English weather. Norman kings, Civil War and the Blitz.

The Luddites were active in these woods. Outlaws just like Robin Hood, who smashed knitting frames because they understood exactly what the new machinery would do to their communities. And they feared what technology in the wrong hands would cost people who had nothing but an ample supply of wild rabbits and firewood.

But in the end, it was the slow, patient, accumulating heat that killed our most famous tree. Not a storm. Not a lightning strike. Not my brother’s chainsaw.

The Major Oak survived the Great Plague and the Luddites. It didn’t survive us.

My brother’s chainsaw. Maybe I should clarify. He’s a tree surgeon you see. A man who has spent his career saving trees, living next door to the most famous tree in England, which has just died anyway. There are limits to what even a good tree surgeon can do about a thousand years of accumulated heat.

From Major Oak to Major catastrophe. The Woodland Trust who pronounced the Major Oak dead are an old client of mine as it happens. I did some training with them in Bristol once. They were good people. They later introduced me to a restaurant on the Southbank - the kind of place you’d never find, without a recommendation - where they’d filmed a segment for ‘Lost’. The American TV series. The one about people who fell out of the sky and couldn’t find their way home. I’m in Sherwood Forest thinking about a dead oak tree and a TV show about being lost, and yesterday I was on the Jubilee line unable to reach my earbuds.

After Leicester, I came up the A46. This used to be, Markie’s neck-of-the-woods. I said a few words as I passed. A greeting. Nothing morbid. She introduced me to the writer Richard Brautigan when I painted things with real brushes.

I arrived home safely. The house hadn’t melted. Small mercies. Venetian blinds and a collection of fans had been enough to keep it cool. My wife was remote working - just. The kind of just that deserves a medal but won’t get one. We agreed it would be my turn tomorrow.

Tomorrow is today. And the cat is still hot. The cat is called Neko, the Japanese word for cat. Direct and uncomplicated. Neko is jet black with green eyes and on day two of the heatwave he was doing what cats do when the temperature hits thirty-eight degrees. He was making it everyone else’s problem.

The solution we arrived at was this: an icepack - the kind that arrives with an internet delivery, presumably to keep something cold, something that had already been consumed and forgotten - jammed in front of a cheap rotary fan, aimed at a specific patch of floor that Neko had already identified as his optimal location. It worked beautifully. The physics were straightforward. The dignity negotiable. I have photographs to prove it

Coronation of the Cat-selfie King

Here’s the thing about cats. You see. In 2014, I appeared on Notts TV’s teatime programme. The six-thirty show. The kind of programme where you sit on a sofa next to another studio guest, opposite an experienced broadcaster, and talk about something you care about in what my grown-up children recognise as (with some precision) my posh voice.

The broadcaster was Francis Finn. Small studio. Intimate, you might say, if you were being generous about it. I watched the previous segment on the monitor in the green room. A local vet, or someone of that persuasion, had brought in a twelve-foot python. Another guest had the honour of wearing it. On television. On a sofa. It wasn’t me, fortunately. By the time I was called, snake-man and his python were leaving the building. I had escaped the indignity. And briefly, felt that things were going well.

I had done this kind of thing before. TV and Radio. Talking about teenage literacy, reluctant readers, and Nottinghamshire writers, zombies coming back from the dead. I knew the material. I knew the register. I introduced the latest characters from The Guardian Award-winning ‘Dawn of the Unread’ - that engages teenagers by sending dead writers back to teach them: D.H. Lawrence. Alan Sillitoe. Lord Byron. J.M. Barrie.

‘When the dead go unread, there’s gonna be trouble’ was how I put it. The interview went well. It felt automatic in the best possible sense. A good kind of automatic, where the preparation has done its job and you can just show up.

Then came the commercial break. Time to peek at my phone. My kids’ social media commentary already flooding in. They were mocking the posh voice. My kids and their friends sharing comments. Hundreds of LOLs feeding the space in real-time. I knew exactly what they were up to and had absolutely no way to respond. I was a man in a television studio holding a phone he couldn’t type on.

When the theme tune rolled, I tucked the phone back into my pocket. Francis launched immediately into a cat feature. An outside broadcast at a local cat sanctuary. Abandoned cats, lots of them. Too many in fact. Apparently, they were cats that didn’t photograph particularly well and had therefore become, in the brutal logic of social media, harder to re-home.

I sat quietly and politely beside the other guest, a young woman from Lambley. I didn’t know I was going to be asked anything. Nobody had mentioned cats.I should say, for context, that in 2014, I feared cats! We had a dog. You could throw a ball for a dog and he would come back, tail wagging, transaction complete.

Cats aren’t like that. Cats have an entirely different relationship with cause and effect. I hadn’t yet learned to respect this.

“I’m more of a doggie person,” I said.

Francis waited. I was on a roll.

“Black cats,” I said, with some confidence, “look better than other cats, I think.”

“Do you think so?” said Francis.

“Yeah,” I said, turning to point at the giant image of a cat on the wall behind me. I was lucid and definitely going for a ‘Blue Peter’ badge.

“And there’s a little tip. If you’re taking a selfie with a pussycat, right.” I held an imaginary phone aloft on my left hand. “Just make sure your phone is set to High Dynamic Range -HDR”. I said the technical bit slowly so that the audience would remember. “And then you will pick up all of the wonderful detail.”

There was a slight pause as Francis looked into the camera with a bemused expression.

“Who’d have thought,” she said, “that we would have photography advice on cat selfies, on Notts TV, from Paul.”.

This was the moment of my coronation. I went viral on Twitter and was crowned Cat Selfie King.

Now, over ten years later, I’m constructing makeshift air conditioning units for the species. Neko is precisely the kind of cat the sanctuary was struggling to re-home. That switch from dogs to cats. I didn’t see that coming.

ElevenLabs Voice Clone

Which brings me. To the voice clone. You see. I’ve been working with ElevenLabs. If you haven’t encountered it - it’s a tool that takes a sample of your voice and replicates it with impressive fidelity. I’ll do a follow up to this article with a step-by-step guide. The technology genuinely is remarkable and it works. I already have a voice clone as it happens. I made it with a ten second audio sample. It doesn’t sound like me. It sounds like Dick Van Dyke in ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks.’ Impressive, but just a little bit too far south of Watford Gap.

I like the idea of using a voice clone. Not out of vanity. But from a practical perspective.

But the tool actually needs a lengthier, clean source sample to work with. Thirty seconds minimum. Quiet room. No background noise. So before heading for the woods I decided to give it one more try.

I enticed Neko away from the mike - with tasty snacks. Earlier, he had been photobombing calls all day, with the casual professionalism of a cat who knew exactly what he was doing. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Anyone who is a cat person, rather than a doggie person, will understand this.

Neko was munching out of earshot and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. This was my moment. Record the prepared speech, upload the sample, and let ElevenLabs do its thing. No more Dick Van Dyke. Just me in my natural habitat. I recorded the sequence. Taking care not to sound too posh. Keeping those vowels nice and flat. I assumed it would be perfect then played it back.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock - The clock. A Seth Thomas. Vintage American factory clock, a lovely old thing, hanging on the wall and ticking with the quiet authority of something that has been doing this since approximately 1962 and has absolutely no intention of stopping. An American clock. Sabotaging my attempt to sound less American.

I put a sock in it. The clock, that is. Headphones on. Silence. Take thirty-five, or something like that. It was all going so well. My phone rang.

Someone trying to sell me air conditioning. - Are you kidding me? Then Neko, calling.

More ice. More fishy snacks. More Catnip deployed directly into the fan.

Take thirty-seven. It was going beautifully except that I hadn’t taken my antihistamine, and I sounded like a man recording in a bucket. You see, I walk four miles through Sherwood Forest every day. Pollen season. The antihistamine is mandatory not optional.

Take thirty-eight... Take thirty-nine...

‘The Thirty Nine Steps’. Isn’t that a Hitchcock film? I became briefly distracted. 1935 - Genuinely worth looking up, as it happens.

Take forty. There was a knock at the door. An internet delivery. Sharpies and sticky notes.

Time to give in. Time to abandon the studio and head for the sanctuary of the forest. Nineteen degrees under the oaks. A wood pigeon. A rabbit that won’t stay still long enough to be photographed. A dragonfly. And the slow, patient, accumulating quiet of a thousand-year-old forest that has seen it all and is in no particular hurry.

And underneath, I mean deep underneath. Underground. The carboniferous forest. Laid-down millions of years ago. Forming the coal, that used to be extracted here. The Seth Thomas was ticking relentlessly, as I closed the door behind me.

And here’s the Catch Twenty-Two, at the heart of this entire exercise. The digital tool that could tell this story requires physical conditions that the domestic environment does not provide.

The hype gets punctured from the inside. Not by scepticism. Not by a think piece. Not even by a ticking American clock or a jet-black cat with strong opinions about the weather. Just by life. Ordinary, uncooperative, antihistamine-forgetting, Hitchcock-distracted, Sharpie dependent life.

This is not anti-AI. The technology works and I’m an early adopter, as ever. 2019 as it happens. ElevenLabs does what it says. The gap is not between the promise and the delivery. The gap is between the promise and the kitchen at half-past-five in the afternoon when the petrol-station is busy with rush hour traffic and the cat is warm, and I’m distracted by The Thirty Nine Steps. And someone is trying to cold-call you into buying air conditioning when we all know it will be raining next week.

I’ve been here before. We’ve ALL been here before.

The trade typesetters didn’t realise what had hit them. Desktop publishing didn’t just change the industry, it moved it. And the people who couldn’t move with it weren’t stupid or resistant or afraid of progress. They were just trying to do their jobs in the conditions that life actually provides. Not ideal conditions. But the real ones.

The Major Oak survived the Luddites. It didn’t survive us. And I’m sitting in my home office with a sock in a clock and a cat with catnip in his fan and a professional microphone that has finished forty (unsuccessful) attempts at capturing thirty-seconds of clean audio. And somewhere in all of that is the story of every significant technology I have ever worked with. The same gap. Every time. Not a technical gap. A human one.

So, here’s what I want to say to you, wherever you are reading this: On the Jubilee line, in your kitchen, or on a patch of floor in front of a fan with an icepack: We can do this thing together. Get to grips with the next big thing I mean.

Part Two of this piece will be narrated in my own voice. My cloned voice. The clean one. The one I’m going to get eventually, when the lorries are elsewhere and Neko is fast asleep. And the Seth Thomas and I have reached some kind of agreement. I will describe the process and the value it brings. And it will be delivered in the medium it’s describing.

Toodle Pip

In the meantime, I’ll use the voice of Laurie Lovelace like I have done before. A fictional character from my seaside sci-fi novel; Houdini Window. And a great example of what AI sound design can actually do when the domestic environment cooperates.

Anyway, ‘toodle-pip’ as we posh TV celebrities say.

And remember. You Make Magic Real.

Paul Fillingham
Sound design by Studio-thinkamigo

There’s a moment in 1968 - or at least in the cultural memory of 1968 - when someone handed you something that promised to expand your mind and instead just made the walls melt. I wouldn’t know. I was seven, sitting in a classroom in Robin Hood country wearing a paisley shirt, building a computer from a Cornflakes packet, some cards and a handful of knitting needles. A punchcard system, as it turned out. My classmates and I were sorting information - which kids had brown eyes, which had blue. Mine were hazel. It worked. Nobody’s mind melted.

That’s the kind of practitioner I am. The tools change. The impulse to build doesn’t.

Notebook novelty

I discovered Google’s NotebookLM the way I discover most things these days - walking through Sherwood Forest. Four miles a day, every day since Covid, Apple earbuds in. No paisley shirt. The kid who sorted brown eyes from blue in a classroom a few miles from these trees and is now a daily presence among them, which is either poetic or just what happens when you get older and realise that walking is all about thinking.

The podcast that found me one evening was about Google labs and their AI tool NotebookLM. And the remarkable thing - the thing that stopped me in my tracks somewhere between two oak trees that were old when Robin Hood was young - was that NotebookLM could take a piece of text and turn it into a podcast. Not a transcript. Not a summary. A conversation. Two voices, a format, a flow. I stood there in the forest and thought - that’s genuinely impressive.

I tried it. It was. The first time.

But all novelty has a ceiling. After a few authentic sounding podcasts, the format started to feel familiar in the wrong way. Samey, despite each render sounding slightly different. The variations were there but they weren’t doing the work that variation is supposed to do. And then the hosts started to drift. Confident. Authoritative. Completely unmoored from the source material. Hallucinating in the full psychedelic sense of the word - wandering somewhere straight out of the cultural wonderwall of 1968 that I’d managed to avoid the first time around by being only seven years old and more interested in Cornflakes packets and comics than expanding consciousness.

The impressive thing had become an unreliable thing. And an unreliable tool is worse than no tool at all, because you have to check everything it tells you and checking everything defeats the purpose.

I moved on.

G is for Gemini

Gemini was NASA’s space programme before Apollo. Twelve missions between 1961 and 1966, bridging the gap between the early Mercury flights and the moon landings. I missed Gemini by a couple of years. But Apollo I was ready for. Transfixed by. A seven year old in Robin Hood country, eyes fixed on a grainy black and white television screen, absolutely certain that reaching for the moon was the right thing to do.

I mention this because when Google named their AI tool Gemini. I wanted to believe it carried some of that ambition. The bridge between where we were and somewhere extraordinary.

It did not.

My first attempt to generate AI-assisted code with Gemini produced something so confidently, elaborately wrong that I briefly wondered whether I'd accidentally wandered into the cultural memory of 1968 that I'd been successfully avoiding since the NotebookLM incident. The walls didn't exactly melt. But the code did.

Crafting a workflow with Claude

I came to Claude sideways, the way you find most useful things. Someone mentioned markdown files in passing - I can’t remember whether they were recommending them or warning against them. It doesn’t matter. I already knew what markdown was. I’d been using Obsidian for a while - a note-taking application that uses .md files, which is either wonderfully minimalist or pleasingly nerdy depending on your creative disposition. I’d found it a better alternative to Apple Notes. Less frantic. More like thinking.

The connection was straightforward. I could write a markdown file in Obsidian - background info about what I was trying to do - drop it into Claude, and have a conversation that started from somewhere real rather than starting from scratch. The project at the time was rebuilding my old WordPress site. An open source migration. Years of work, accumulated content, a practice that had outgrown its original container.

Claude read the file. Understood the context. And we got to work.

No walls melted. No code dissolved. The thing I asked it to build got built. Nice clean HTML, a bunch of CSS files and some neat JavaScript - old pals from my early internet days. The open source web had come full circle, and here was a tool that understood both where I was coming from and where it needed to go.

It was enough. It was more than enough!

The markdown files were the key. Not the tool alone but the combination - context ingested and retained by Claude, so the conversation was built on something stable rather than starting from scratch every time.

For a creative practitioner, writing code is a bit like getting by in Spanish. I can manage. I can make myself understood. I can read a menu and navigate a conversation and occasionally produce something that sounds almost fluent. But I’m not a native speaker and I know it. The gap between what I can ask for and what I can verify is real, and in that gap, Gemini’s hallucinations had been doing their worst.

The background briefs changed all of that. A markdown file written in Obsidian the night before - here is the project, here is the architecture, here are the rules, here is what we built last time and why - dropped into Claude at the start of a session.

Suddenly the conversation had a foundation. The code that came back was consistent with the code that had written in the previous session. The CSS had the right variable names. The JavaScript knew what it was supposed to do. The foreign language had an interpreter who had read the same brief I had.

Predictability sounds like a modest ambition. For a creative not speaking in their native tongue, it’s everything.

But this was more than just a simple web build. With briefing documents, I could feed-in brand values, colour palettes, working conventions - trivial stuff too, the anecdotes and recollections that give a practice its texture and its voice.

From there it started to develop into something beyond code. It offered a way of actually designing things. Not just one thing but many things simultaneously. I was able to condense and categorise different projects until they made sense - the confused and the sprawling becoming ordered and legible, like the brown-eyed punch cards dropping out of the Cornflake box when you pulled the right knitting needle.

The briefing document methodology described everything: Award winning comics for reluctant readers. A heritage platform documenting the last generation of East Midland coalminers. Digital Government and offshore legal stuff. An epic sci-fi thriller being built chapter by chapter along a fictional coastline. Each one a different domain. Each one a different tone. Each one a different set of constraints - and a massive markdown file that made Claude fluent in all of them.

And yes, Claude delivered. I was able to ditch WordPress and its weird plug-ins and increasingly bloated dashboards, and return to a place I once knew. But this time with an assistant - not to do everything, but to ensure consistency, which is where Gemini and NotebookLM had let me down. Claude even taught me how to version files correctly in GitHub - not rocket science for a developer. But something that I had managed to avoid for years - through fear more than anything - but now I totally ‘get it’.

Yep, Claude could do no wrong. Or so I thought.

Behind the screen

After all, that’s what I’d spent the last month doing - not isolated chats but one sustained project. The thinkamigo.com rebuild. Hundreds of exchanges, dozens of files, a CSS architecture built version by version through evenings and weekends. So when I noticed a Projects icon sitting there in the Claude interface, I was intrigued. Perhaps this was where I should have been working all along. A dedicated space. Persistent context. A collaborator that already knew the practice before the first word was typed.

I tugged at the knitting needle to see what would drop out of the bottom of the Cornflakes packet.

It was a Project screen. Wow. What do I do now?

I uploaded some contextual stuff. Brand guidelines. A career history spanning four decades. Things about space rockets - well, Apollo specifically, we've established my position on Gemini. Notes about being an Apple product demonstrator in the late eighties, and putting computer screens into Raleigh cycle shops at a time when most people thought the internet was something academics did.

And all that trouble with the Cerne Abbas Giant, getting too excited by his new bike and upsetting the National Trust. The kind of material creates texture and a compelling back-story.

I started to feed the shiny new project space, the knowledge was filling up. Claude would know everything. It would be epic and unstoppable. This was the same briefing document methodology, but permanent. Always on. No more uploading files at the start of each session. This was the kind of creative revolution I had been waiting for.

I was reaching for the moon again.

Then Bam!

“Houston, we have a problem”.

I was used to seeing my collection of files, opening them, downloading them, working with them alongside the chat window. But in Projects they were invisible. No representation on the screen at all. Just a single chat window, linear, unyielding - no way to iterate, no way to pass files up and down my workflow as ideas developed.

The revolution had a missing component. A fairly fundamental one.

Claude had everything ready. But I couldn’t touch any of it. Couldn’t open a file mid-conversation to check a detail, couldn’t download a revised version, couldn’t see what was there without asking Claude to read it back to me. The files existed behind the interface, silent and inaccessible, like documents posted through a letterbox with no way to get them back.

I’d traded the agility of the file panel for something more rigid, and creative ideas just don’t flow like that. Nobody had mentioned that was the deal.

You see. Here's the thing about creative practice. It doesn't move in straight lines. It loops back, branches sideways, stacks up in layers, drops connections from unexpected angles.

Creativity looks chaotic from the outside and purposeful from the inside. It needs tools that can keep up with that - tools that are agile, tactile, iterative. Tools that get out of the way when the thinking is happening and step in when the artist needs support.

The AI tools I’ve encountered were built by brilliant people solving fascinating problems. But I’m not sure they’ve spent much time with the people who’ve been inside every tech transition since the early web. The ones who write novels and build heritage platforms and debug CSS at midnight and produce award winning comics - sometimes in the same week. The ones for whom creativity and technology are not separate activities but a single feedback loop that has been turning for decades.

• NotebookLM impressed me and then started hallucinating.

• Gemini sent me somewhere I hadn’t signed up to go.

• Claude earned my trust and then introduced a feature (or lack of) that tied my hands behind my back.

Each one designed, I suspect, for an idealised user who works in straight lines, has tidy folders, and finishes one thing before starting another. Where’s the user research for heaven’s sake?

That user doesn’t exist. Or if they do, they don’t need AI. They’re already organised enough!

The rest of us - the non-linear, messy multi-domain creatives - who think by making and make by thinking - we’re still waiting for the tool that was actually built for us. And it’s not Adobe Creative Suite.

So, step aside Claude. Give me that stack of Post-It notes and a Sharpie and I’ll show you what we creatives actually need.

Epilogue

I’ve heard that some people are turning to AI for therapy. But that’s not me, because I have some great flesh and blood collaborators I can always turn to, and they are genuinely creative and funny and flawed. But I must admit, when new technology lets us down, or doesn’t live up to its expectations, it can feel like you need a little therapy, especially after using AI.

If that’s you, I’d love to hear about your experience.

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Postscript

The opening image was generated in ElevenLabs Studio using their image generator, which is currently in beta.

The prompt: A man in a creative studio behind a desk, composited with a vivid 1968 psychedelic colour wheel. The two images melt into each other - the studio dissolving at the edges into swirling colour, the psychedelia bleeding into the photographic space. Saturated colour at the periphery, photographic reality at the centre. Two eras occupying the same moment.

Source image one: Personal photograph, makeshift studio, Leeds.

Source image two: Psychedelic oil wheel, Wikimedia Commons.

Production: Both images were fed into ElevenLabs Studio image generator. Single pass. no adjustment.

Total time: Less than five minutes.

The tool didn’t make the image. The creative brief did. And that’s always been the way that Art Director’s work.

Anyhow, it’s time to get back to writing my story. So, Toodle-pip as we posh Arty-Farties say. And remember. You Make Magic Real

Listen to Milligan’s Monorail by Paul Fillingham. Presented by Debbie Irwin (ElevenLabs) and Houdini Window character Laurie Lovelace.

I am on a monorail. At Butlins, Skegness, in the 1970s.

I’m fourteen years old, suspended above the chalets and the candyfloss and the optimistic clatter of the British seaside holiday, and I’m crying. With laughter. And the other people in the carriage think I’m mad.

The book in my hands is Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall by Spike Milligan.

I had no critical vocabulary for what I was reading. No framework, no context, no understanding that Milligan was actually processing genuine trauma, the real horror of the war, through the only lens that made it survivable. I just knew it was the funniest thing I had ever read. And that the laughter had something underneath that I couldn’t quite explain.

I still can’t, entirely. But I’ve spent the rest of my life making things that try.

Skegness does something to you if you arrive at the right age, in the right era, with the right level of attention.

The Butlins monorail was pure Americana - a vision of the future delivered to the British working class during the holiday fortnight for the pits and the factories like Players, Pretty Poly and Raleigh. Gleaming, optimistic, slightly absurd. Riding above the amusement arcades, the theatres and the bars down below, bathed in the marine blue of the East Coast light on a clear day. The sea always there at the edge of things, the breeze ‘so bracing’ (of course) and indifferent to it all.

I didn’t know then. But I was storing all of it. The melancholy underneath the cheerfulness. The gap between the promise and the reality. The way a place can be funny and sad at the same time without being either.

Decades later, a fictional seaside town called Binley Bay would appear in a science fiction novel I was writing. It had been evolving gradually since that monorail ride.

The film exposure came at the same age. It had a distinctly British flavour and came from a peculiar window that existed around 1968. How I Won the War, Richard Lester, (1967). If.... Lindsay Anderson, (1968). Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper, 1969. A kid from a Notts mining village absorbing them on a Comprehensive School Film Studies Course before anyone had explained what they meant or how to decode them.

If.... didn’t feel like cinema. It felt like validation. The school as a repressive institution. Authority as performance. The line between what is happening and what is imagined never resolved. Anderson’s deliberate cuts between colour and black and white leaving you uncertain which world you were in. That level of uncertainty resonated with a fourteen year old who would never work down the pit like his Dad.

Easy Rider had three brilliant things. 1. Jack Nicholson. 2. Jack Nicholson on release from county jail, toasting Nottingham’s famous rebel writer, D.H. Lawrence. And 3. Jack Nicholson riding on the back of a chopper motorcycle. Oh and wearing a ridiculous gold football helmet - that’s four things... I could go on.

I was already obsessed with Americana. Apollo was on TV. Marvel Comics in my hands. Sci-fi paperbacks in the local library, and Bazooka Joe bubble gum hurting my teeth. America existed in my imagination as a mythological construct, vivid, romantic, and slightly unreal, viewed from the self-sufficient bubble of a mining village.

Easy Rider confirmed the darkness underneath the myth. It also confirmed that the darkness was worth investigating.

Art school arrived in 1977. Mansfield College of Art, then Clarendon College Nottingham. Then in 1980, Leeds Poly, Fine Art - a mixed-media course modelled on the Bauhaus. The idea that all creative disciplines belong together. That making and thinking are one and the same.

My tutor at Leeds was Jeff Nuttall. Author of Bomb Culture. Poet, jazz trumpeter, exuberant provocateur, larger than life, full of mischief and Tetley’s (ale not tea). His poetry was packed with whimsy and bodily functions. I have an LP of Nuttall poetry readings and it’s really funny. But also quite sad. Nuttall was a man who worked with the likes of Yoko Ono, and had turned his own macabre imagination into a creative methodology.

I was in good hands. Dangerous hands, but good ones.

At Clarendon College, my friend Markie, a mature student who had grown up in Marin County California, introduced me to the beat poet Richard Brautigan. His peculiar lightness and whimsy, was embedded with something much darker. His surreal imagery landing quietly in your subconscious where it took root.

Markie shared Brautigan with laughter and anecdotes, the way the best books get passed on. She is no longer with us. Neither is Brautigan. But his books remain.

In the Fine Art Sound Studio, equipped with a Roland TR808 Rhythm Composer, funded with my student grant, we made music that owed something to all of the above - the cut-up techniques of Tristan Tzara and William Burroughs, the post-punk energy of the Leeds music scene, the playful melancholy of Brautigan, the dark comedy of Milligan. We called ourselves Smart Cookies. We played at the Poly and Nottingham Palais. We released demo tapes that came to nothing. Thirty years passed before our self fulfilling prophesy Loud and Lonely was released on vinyl.

In 1984 I sold the 808 and bought a BBC Computer. The next creative toolbox for me to open.

I tell you all of this because Houdini Window didn’t just appear from nowhere.

The story of a murdered magician, an escaped monkey called Elvis and a computer called Big Baby’ all converging on a sleepy seaside town - came from fifty years of accumulated culture, processed through every project, every platform, every collaboration that followed.

The dark comedy that makes you uncertain whether to laugh or cry. The melancholy underneath the cheerfulness. The gap between the official version and the truth, and objects that carry secret histories their owners don’t even recognise or even understand.

Milligan on a monorail. If.... in a cinema. Markie and Brautigan in a life-drawing class. The TR808 beating away in the Poly sound studio. All of it paying forward to a Seaside Sci-fi novel now approaching ninety-thousand words and counting.

Skegness started it.

I’m finishing it in Morecambe. Not far from the bookshop where at the height of the American moonshots in 1970, I bought an Apollo 11 pendant and an Outer Space magazine that was originally printed in the 1950s. The cold war pages were really dated and had a certain musty smell, the rockets looked ridiculous, anachronistic and not like Apollo at all. It contained articles by Werhner Von Braun and fake photographs of flying saucers dancing around power lines, but I cherished those pages all the same.

Listen to Billy’s Chinwag Theme.

Anyhow, Toodle-pip as we posh TV Celebrities say.
And remember. You Make Magic Real.

Houdini Window is a Seaside SciFi production by Paul Fillingham, with editorial support from screenwriter Adrian Reynolds. Sound Design by Thinkamigo. Follow our journey here on Substack.

Listen to Topographic rabbit holes. Presented by Debbie Erwin and Houdini Window character Laurie Lovelace.

The Endless Elevator

Sometimes you experience something in a gallery where a work just grabs you. A recent visit to Tate Modern did just this. You see, I’ve attended many exhibitions over the years and I have to admit that although I’m pleased the Tate Modern exists, it’s never really felt like a good place in which to view art. This former coal and oil fired power station is so vast that the artworks often seem dwarfed. The endless escalator rides between the different floors just compound the emptiness of it all. Remarkably, the gallery is entering its twenty sixth year, so it’s beginning to show its age - closed displays, ceiling tiles removed, apologetic warning signs, scuff marks, scrappy interpretation panels and not enough art. I’m guessing the maintenance and repair costs for the place are horrendous.

Cold War Terror

For the first time, I explored the dimly-lit belly of the former oil tanks, where skeletal Giacometti figures remind us that the cold war and the threat of nuclear anihilation never really went away. What I could do with a space like this!

I enjoyed inhabiting these darks spaces and knew that my mobile phone camera would never be able to capture the ambience. I snapped a pic. I was right, the auto exposure sucked the life out of the image.

Sticks and Stones

Ascending the shopping centre escalators I found a number of art installations that are more suited to the vaccuous spaces of Tate Modern. Richard Long’s walks and assembled stone and slate circles really work here. But they are so tactile that it’s easy to set off the security alarms.

Henri Matisse once said that sculpture was something you tripped over when you stood back from a painting.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, no such security existed, and it was tempting to slip foreign objects like keys, notes, tickets and other ephemera into the folds of a Barry Flannigan scultpture and other works that were housed in the old Tate Britain in Pimlico - I did this often.

I like the scale of these works. The artist Henri Matisse once said that sculpture was something you tripped over when you stood back from a painting. He was right of course. Because exhibition spaces can be as important as the works hanging on the walls.

Shit and Die

This creative playground is everything. It’s probably why I can’t get Bruce Nauman’s works out of my head, with its noisy repetitive video loops and gaudy neon signs and banal flickering random phrases like ‘love’, ‘hate’ and ‘shit'. And why I go back for more, sometimes dragging friends along, to their utter bewilderment.

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Houdini Window

Anyhow, I’m in the middle of this novel that I’m writing. And I often discuss publishing formats with my friend and editor Adrian, who is helping me exorcise the weaker aspects of my story. We’ve worked previously on multichannel storytelling projects, expressing themes and ideas in essays, video, comic strip panels and performance. I like this immersive approach to stories, and can envisage Houdini Window being released in a number of different formats. We are after all creating entire worlds.

Delivery Dancer

So, wandering through Tate Modern, I chanced upon a room devoted to a work by Seoul-based artist, Ayoung Kim. The room was rendered in oversized wall-to-wall comic art panels, arranged in sharp diagonals - an instant trigger for the 1960’s TV Batman fight scenes stored in my brain.

I watched her short film about a contemporary despatch rider whose food deliveries are late due to becoming distracted by a dancer, a creative engagement which results in punishment for failing to deliver on time.

Video Trailer for Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancers

ROtring Sketch

The theme is so contemporary and relatable that it became instantly memorable, just like Nauman’s artwork. I soaked up the gallery space, the images (still and moving), the sounds, and the giant wrap-around illustrations on the gallery walls made a big impression on me.

It made me think about how I want to stage the story of Houdini Window. I don’t have an answer for that right now. But I do have some interesting aspects of the story that I am currently developing. It also got me thinking about visualising the story. Not just the Gen AI impressions of characters like Duke Silverman, or Carlos and Cordelia. But getting a sheet of A4 paper and sketching a map with a ROtring pen, developing the story in scratchy little pictograms and annotations.

Sketching was raw and felt good and resulted in some fresh perspectives for the story.

I know that the Nottinghamshire-born author Alan Sillitoe drew maps for stories like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner (1959). Sillitoe was an RAF navigator just after WWII and was fascinated by maps. There are other examples of authors using maps. Adrian mentioned AA Milne who wrote Winnie the Pooh and published a map of the Hundred Acre Wood. And I’ve definitely seen other examples.

So, I’m going to doodle with maps as an experiment and hope that I dont get lost down too many rabbit holes, because it’s time to finish off the episode outlines and get this thing into the world.

And remember, in the words of Houdini Window character Laurie Lovelace

‘You make magic real!’

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Above: Cordelia Kim and Carlos Basquez Gallego, modern day characters from Houdini Window.

So, you’ve had this great idea

Listen to Intent and Disipline - Substack voiceover by DellaRayne, ElevenLabs.

Houdini Window is my first attempt at long form fiction. And it’s taken some time to get this project moving, years in fact. The inertia and paralysis experienced by anyone with an idea is well understood. This Substack rabbit hole was inspired by the PodCast Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam. More specifically You 2.0: How to get out of a rut’.

The Podcast (which I highly recommend) mentions a mice maze created by Psychologist Clark Hull, which he used to demonstrate a behaviour where an initial burst of fresh activity, is followed by a lull, then a flurry at the end when the goal is in sight. This is the goal gradient and is essential to understanding engagement (Engagement has been a theme in my professional research and design work all week, but that’s another story).

So the creative journey goes like this… The BURST | the PLATEAU | the SPRINT

The plateau of course is where creative ideas go to die.

Atomising the end goal

In the Hidden Brain Podcast, Adam Alter talks about breaking big goals down into sub-goals or ‘Atomising’. It’s not rocket science. Atomising is a familiar concept that has been explained many times and I’m sure you’ve heard it too.

As a writer (or any kind of producer) these sub-goals can be very small - To atomise the goal, requires discipline and intent. Which brings me around to this word ‘intent’. I’m reminded of a childhood memory from Butlin’s Holiday Camp where displayed in large letters on a service building was the phrase ‘Our True Intent is for Your Delight’.

What is your intent?

This word ‘INTENT’ has been appearing explicitly in my writing for Houdini Window. The intent of my characters (good or bad) has profound consequences for them. You don’t know my characters yet, but that’s OK. One day I hope you will, and I think you will like them, or at least some of them.

“Our True Intent is All For Your Delight” was a famous Butlin’s slogan, originating from Shakespeare and used for marketing, especially for the iconic, highly staged John Hinde postcards from the late 1960s/early 1970s, capturing a colourful, escapist vision of British holidays. It signifies Butlin’s core promise of providing fun and entertainment, a value they still aim to uphold by delighting guests. - Google

Above John Hinde postcard. To unaccompanied children, the monorail at Skegness was futuristic, practical, exciting and free.

Seaside sci-fi

I guess what I’m taking from this is some form of validation for my delightful 1970s working class, childhood experience at Butlin’s, so easily dismissed by jet-setters (you know who you are). But now being expressed in my Seaside sci-fi (tm) - Now there’s a genre to be reckoned with! The neon sign with the word ‘INTENT’ writ-large has been locked in my brain for decades. But has since been plugged in and is now flickering into life all over the place.

A note about writing

In desperate moments of inertia, George RR Martin, writer of Game of Thrones talks about setting alarms for what seem like absurdly small periods of time, with the intention of writing something, anything, no matter how small. This is good advice.

To atomise the goal, requires discipline and intent

So, today is another day of ‘Intent’ making incremental steps towards a bigger goal. Let’s hope the intent is good, because when the characters of Houdini Window have bad intentions, the consequences are often worse for them.

This Substack Rabbit Hole was adapted from a note in my Scrivener application that I am using to write Houdini Window. I hope to orient myself around this unfamiliar platform as I share these random thoughts with everyone and no one.

Above: Splashdown off the East Coast.

Houdini Window on instagram

Website and serialised audiobook imminent!

It’s part of the narrative ‘lore’ aspect of my Houdini Window story. Clean HTML, easily customisable. Then adding thumbnail and depiction images from existing AI characterisations.

I created a folder on my houdiniwindow.com webspace and uploaded the resulting HTML. And it looked great (at least on desktop).

Cover up

The death of one of the main protagonists in my story in the opening chapters is a critical part of Houdini Window. The death is effectively covered up by the authorities using financial incentives and official press releases.

The production of artefacts representing this deception is a great exercise - it adds to the Houdini Window lore, which can be read alongside the main story.

The CELEBZ publication created with Gemini is very authentic, giving just enough detail to suspend belief and adding further layers to an already dense plot.

Having created a great looking website for my gossip column, the next stage was seeing how Gemini could modify the code so that it was mobile responsive. I must admit I nearly died when I first saw how awful it looked on my phone.

When researching how to get responsive code from AI, several links mentioned Gemini Canvas, which I presume is a code building environment.

However, this time around I didn’t really want to devote to much energy learning a whole new way of working - I have a novel to write after all!

So, I persisted with Gemini, my ancient copy of BBEdit (bare bones edit) and a browser. There were a few frustrations and I had to work hard to resist the temptation of resorting to Wordpress - ‘stick with it’ I kept telling myself.

I continued working with the CELEBZ page for some hours, making design refinements, copy changes and generating more graphic elements. I discovered that AI coding is more of a conversation, it feels like co-creation, demanding the same level of engagement as making generative images, sound, and video. Activities that are often far from quick and sometimes excruciating!

I do feel that it was advantageous to have some HTML and CSS experience in order to direct Gemini accurately. But I found it really convenient to have Gemini clean up code that would normally be a bit ugly after a few hasty edits. And when things were a little flaky, it was possible to pass the code back to Gemini and ask for improvements to be made!

From the outset I had a very clear idea of what I wanted. And working with AI, I achieved my goal. It was necessary to challenge the outputs sometimes and to see where human intuition is still valuable. But I was impressed by what could be achieved and maybe encouraged that I still had to put my thinking cap on in order to get something of sufficient quality.

CELEBZ is here: https://houdiniwindow.com/lore/laurie-death.html

Space Exploration

Back in 2012, Yentob described The Space – a project which shaped my understanding of digital media – as a platform supporting artists and organisations engaging with new audiences.

The project became a digital touchpoint in my own creative journey – overcoming a minor stroke – establishing Thinkamigo – and collaborating for the first time with writer and educator James Walker. It was a moment that echoed the spirit of innovation Yentob brought to British arts broadcasting throughout his career.

Above - Don Letts and Alan Yentob at the launch of The Space in 2012.

RIP Arts Editor Alan Yentob

Today I learned that Alan Yentob has died, aged 78. As an editor, broadcaster and director, Yentob was both advocate and catalyst for the arts, responsible for some of the most innovative television of the past half-century. To list all his arts programming achievements would be like trying to map the entire internet on a napkin. So, I’ll focus on a couple of personal connections – those digital and analog touchpoints that shaped my own journey.

I first met Yentob in 2012 at the Royal Festival Hall, alongside music producer Don Letts and author Will Self, at the official launch of The Space – the experimental, on-demand arts platform co-funded by the BBC and Arts Council England for the Cultural Olympiad.

Our digital literature project, The Sillitoe Trail, found a home there, bringing together over seventy creative practitioners from Nottinghamshire to explore the region’s cultural identity, just as Alan Sillitoe had done with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Above - BBC Arena - message in a bottle title sequence, accompanied by Brian Eno’s repetitive guitar track.

Arts Television in 1978

But my connection to Yentob goes back much further. Once upon a time in 1978, I was an art student growing up in Robin Hood county, where the trees were green with possibility, the coal mines dark and foreboding, and the art schools full of bright young things, paper, charcoal and life models.

At art school I was prolific, painting, drawing and studying art history – not old masters, but contemporary artists – the more contemporary and contrary, the better. Local libraries offered a few books about modern artists, and contemporary practitioners were covered in magazines like Art International and Artscribe. The latter being styled more like a fanzine than an arts publication.

There was always a tradition of arts programming on British television. But with a few exceptions – Ken Russell’s Pop Goes the Easel and the occasional Southbank Show hosted by Melvyn Bragg – these programmes were largely highbrow and rather dismissive of popular culture.

BBC2 was the innovator at the time, and aired Arena, an arts magazine programme that had just been handed over to its new editor – Alan Yentob.​ During Yentob’s time as editor, Arena received six BAFTA nominations and three BAFTA awards.

Above - Magritte’s familiar bowler hatted Belgians motif.

Capturing the Extraordinary

Now, if we think of television as a kind of information network composed of nodes, links, signals and receivers. Arena didn’t just show art; it became a landscape of language and images, of clever jump-cuts, animation, collage and reconstructions. It also provided a space for student film makers to shine. People like David Wheatley whose film about René Magritte faithfully captured the mysterious world evoked by the artist’s Surrealist paintings.

Magritte’s bowler hats floated like clouds on our family’s TV screen with the suggestion that the ordinary world could be gently rearranged, as if the laws of physics had taken the night off. It was a place populated by charismatic art collectors like George Melly – riffing like a jazz musician should. Arena programmes like The Private Life of the Ford Cortina, broadcast in 1982 were like the essays of the French semiotician Roland Barthes – required reading in the field of sociology – who investigated the popular iconography of the everyday and the banal.

In 1978, VCR’s were still a couple of years off – at least for the domestic market – we had them at school of course – chunky Philips N1502 machines that recorded 60 minutes of black and white video and were used to playback the early years sex education programme Living and Growing, thus avoiding all the embarrassment experienced by our long suffering biology teachers.

Being resourceful, I recorded the Arena programme on a portable cassette recorder, snapped black-and-white stills with my Soviet-made 35mm Zenith-E camera, capturing the sense of wonder that Arena inspired – I still have those black and white negatives somewhere.

The cassette tape could be replayed over and over, so that the message became engrained, the sound effects eagerly anticipated, the voice-over recited – word for word. The images, scored with the 625 alternating scan lines of the analogue screen became iconic shadows, providing more collage fodder for my sketchbooks. Everything was deconstructed to its component parts.

Above - Sex Pistols and Buffalo Gals impresario Malcolm McClaren – the best Mayor of London we never had – on the 1984 Arena programme Beat This! A Hip-Hop History.

The Butterfly Effect

The Magritte episode – broadcast in those first days of Yentob’s reign – was a door left ajar in the mind, revealing that reality could be edited, painted, or simply imagined away. Its impact was, in a sense, a demonstration of the butterfly effect – that a single programme, broadcast on a winter’s night, could ripple through your imagination, inspiring new ways of seeing and making.

By 1984, after I had finished art school, Arena was legitimising artists like Afrika Bambaata in Beat This! A Hip-Hop History – the first arts programme that I ever recorded to videotape – and one that still feels fresh today – well actually, quite a few vintage Yentob edited Arena programmes possess a certain vibe that is timeless and have the power to inspire future generations of artists – if only they weren’t so siloed – but accessibility to artefacts and ideas is another topic entirely that I won’t cover here.

In 1978 I was just one art student, learning to see, waiting to be hooked-up and connected. And, Arena, under Yentob, was a poem disguised as television – a rich network of ideas, and a mixed-media touchpoint before the digital age had even begun.

Links

Yentob talks about The Space digital arts platform

The Sillitoe Trail – All the rest is propaganda

Wikipedia entry on BBC arts programme Arena

A short film about bottles on BBC iPlayer
(8 mins. Requires VPN connection outside UK)

Multimedia lobby to the Arena programmes

John Coulthart on student film maker David Wheatley