Consider turning on your TV after a long day of work. You flick through the guide until you get to one of the 5 biggest channels in your country. And what you see is a video broadcast from a camera mounted on the front of a train. For seven straight hours. Followed by credits. You don't think much of it until you show up to work again the next day and everybody's talking about that very show. You take out your phone to distract yourself from the chatter, and your Twitter feed is bursting with train-related posts.
Yes, this is really a thing.
It all started in Norway back in November, 2009, when NRK2 decided to tape and broadcast the aforementioned train ride. What NRK2 didn't expect was that 1.25 million Norwegians would tune in at some point during the broadcast. That's around 25% of Norway's population!
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| NRK2 viewership on a normal day |
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| NRK2 viewership during "Bergensbanen - Minutt for Minutt" |
John Cage once said, "If something is boring after 2 minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight...eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." Slow TV is boring in the conventional sense, and yet it has enjoyed massive success in recent years. So is slow TV an extension of the conceptual idea of "boring" and its ability to be sexy in certain circumstances?
Goldsmith wrote "Being Boring" **, an article that specifically addresses the boring nature of his work, and the types of "boring" people can be subjected to. The first, "boring boring", is a forced situation: attending a meeting or watching a baby for a few hours. The second, "unboring boring", is a voluntary state. The argument, therefore, is that excitement can be derived from anything that is boring if the viewer chooses to be in that position.
Here's why unboring boring hasn't caught on: until now, the conceptual movement has been limited to obscure literature, art galleries (who goes to those regularly?) and a few YouTube clips here and there. Television, however, has an almost unbelievable reach. A report my Nielsen (a global measurement company for consumer-advertisement interaction statistics) suggested that the average American watches 5 hours of television a day. Therefore, the attendance to a performance of, say, John Cage's "4'33", even if performed by the BBC Symphony, cannot even compare to the exposure that any slow TV documentary would get in America.
Perhaps slow TV is an experiment gone horribly wrong. As is quoted in Goldsmith's article, Douglas Hueber once wrote, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." This could be rewritten to suit the needs of Thomas Hellum: "The world is full of dramatic television, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." And yet, slow TV is immensely interesting and dramatic in its own right; except for the underlying concept, it is entirely unplanned, and anything can happen at any given moment. This drama derived from boredom is exactly what Goldsmith is referring to when he says, "Because I volunteered to be bored, it was the most exciting thing I've ever seen."
Of course, we cannot ignore the role played by the visual medium. The human brain has an affinity for remembering and interpreting pictures and images, which is why we can generally remember details about places we've been to more easily than words that we've read. It is difficult to conceive of a work of literature or art that could effectively achieve an experience as engrossing as watching television. And then there are the other factors that play a part in slow TV's success: the calming nature of the documentaries, the ability of the movie to take you on a real-time journey through scenic regions, and the massive social events that viewings have become. Yet, fundamentally, the content of slow TV is created to the likes of the conceptual movement, and is inherently boring in nature. I am therefore in no doubt that Goldsmith's prediction for the future of unboring boring ("Our taste for the unboring boring won't last forever. I assume that someday soon it'll go back to boring boring once again...") will be proven wrong by the emergence of slow TV.
** Golsmith's "Being Boring" (mp3 link): https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Goldsmith/LunchtimePoets/Goldsmith-Kenneth_Lunch-Poets-11-04-04-Being-Boring_KWH.mp3
Slow TV Ted Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_hellum_the_world_s_most_boring_television_and_why_it_s_hilariously_addictive?language=en
Slow TV reminds me a lot of something that could be showcased in an art gallery using a projector. It seems like a totally possible thing for an artist, not necessarily a conceptual artist, to take footage of things like a train's journey or capture an area of the ocean for a day. These are very beautiful things that no matter where they are showcased should be a form of art. I think that because they are appearing on TVs when usually a fast paced news show would be on instead, it gets categorized as slow or boring. I think that with something like this, what you were saying about boring boring vs unboring boring only rings semi true. If someone does not like to look at art to begin with, then there is a very little chance that they will ever enjoy just watching a train go along its tracks. Boring boring and unboring boring relate more to written words in my interpretation of it. With more visual things, it is very hard to categorize it in a boring spectrum because it is so open to the eyes of the beholder. We expect words to have a purpose. However, we do not expect all images to as well.
ReplyDeleteI think that slow TV should also be categorized as fast art. In that case, it can take the boundaries that an artist is usually bound by, which is having to choose a single moment of time to capture, or single moments along a timeline, and shatters it. Now, you can see every single leaf that the train is passing and every move the clouds in view make. I very much agree with you about how by using the TV to showcase this footage it is able to reach an unimaginable audience. By making it so easily accessible , they truly set it up for as much possible success as they could have.
Despite, its weirdness, I find slow TV very interesting. I’d like to show the difference between slow TV and Ben Bennett’s Sitting and Smiling. So I came across a post about a thread titled, "This guy streams himself Sitting and Smiling for hours. I'm not sure what to make of it. He's on right now." And it’s literally what the thread describes it as: Ben Bennett sits on the floor with his legs crossed, smiling for approximately four hours. But even though this is “slow” because it progresses at the same speed as actual life, rather than at the accelerated speed of digital life, I don’t necessarily consider this slow TV.
ReplyDeleteSlow TV's appeal is easy to understand: It is pretty, soothing, and doesn't require a lot of attention or effort. The shows have narratives that are in a large sense comfortingly predictable (the fire will burn to embers, the train will reach Oslo) but are in a small sense prone to all kinds of variations and details that cannot be anticipated. These narratives progress, slowly, toward their conclusions; the sense of slowness comes not from the lack of progression, but from the fact that it is spread over a long period of time rather than telegraphed into a short video. Slow TV has something that Sitting and Smiling glaringly lacks: progression. This makes the experience of watching Bennett's work distinct. The lack of progression makes it unwatchable, and the act of watching it is almost as much of a feat of endurance as Bennett's performance. These are four hours of almost absolute stasis, repeated over and over again. There are no details to observe, no slight changes or unexpected happenings, no slow movement toward a goal. ‘Sitting and Smiling’ forces the viewer into a cruel awareness of the passing of time, time that passes so slowly that it doesn't seem to move at all. It is not the mirror of a moment, not an unmediated representation of the passing of time as it happens to some object or person, not soothing or calming or soporific: It is one moment stretched for four hours across a rack.
Very insightful post Niraj! When I first pulled up your blog, I immediately played the video you had attached. I made it one minute and thirty seven seconds before my patience wore out and I decided to move on and read your article. My attention span lasted less than two minutes mostly because reading and commenting on this blog is not a voluntary state right now, qualifying this as boring boring in my mind. However, as I read through your informative and insightful blog post a couple things stuck out to me and made me reconsider slow TV. The John Cage quote that you included states that, "if something is boring after 2 minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight...eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” This statement along with your analysis of slow TV convinced me to attempt to rewatch the video. I pushed through the first bit of it and ended up really enjoying myself. This shift in my opinion of slow TV is very similar to my opinion of conceptual art, music, and literature as a whole in class. The first time I was exposed to Goldsmith and some of the other works we studied at the beginning of the semester, I really didn’t get the point and thought most of the pieces were not worth my time. But as the semester progressed I started to understand and enjoy the things we were studying and the boringness of the boring pieces turned into unboringness.
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