Milton Keynes of the Mind: Looking for Culture through Economy
Essay film commissioned by the Open University & Journal of Cultural Economy, 2018
"To mark the JCE’s 10th anniversary they commissioned a film about Milton Keynes that delves back into the history of Journal of Cultural Economy and its links to the work of Stuart Hall. We chose to set it in Milton Keynes because that’s where the Journal started, because what’s not to love about a place that was definitely NOT named after Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes – and because, to be quite frank, we needed somewhere to hide from 2017 and all its brutalities."
"This is a film about theory as much as it is about MK. Hence that clunky title. The arguments at the heart of the film are that culture remains a vitally important analytical category and that culture isn’t a thing. Culture can be The Arts, but the film is much more interested in culture as Hall understood it, as the ordinary, taken-for-granted meanings and values that animate everyday life. In that sense, culture is everywhere, mediating how we understand and what we see.
The film enacts that everywhereness, filtering its views of the city through odd edits, collaging and splicing, using fuzzy archive film and repeating images..."
Gilian Rose on Visula/Method/Culture
The film also appeared on the Open University's Openlearn.