Credit crunch drama
October 26th, 2008 | by abigail |Literally making a drama out of the credit crunch crisis
It could easily be a real headline from any time over the past few months but anyone a website called ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ is in fact something rather different from what one might expect. Instead of yet more discussion and frightening financial facts, visitors will find a forty minute fictional drama that’s described by its makers as, “bizarre scenarios reflecting the strangeness of our situation today: life governed increasingly by abstract exchange and the accumulation of profit”.
The film is available as four free episode downloads which are designed to be like a television series. The Crisis in the Credit System story begins as five employees of an investment bank meet for a ‘brainstorming retreat’ at a country mansion. Their task is to find new ways of dealing with the credit crunch and to do so, they use role-play.
The sessions start out with scenarios of profiteering, hostile bank takeovers and share-price fiddling but their role-playing quickly escalates into ‘weirdness.’ A financial analyst goes into a trance-like state and speaks in tongues; hedge-fund managers have delusions of gradeur and humans breed with computers which ultimately causes an apocalyptic meltdown.
The drama is the brainchild of Melanie Gilligan, a Canadian conceptual artist who’s now based in London. She’s had shows at the Tate and the Serpentine Gallery within the last year and started work on this project seven months ago. She collaborated with journalists, economists and City insiders to make the drama and said, “The possibility of a financial crisis has been an important topic for me for years now” but she added that she’d been “unsettled at the speed at which life recently overtook fiction.”