Seeing and Believing

Wendy McMurdo RSA, Olympia, 2011 (5:12) (Also in Academicians: Part One)  

Ronald Forbes RSA, Only Make Believe, 2014 (12:00) 

Ken Currie RSA, Stone Circle, 2025 (12:00) (Also in Academicians: Part Two)  

Rachel Maclean RSA (Elect)’s DUCK is a daring deepfake short that follows Sean Connery’s unravelling after he witnesses Marilyn Monroe’s return from the dead. All of this has been created using sophisticated AI technology. All parts are played by Rachel Maclean, but presented, through AI, to us as a range of our favourite film stars. 

In Wendy McMurdo RSA’s Olympia, the camera glides balletically through an interior space observing the movements of a beautifully engineered skeletal humanoid robot. When we eventually see the separate fully realised head we circle around it to the sounds of the aria Olympia from Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann, creating an image that is full of both wonder and pathos. 

In Ronald Forbes RSA’s Only Make Believe, a terrorist forces a couple, who bear a caricature likeness to members of the British royal family, to join another couple in their homely imprisonment in a war zone. Who do they think they are? Who do WE think they are? Throughout, TV clips of pro-war propaganda are interlaced with the absurdity of this mysterious scenario.  

Ken Currie RSA asserts that in In Stone Circle he had nothing in mind other than to simply shoot film, and insists that the images are random, fragmentary and entirely improvised.  However, he uses many cinematic devices, which create dramatic tensions, and these cause the viewer to weave varying narratives around the perceived action.  We the audience are creating a shifting reality.