School of Change: Re-dreaming Past Futures

In this essay I approach the subject of the Future-Past from an oblique angle, through a kind of time travel that involves the re-staging of my fantasies of the future, inside a structure of my past - my old school. In 2012 I realized an art project called SCHOOL OF CHANGE, the core component of which was an experimental Science Fiction Musical film, set in a dystopian future-past and filmed in my old secondary school, a deteriorating Mid Century Modern comprehensive in an English New Town. The aim of this essay is to develop some of the ideas and debates that were thrown up by that project; speculations on our belief in the future, technology, memory and representation. I am using the film, and its fictions, as a device with which to launch these speculations. My methods of filmmaking are quite unusual, they involve an elision of fantasy and everyday reality through what might appear to be eccentric strategies. I will examine these strategies, to unpick how it is via methods of making that I can create a tone through which ideas are opened to more affect. So as well as discussing the fictional conceits of the film and the ideas they generate, this is an excavation of a creative filmmaking methodology, because its strategies, its aesthetic politics, are intrinsic to the meanings that are generated