CAPTAIN'S LOG: July 7th
This is a copy of my weekly blog which I write for work and is published on the council's intranet.
We're having a bit of a think right now about how communications at the council should look in the future. One of my colleagues has spent the last six months doing an audit on communications in services which found that there isn't much consistency across the authority and that there were loads of gaps in terms of people power and skills. Her report has put forward some suggestions about how to resolve those issues and one idea is to get a senior communications person on board who would work in each directorate.
Clearly, if that's the way things will be done in the future, it makes sense that we (as in the central communications team) have a quick check of what it is we're doing and perhaps suggest some ideas about how we might need to change in order to 'dovetail' in with any new council-wide structure.
As a result we've been comparing notes with other councils across the country and I've been reading various reports that have been commissioned elsewhere to make recommendations for change. One of those reports was written by Westminster City Council which (as you will recall me saying in a previous Log) is regarded as being one of the best councils in the country when it comes to communications. It spends £1.8m on its communications team alone!
Anyway, the report highlights several areas of concern for the authority in question and makes lots of suggestions. One being an immediate investment of at least £500,000 in the communications team and the centralisation of all of the staff into one unit.
We've talked about this idea and it seems it's not the option-of-choice in Leeds.
However, scanning the issues highlighted in the Westminster report I can see that there are similarities with us here in Leeds. But, I am reassured by the fact that we're already tackling most of the issues and are most likely an above average authority when it comes to communications. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement because there is and you'll know about some of the ideas we're putting forward to make us even better.
Talking of which … The Chair.
I can see from the stats on the website that quite a few of you have viewed the video 'teaser' for The Chair. I mentioned this last week. It's something we're experimenting with as part of the bigger project called Leeds City Council People which is all about improving internal communications.
The video even prompted this reply from a colleague in Environment and Neighbourhoods:
The video is quite clearly a representation of the complex relationship that the individual has with the modern workplace. It combines the surrealist influences of filmmakers such as Bunuel along with radically traditionalist existentialist iconography of the chair itself. The function of this film is quite clearly more relevant than the sterility of either form or content.
On the one hand the chair is simply that - a chair; a place for a person to sit; rest and to think. However, placed alone in the midst of an empty space the chair becomes more than just that- it takes on an outgraphic quality where the human being is missing. It becomes the passive focus of the onlooker; a void that requires filling. But with what?
The choice of a chair as the focus – and indeed title – of this portmanteau emphasises the defamiliarisation that the viewer (or spectator) experiences when confronted with this film. Both the writer and director have deliberately contrived to create a situation where the mundane becomes strange, thereby ensuring that the watcher is forced into a critical self absorbed reflection of how the chair fits into their own interaction with the world.
The fact that we observe the solitude of the chair as it is by-passed and ignored creates its own verfremsdungeffect. The spectator views an object through the medium of film whilst in real life that same object is ignored thereby utilising the manipulative nature of the medium itself.
This approach creates its own dialectic and opens the viewer to question what their own approach to the chair would be if they were confronted with it; would they sit in the chair and risk being ignored? Would they copy the actions of others and walk on by? Or would they see the chair as an opportunity and steal it?
Quite clearly the didactic nature of the film forces the viewer to rationalise the contradiction between belonging or becoming an outcast as the film becomes increasingly concerned with how relationships are contiguous with post modern cultural conditions.
Either that or somebody decided to have a bit of fun with a chair and a video camera after a Friday lunchtime in the pub…
Well I couldn't really comment on that!
The true purpose of the Chair will hopefully become clear before the end of the month as I begin to ask for volunteers to assist with the Leeds City Council People project.
