title: A Presentation to the Board
instrumentation: speaking voice and video
duration: 6 minutes
written in: 2010
text: Alex Temple
A Presentation to the Board is based on a 1957 promo film by Redbook Magazine. I cut up, rearranged and rescored it, and then added a live speaking part, turning what had been a cheerful depiction of suburban life into a shadowy conspiratorial organization’s pitch to a room full of despots.
The music pulls in two contradictory directions — toward cheesy business-presentation Muzak, reflecting the organization’s attempt to put a positive spin on universal surveillance and behavioral control, and toward atonal chamber music that evokes the scores of European arthouse films from the same period, reflecting the surprisingly Antonioni-ish editing of original film.
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Eliza Brown, speaker
Studio recording, 7.2.12
Recorded by Alex Temple
This recording of A Presentation to the Board is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. This means that you can
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b) sample, remix or otherwise transform it
as long as you credit Alex Temple as the composer and Eliza Brown as the performer, don’t use the resulting piece commercially, and license any derivative works under the same terms.