Popular Culture
Firrell has declared his belief that mass, rather than high, culture may well be the more powerful shaper of our ideas about how to live rich and fruitful lives.
"I would argue that popular shows have an immense cultural importance because their popularity makes them powerful 'carriers' of ideas. If you think about Trek, it has been spreading powerful ideas about tolerance (for example) for 50 years or so. Every rerun is a chance to open another person's eyes to the truths that we need each other if we are to live good lives, and that the differences between us, strengthen us. Every rerun of Voyager shows the world that it is unremarkable that a women should be the ultimate authority figure."
The Sci Fi Series project (working title) mines popular American television science fiction for helpful ideas and philosophical truths with direct bearing on the project of enriching lived experience.
Contributors include Kate Mulgrew (aka Captain Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek Voyager), Joe Flanigan (aka Colonel John Sheppard, Stargate Atlantis), Torri Higginson (aka Dr Elizabeth Weir, Stargate Atlantis), Ben Browder (aka Commander John Crichton, Farscape).
Interviewed by SFX Magazine in January 2011, Firrell stated, “I am interested in the power of popular culture to disseminate sound ideas about how to live productive, intriguing and valuable lives. It struck me that popular culture is often looked down on by 'serious' critics or commentators. I wanted to use my privileged position as an artist to counter this by taking a very long, deep and critical view of the ideas in science fiction and their potential value when applied to our daily lives.
"Truth is, I have little or no idea about how to live a good life myself, and my experience suggests that we are all equally baffled and all equally in need of ideas and advice. Science Fiction is as good as source as any, in my opinion - maybe a better source than most. So the Sci Fi Series project is intended to create a platform for thinking about what might be important and helpful to us all."
Read more about this topic: Martin Firrell
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity.”
—John Lennon (1940–1980)
“If you’re anxious for to shine in the high esthetic line as a man
of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant
them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your
complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a
transcendental kind.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)