(gentle music)
- The first time I experienced a basketball game was
at Madison Square Garden, probably around 1999.
I remember less about the specific game
or even what teams played.
It was more just the atmosphere,
the drastic shifts in scale,
the feeling of smallness when you're a part of a crowd,
but also the monumentality of the athletes.
There's something, to me,
really moving about the relative nakedness
of athletes and just the amount
of spectatorship focused on their bodies.
It was definitely a transformative moment.
I was sort of looking at it
like an alien from an outsider's point of view,
abstractly and maybe almost like anthropologically,
and developing that interest,
it's been a series of unfolding revelations
of the machine, the infrastructure behind the image.
It's like an onion
and I'm still in the process of unpacking it.
(soft upbeat music)
(crowd cheers)
Sometime in the early 2000s,
I got this invitation from faculty members
at the University of Georgia to come and give a lecture.
I did a little research on the university
and realized that they were one
of the top four schools for college football in the US.
I told them I'd love to come down,
specifically with the thought
that through the art department, I might explore the culture
of a real American football school,
having no idea what that really meant except
that it looked like a really intense culture.
I had this initial experience where,
in the midst of the game happening,
there was this shiny thing in the corner of the stands
and that was the band
and I was immediately like, "What's that?"
(upbeat band music) (indistinct chatter)
- Brian suggested going for a little bit wider shot,
since we can't get that close.
- And so I quickly became fascinated
with exactly what they were doing
in the context of the game.
(crowd cheers)
(Commentator speaks indistinctly)
- The title "Red Green Blue" refers to the color components
of the broadcast image.
As an artist, in a way, my interest is in,
not sports per se, but sports as one scene
for the moving image and mass entertainment
and what I'm doing is moving a viewer's attention around
the stadium by presenting juxtapositions of images
that are normally not in a broadcast of a game.
(indistinct radio chatter)
But see, that's our kind of good stuff.
- Okay, 'cause sometimes I'll be right here.
- I had eight cameras at each game.
Three of them were in static positions.
The other five were roaming cameras
and they were shooting in 30 second increments,
trying to get the maximum variety of details.
So this is one of the establishing shots
and it just shows. - So who's that?
Is that the band director? - That's the band director.
(upbeat band music)
(Paul laughs)
- [Band Director] It's that last song,
we're gonna pick it right back up.
Yeah.
- [Paul] The kind of texture and experience
of being inside the stadium,
it's all running off of a script
and there's a person in the control room,
which is at the other end of the stadium,
and their official title
is the Director of Fan Experience.
- [Commentator] Bulldogs, it's first and fifteen.
- Hey, but in all seriousness, if we do score here
and they go to a player, let's knock out Jersey Mike's.
- [Paul] Really, they're curating
or choreographing the experience
of the game on many levels.
- [Commentator] Touchdown Bulldogs.
(crowd roars) (upbeat band music)
- [Paul] So the musicians are a part
of the spell of the game.
(upbeat band music)
- [Band Director] Two, two short PA, Dixie Land.
- The band director,
he would talk about how he was purposefully
slowing it down, creating a swelling crescendo
of sound during say like,
you know, "America the Beautiful,"
and you could literally see people start
to cry as this happened.
You're seeing the machinery operate.
(upbeat band music)
It spoke of a self-awareness
of inciting emotion in this crowd.
I began to just really think of it as like the production
of a kind of mass ritual, almost like a religious ritual.
(whistle blows)
(crowd cheers) (upbeat band music)
I think of art as the finger that points.
To me, there's a value
of becoming more conscious of the manipulation.
My agenda is in a way to call attention
to that process of mediation.
(upbeat band music) (crowd cheers)
Whether you love or hate football,
it's a big part of American culture,
and so to me, in the end, a football game,
its familiarity makes it an interesting ground to unpack.
To take something that's the most familiar
and to defamiliarize it becomes a process
of breaking the spell.
To produce almost like a kind of disturbance.
(upbeat band music)
(crowd cheers) (insects chirp)
(insect chirping continues)