Mute Dialogue

‘A Story of Deception‘ at the Tate Modern is a comprehensive exhibition of work by artist Francis Alÿs. What I like about Alÿs’s work is how each of his actions have an underlying social and political motive but are carried out with humour and a sense of absurdity.

The exhibition is inspiring, surprising, funny and at times it seems totally implausible that someone would do the things that Alÿ’s manages to carry out. ‘Re-enactments‘ is the work that springs to mind. Here Alÿs buys a gun and walks down the street to see how long it will take for something to happen and after about 11 minutes he is arrested. Somehow he manages to convince the Mexican police to re-enact the whole thing.

The work ‘When Faith Moves Mountains‘ is particularly poignant. The video is a documentary of how 500 volunteers took part in the act of shovelling a sand dune and displacing it by a few centimeters. It’s both futile and heroic and watching the spectacle is inspiring. For me it was interesting to hear how the students interpreted their involvement with the work and the concept. They describe many facets of Alys motivation behind the work such as the politics, its social element and how it will live on as legend passed down in an oral tradition.

There is almost something very Monty Python in the work ‘Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing‘ where Alÿs pushes a block of ice along the streets of Mexico City until it melts to nothing.

Another one of my favourites in the exhibition is ‘Rehearsal‘. In this performance Alÿs drives a red VW Beetle up and down a road accompanied to the soundtrack of a brass band rehearsing on his stereo.

‘Tornado‘ captures the essence of the exhibition well, its humorous and unbelievable at the same time. Watch carefully as the artist runs after a tornado with the intention to be smothered by it.

A nice dig at the iPhone 4 on the back of the Evening Standard.

A little while ago Broadcast magazine published a piece on a project I’m currently working – the revamp of Radio 1 online. We are only a few weeks into the creative process but already the team have generated lots of great ideas and we have settled on a direction that we feel can deliver the innovative experience we want the Radio 1 audience to engage with.

I think the most exciting aspect of the work so far is that the homepage is a radical departure from where we are at the moment. It really changes the way we think about a typical BBC radio homepage by incorporating live video and real time information. The real time component is key and makes what we are building distinctive, as Ben Chapman (Interactive Editor for Radio 1) mentions in the article, the purpose of the project is to bring the station to life online. To achieve this we are exploring how we can create a homepage that is constantly changing and updating with lots of strong visual information (using a combination of images, video and a strong use of typography) and the use of playful interactions.

This new approach to presenting Radio 1 online will illustrate how we can start using real time info from radio studios in a compelling way and create an experience that makes people want to engage with all the exciting things that Radio 1 does. Last year we ran two trials of  a visual radio player (trial one, trial two) that combined real time elements such as text messages, track information and video, it was a great learning curve for everyone involved and the work we are now doing is a significant evolution. At the moment many websites that accompany tv or radio programmes feel very much like very much like supporting material rather than something that’s actually synchornised with what is going on in the broadcast.

Timeliness is important and by incorporating it into the website and enabling people not only to see whats happening right now but also skip back in time and see what they have missed the homepage becomes more than just a compliment to the radio network it becomes an interactive broadcasting channel in its own right.

Recently I was asked to give a talk at an internal BBC away day on the concept of Innovation Design. The word innovation is often overused, to the point where it has become almost meaningless to most people. In this talk I discuss how innovation is about influencing somekind of change no matter how big or small and how taking a grass roots approach is often the best way to approach innovation within a big organisation.

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My aim in this presentation is to not come across like the man in this advert.

Innovation is a word that gets used a lot but what does it actually mean? In the dictionary it gives a very broad definition.

“Something new or different introduced.”

But I think its useful to think about innovation in terms of bringing about somekind of change no matter how big or small. This might be through introducing something completely new into the world or re-purposing something that already exists either way its about bringing ideas to life and the execution of these ideas may be a physical or a cultural thing.

There are plenty of examples throughout history of innovation and I’m sure many of us can think of several such as the internet, the camera, the bicycle and there contemporary examples that may not seem so obvious but are also valid such as Street Car, a service that changed the way people rent cars in London and the Dyson that changed the way people use and perceive vacuum cleaners.

The problem with the word innovation is that when you use it, it instantly sets an expectation. If I said to you I’m going away to think about creating an innovative mobile experience. Your expectations are more than likely going to be quite high because of what you know of the iPhone. The iPhone is a fantastic user experience and instantly set the bar in terms of mobile product and interface design.

But I think this perception of innovation being this grand thing, this holy grail to attain is misleading. Innovation happens in lots of different contexts and on many different scales. Its borne out of a natural curiosity of observing the world around you, being inspired and then acting on it.

Take for example the wind up radio a small innovation that had a meaningful impact on peoples lives.

Back in 1991 Trevor Baylis saw a TV programme about the spread of AIDS in Africa and was shocked at the lack of access to information that people had about the ways to halt the disease so he set out to develop the Wind Up Radio.

One aspect of the term ‘innovation’ that bothers me is that its a word that gets very overused it is. Its become part of business speak a buzzword among many where it almost becomes meaningless. This is a another one from IBM which sums up nicely what I mean.

There are hundreds of books that aim to teach you how to be innovative. There’s the art of innovation, ten faces of innovation, making innovation work: measure it and profit from it, the oxford handbook of innovation, managing innovation, innovation a short introduction. I’m sure a lot of these books do have some useful information to impart but if you look at many of the great innovations that have happened throughout history they have occurred through curiosity, experimentation, exploration, trial and error, accidents, passion these keywords for me are the characteristics needed to make innovation happen. I think a good example of this is the story behind the creation of the mountain bike (and I’m going to paraphrase Charles Leadbeater who uses this as an example in his TED talk).

The mountain bike came from young people who were frustrated with the bikes that were available during the late 60′s which consisted of traditional racing bikes or bikes that had big handlebars and were too heavy. So, they got the frames from these big bikes, put them together with the gears from the racing bikes, got the brakes from motorcycles, and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients. And for the first few years of their life, mountain bikes were known as “clunkers.” and they were just made in a community of bikers, mainly in Northern California.

It was another 10 -15 years later before the big bike companies realized there was a market. In the present day mountain bike sales, and mountain bike equipment, account for over half bike sales in the world. This is a category entirely created by a group of passionate people, that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they couldn’t see the need or the opportunity and they didn’t have the incentive to innovate.

This grass roots approach that was taken to create the mountain bike is similar to the approach we need to take in a big organisation. Innovation needs to be part of the culture of day to day work and people need to be empowered to be able to act on ideas they feel are important to pursue.

Prototyping, workshops and hackdays are all methods that enable you to explore and create. And I want to give you an overview of three projects that I’ve worked on that illustrate this in practice.

Two or three years ago there was a lot of talk about visual radio but no-one really knew what it was or the opportunities that it could open up for radio. So a group of three of us kicked off a project to define what visual radio could be. What we ended up proposing was a prototype that became hugely successful and very influential within Audio and Music. The prototype we created led onto two visual radio trials during 2009 with Radio 1, Switch, Radio 4 and 5 live. The trial’s boosted traffic to these sites by 50% and on top of that it gained a lot of press in the media.

The entire process from ideation to execution was collaborative with editorial producers, ux, tech and DJ’s working together and it really opened up the eyes of the production teams to what is possible for radio on new platforms.

The technological innovation was that we created a console that brought together real time video, track info, text messages, studio updates and enabled the audience viewing the console to interact by sending messages and responding to calls to action.

The cultural innovation was that the production teams have started to think about their content in a much broader and interactive way.

And what is really exciting now is that we are starting work on a new project that will continue the evolution of using the web as a real time, interactive, broadcasting channel.

Another example is a workshop we did a few months ago exploring how we might evolve the Radio 1 chart online. The chart has been like it is for a long time now and doesn’t reflect how people interact with music these days. So seeing the potential of exploring another perspective on the Radio 1 chart we embarked on a two day workshop away from the office where we sketched ideas, talked to listeners of the chart show, went back to refine out initial ideas and developed three different audience experiences. This work then went onto inform a new beta Radio 1 chart application.

This chart is a radical departure from what has been on the site for many years and its the first attempt to integrate new functionality, and present the chart in a totally contemporary way.

The final example is a very recent hackday for Desert Island Discs. The programme has a rich heritage and recently we managed to aquire the rights to make the archive available online and we have lots of data about the programme such as such as castaway profiles, their music tastes, occupations, luxury items and favourite books. A group of us thought it would be a great idea to organise a hackday bringing together designers, csds and engineers to explore ideas and build prototypes that illustrate different ways of using the archive data.

The outcome of the hackday were a number of compelling ideas such as being to use your last lastfm profile, or manually entering your musical tastes, to connect you to Desert Island Discs castaways. Once these connections are made, other recommendations can be provided to you – programmes on the BBC, books to read and even luxury items.

Another idea involved analysing transcriptions to create a different way of navigating the programme content.

These prototypes and others that emerged from the workshop have really opened up new ways of thinking about how we might present Desert Island Discs online.

What I hope these projects illustrate is how innovation happens from spotting opportunities and being pro active. They also show how innovation can be created with simple ideas and how the way in which we collaborate with each other and our colleagues in other divisions also creates innovation on a cultural level.

Within user experience and design we have the remit not only to define a vision for compelling experiences across many products and services but also to propose and create new ones.

A while back I wrote about how a group of us brainstormed and produced some concepts for the Radio 1 chart show. After this workshop Hugh Garry, Tom Spalding, Patrick Sinclair and Chris Johnson worked with Six to Start to build a live prototype called The Love 40 and its just launched!

It’s a great piece of work and a good exploration of how to visualise and interact with the top 40 chart. It’s a challenge to reinvent something that has a legacy like the top 40 and present it in a completely new way. The interface is responsive and playful encouraging you to have a click around and explore and it will be interesting to see how the audience responds overtime as it’s such a radical departure from the design that has existed for a quite a while on the website (it’s been tweaked and update but essentially the format has remained the same). The way in which people listen and discover music is continually evolving so hopefully this new visual and interactive direction for the Radio 1 chart is just the beginning.

Read more about The Love 40 on Hugh’s blog.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about the key characteristics of creative leadership. It’s an important part of my role as a Creative Director and it’s a skill that I’ve developed over time having been responsible for many high profile projects and being exposed to diverse experiences in my day to day work. Currently I lead teams across different project areas. Each project requires a different creative approach due to a number of factors such as the scale of the project, the team itself, stakeholders, business objectives and audience needs. Good creative leadership has tangible results, and in practice its a skill that involves being able to draw on a variety of experiences and a particular way of thinking about problems. I think John Maeda sums it up really well in this example:

What I like about these characteristics is that its possible to draw on your own personal references to put them context. For example, “loves to learn from mistakes” is one characteristic on John Maeda’s list and I’m sure many people can reflect and think about mistakes that have occurred during their career. Making mistakes can be difficult but its a great learning process and gives you an experience you can draw on to do things better in the future.

Some of the characteristics have strong relationships to each other, for example enabling and encouraging teams to take risks at times requires you to lead the project like a ‘jazz ensemble’ and to get the best out of an iterative process its important to maintain an open and interactive environment where the team feel empowered to make decisions and create things quickly.

I think it’s important to bear in mind that John Maeda’s list  is not a template that can simply be copied and then bang your a creative leader. All of these characteristics are informed by ways of thinking and doing things throughout your career.  What I hope to do with a series of blog posts is to explore different facets of creative leadership putting some of John Maeda’s characteristics in context and also adding a few of my own. Hopefully it will provide an interesting overview of different techniques and approaches.

Desert Island Discs was created by Roy Plomley in 1942, and the format is simple: a guest is invited by Kirsty Young to choose the eight records they would take with them to a desert island. Due to its longevity it has a rich heritage and a dedicated audience. The range of prolific guests invited to tell their stories and talk about the memories that certain pieces of music invoke creates an engrossing programme.

Recently our team was given access to historical data about the programme, so in the spirit of creativity and innovation myself, Mark Channon (Technical Team Lead) and Chris Lowis (Software Engineer) organised a two day hacking workshop, involving software engineers, client side developers and designers to build  prototypes that illustrate how the data can be used in new and creative ways.

To kick off the workshop we started with some brainstorming exercises to get ideas flowing. The first exercise involved everyone grabbing a partner and asking them questions about music and objects that they would take to a desert island and why.

The second exercise was focused on generating ideas that could be potentially prototyped. To do this everyone split up into groups to discuss thoughts and ideas and sketch them.

After a number of ideas were jotted down we then launched into another exercise to help each group develop their concepts further using a word association technique called random input. This involved taking a random word from the luxury items that were noted in the previous exercise such as ‘cloak’, ‘piano’ and ‘bed’ and then using these words to spark off ideas around the initial concepts that had been written down so far in the ‘generating ideas for the prototype’ exercise.

After completing this exercise it was time for the groups to decide on which ideas to take forward. Due to the short timescale we all decided that a maximum of five ideas would be a resonable number to pursue. So in order to whittle down the huge number of concepts that everyone had generated to a manageable number Mark led us onto another exercise using a technique created by Edward de Bono called Six Thinking Hats.

This technique is particularly useful in a group situation where you need to make decisions quickly and encourage everyone to look at  decisions from a number of perspectives.

The following criteria enabled the group to evaluate each idea in turn and decide whether or not it was worth pursing within the context of the workshop.

• ideas – what is the idea?
• value – what value will this idea give to the group and the audience?
• risks – what are the risks involved? Do we have enough time? Do we have the right skills?
• feel – how does this idea make people feel?
• info – do we have the information available to make this happen? if not where do we get it from?
• solution – what do we need to do to make this idea a reality?

After going through this process (I’ve made it sound simple but its a lot of hard work and there was a healthy level of debate and discussion to) we arrived at five ideas. Everyone then split up into five teams of varying numbers to design and build them and I’ll go through each one in turn.

Pete Otaqui and Wai-Tai Li produced Last Island a project that uses your LastFM profile, or manually entered musical tastes, to connect you to Desert Island Discs castaways. Once these connections are made, other recommendations can be made to you – programmes on the BBC, books to read, or even luxury items!

This screenshot is an example of the interface for manually selecting your musical tastes.

Once you have done that you can then view your recommendations.

My Desert Island Memory created by Andrew Hilton, David Rogers, Hannes Jentsch, Tim Broom and Paul Kane is an app that enables you to leave a memory on a map.

The concept was inspired by how guests on the Desert Island Discs programme talk about their memories in the context of locations. Using My Desert Island Memory its possible to navigate a google map and then select an area to leave your memory.

The team also created a mobile version, the advantage being that you can leave a memory on the exact spot that you are standing in and also upload content such as photos straight from your phone.

There are some really nice touches such as the ability to specify your mood and its also possible to leave more than one memory on the map which creates a nice narrative as you navigate between locations.

Using the Desert Island Discs data Paul Duncan created Desert Island Discs – The Quiz. During the brainstorming exercise lots of game ideas were discussed ranging from a match the item to the Castaway to more complex multiplayer games. However in the time available Paul settled on a simple quiz.

The game demonstrates the usage of Desert Island Disc data but also other BBC and web sources. For example question three, ‘Voyage of the Beagle’ shows how the Castaway’s book was also discussed on In Our Time and a link to the programme page provides cross program integration. Paul also explored how to integrate music clips from /music along with artist information.

Desert Island Districts by James Sheppard, Martyn Wilkinson, Chris Thorne was an idea created to explore similarities between castaways, and represent those similarities as groups of islands with distances indicating how “close” different castaways are.

One part of the project looked at understanding similarity, or “relatedness”. Initially this was based on which castaways had chosen tracks by the same artist, but could be extended to choosing books by the same author, or having related luxury items. The group also worked on a visualisation of related castaways represented by an island.

Each island has two labels – the top is an identifier, and the bottom is a relatedness score with respect to the “parent” island. The higher the score, the closer the islands. Clicking on an island re-centres the view on that island and shows related islands. This way, the entire castaway archive could potentially be navigated by clicking on other related islands.

Chris Lowis, Yves Raimond and Melanie Seyer worked on an interesting concept called Desert Island Discs Explorer that involved analysing transcriptions to create a different way of navigating the programme content. These screenshots illustrate the concept.

The starting point is a word cloud that is produced by analysing transcriptions and picking out popular words. Clicking on a word reveals the guests that have mentioned it in their interview.

Its then possible to start listening to a segment of audio that relates to the keyword mentioned.

As the audio progresses its possible to show visual content related to that section, for example pull quotes or photos that relate to the keywords in that segment.

At the end of the two days each team presented their ideas to a packed out room from everyone in the department. Usually with any workshops we do on this scale we wrap up with a presentation to a wider group. This is to motivate the people participating, enable them to demo and articulate their concepts to a diverse group of people and inspire others with what is possible within a short amount of time.

I can’t stress enough how important workshops like this are. There are a number of benefits of holding such events as it brings together people who often don’t get a chance to work with each other, new skills are learnt, it is an opportunity for people to explore and solve problems from different perspectives and it creates an energy and buzz not only within the group that is participating but also when the ideas are presented to the rest of the department. Overall its a great way to stimulate creativity and innovation within a team.

Finally to make workshops like this succeed there are number of tips I’d like to share.

Preparation – this is key, make sure you you plan ahead and think about how the workshop will be structured including what material (physical and digital) you need to make available. In the case of this workshop Chris made sure all the data was available in a format that could be used by the software engineers and he organised servers for development.

People -  its important to make sure you have a good mix of people who are all able to contribute. Think about having a two or three people who may be strong in a particular area whether its design or development, this helps in situations where teams want to be really ambitious even when there is less than 24 hours!

Space – it really helps if the group have a space away from their day to day office to explore and generate ideas as well as having the right tools like wi-fi, pens, paper and food!

Facilitation – Brainstorming is an art. Its often the norm to kick off workshops with a little brainstorming in the morning to get people warmed up and generating ideas that they can pursue for the rest of the day. How this brainstorming is facilitated is critical. Prior to the workshops we discussed and thought about how to approach this and the outcome was a series of exercises that enabled the group to move from a broad range of ideas to then decide on one thing.

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A great clip from Mad Men. I recently showed this at a team meeting and I’m sure its a situation that anyone who has had to present creative ideas to clients or stakeholders can relate to.

This blog post is of a talk I recently gave at an internal BBC conference discussing the concept of designing services and  products for diverse audiences.

Here we go…

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I think its important for the User Experience and Design discipline at the BBC to consider designing experiences that go beyond just a website as a destination you visit using your computer or mobile phone. People demand more from the technology and services they experience in their everyday life and the challenge is that we need to consider how we create experiences that don’t just operate in one context but many.

Rock Band is a good example.

At its core is the video game you can play on your favourite games console. But that isn’t where the experience stops. Rock Band hits that sweet spot where a range of compelling experiences are created through the convergence of music, gameplay, peripherals and the fact that its social and its takes the idea of air guitar to a new level.

The popularity of the game is because its appeals to a diverse audience. The barrier to entry is set severely low, its a pick up and play game and this immediacy lends itself well to casual gamers. Traditionally gaming has always been seen as a geeky pursuit but rock band breaks that by being a game that is socially acceptable.

Even though it appeals to casual gamers, hardcore gamers don’t lift their noses at Rock Band. This is because the game has been designed with varying skills levels, leaderboards and lots of stuff you can unlock.

And it goes further than that. The physical experience of Rock Band doesn’t just stop at the fake guitar and drum kit but also the extends to club nights that are dedicated to the game.

There’s also the community aspect of rock band that happens both on and offline. Online fans can connect with each other, organise battles and share set lists. Offline people get together to watch their favourite bands from the game play live. Check out this clip on Vimeo and fast forward to 8:15 for an example.

And finally what I think is a very innovative move from the makers of the game is that they have made the authoring tools they use to make the game available to bands, studios and record labels and musicians so that they can turn their songs into Rock Band gameplay. This has proved to be massively popular resulting in fairly unknown bands being able to make money from distributing their content on the platform.

As you can see there many different facets of Rock Band to some people its just a game to others its an opportunity to distribute their music on a popular platform and make money.

So how does this apply to us, well we need to start thinking about the landscape we are now working in, which encompasses services and products. Our audiences are really diverse and things that we are designing and building also need to be diverse.

For me this sketch sums up the direction that we are heading, where we have services like bbc /music and /programmes that you can build different products to fulfill different audience needs.

Amazon does this really well, its created a rich eco-system of products that are powered by common platform, there is the website that most of go to buy things, then there are all these extensions of the service such as the widgets you can plug into your site and there is the iPhone app that you can use to take photos of things you see and Amazon will tell whether they have it in stock and of course there is a huge technical infrastructure that Amazon provides for companies and developers to plug into.

In a BBC context this maps onto the thinking that we have been exploring around /music and /programmes. Both services make data feeds available so its possible to create multiple products from these feeds. However before diving into how these products can be presented its useful to have a framework for understanding which experiences are suitable for the different audiences.

This matrix is one tool that helps to identify where user needs are the strongest and where for example, a service like /music can meet them.

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As you can see from the how the heat map animates all these personas have different needs and going through this process enables you to understand what their goals are.

Its at this point we can start using this insight and think about the most appropriate products for these people. Using a concept sheet its possible to map out a journey from someone knowing nothing about /music to having /music fulfill their needs. Typically you can achieve this by using lots of post it notes to map out the journey someone takes through a product experience. At the same time its important to identify the functionality we need from the /music service to bring to life.

What this process emphasises is that there is no one size fits all. we have to consider different experiences, different products that make sense to a diverse audience.

An example might be a product that focuses on delivering broad music entertainment that reflects current popularity and key events which would be ideal for people who don’t have much time and just want to be pointed at the latest and greatest things. Or it could be a set of tools that enables an audience to show off and share their passion for music, useful for people who are really into music and feel that its important for them to demonstrate their knowledge of a particular artist, genre, composer etc.

The real challenge I think is connecting digital services with real world experiences. The way in which we interact with music for example is hugely diverse and an important part of the experience is  going to gigs, clubs, pubs and meeting with friends.

This is where we need to think about how we design experiences that make use of the technologies around us. It might involve traditional marketing techniques combined with a digital interface such as pub beer coasters with QR codes to get exclusive content from the /music website or it could be the ability to scan the bar code of a CD in HMV with your phone that retrieves artist info from /music.

There are plenty of examples out there to draw inspiration from and the tools available to create these interactions are cheap and easy to use. Such as the Arduino which is a simple electronics board you can plug sensors into and you can send and receive data.

Some BBC Audio and Music projects that you may or may not be aware of are useful examples that put this into practice.

For the last couple of years at the Electric Proms we have projected text and Twitter messages on the inside of the Roundhouse.

Last year Kent Lyons created a playful interface where you can navigate the messages by swiping your hand across sensor.

There’s also been the Olinda radio that can connect to the Radio Pop website and informs you if your friends are also listening at the same time. You can read lots more about Olinda and Radio Pop at Cookin/Relaxin.

Then theres the DABagotchi prototype thats lets listener rate the track playing on the radio by squeezing its hand. If you don’t do this enough then it will fall ill (its glowing heart will beat less and dim) and eventually die. If the listener does rate a track then this data is sent to a webserver where it is compared to their previous ratings and other peoples’ ratings, causing the DABagotchi to express appropriate emotions (surprise, confusion, anger…) on its face.

And finally I want to leave you with the Rockterscale, one of my favourite projects, and its basic premise was measuring how hard a band rocks.

Building the Rockterscale! from Ben Hanbury on Vimeo.

The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own is a new work by Michael Rakowitz being exhibited at the Tate Modern. Rakowitz is an artist that operates as a ‘cultural archaeologist, uncovering an unexpected network of connections between historical fact and fantasy’. The exhibition is presented as a series of interwoven hand drawn images and written narratives, accompanied by various paraphernalia such as film, posters, fantasy novels and magazines.

The exhibition depicts the links between Saddam Hussein and western popular culture with strong references to Stars Wars and WWF. The project centres around the Swords of Qadisiyyah monument in central Baghdad, otherwise known as the Victory Arch. Through the exhibition there are multiple references to the victory arch such as a Star Wars poster of Darth Vader holding light sabers above his head and photographs of the american military posturing in front of it.

The artist also explores how the world of WWF wrestling portrayed a strange, almost mind twisting take on Middle Eastern politics. In the build up of coalition forces in 1990 Sargent Slaughter, a patriotic marine turns against America and becomes an Iraqi sympathiser forming a ‘the triangle of terror’ tag-team with his Iraqi manager General Adnan  and the wrestler Colonel Mustafa. They lose against Hulk Hogan in a stadium full of his patriotic flag waving fans. At the end of the first Gulf War Sargent Slaughter returns to his pro-american persona. Similary General Adnan took on multiple personas, as better storylines mean attendance in the world of WWF. After being told he looked like a native American he became Billy White Wolf and then after moving to London he became an eccentric, oil rich Arabian Sheikh.  Rakowitz gives a curious narrative into the short time General Adnan spent in Iraq, under the presidents orders, to promote wrestling in the country that eventually ends with him leaving the country covertly due to his popularity.

The telescope in the final room is a neat and humorous reflection on the many references to science fiction and space that are touched on. But I don’t want to give too much away, because there is a real sense discovery as you explore and move through exhibition

The narratives that Rakowitz presents in all its forms are engaging and curious, its an exhibition that is intriguing throughout, with plenty of humour and a darkside that will make you say out loud ‘that can’t be true’.

The exhibition is on at the Tate Modern Level 2 gallery until 3rd May.