The Common Sense

The Common Sense is an experimental narrative drama that tells the story of a speculative future technology, “The Patch,” that makes it possible to directly experience the physical sensations and feelings of another person. The film spans the period of a decade and shows the social and political effects of the Patch over time. After many years transforming the conditions of work and social life, for the most part in accordance with economic demands, the technology’s networks suddenly fail causing massive disorientation. People withdraw into themselves since they no longer know how to communicate with one another in a meaningful way without the aid of the technology. When the system is back “online,” and The Patch is functioning again, the story splits into two separate parallel storylines. In one of the storylines, after the rupture, society undergoes a normalization and The Patch continues as a part of daily life. In the second storyline, groups come together to try to form social movements to resist the exploitative elements of the technology. In this way the work raises questions about our present relationship to technologies (e.g. mobile telephones, iPads) which increasingly shape our minds, our bodies, and the way we live and interact in a capitalist system. The video installation draws from a feminist sci-fi tradition that includes the work of writers Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin in which sci-fi is used as a means for both critiquing a social order and proposing a different vision. The story is also influenced by social movements and riots across the world that respond to capitalism’s permanent crisis.

2014-2015

INSTALLATION IMAGES

Melanie Gilligan, The Common Sense, 2014-2015, courtesy of Melanie Gilligan and Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf.
Installation at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht. Image credit: Niels Moolenaar.
Installation at Frans Hals Museum Hal, Haarlem. Image credit: PH.GJ.vanROOIJ
Installation at de Appel Amsterdam. Image credit: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkirk
Installation at Trondheim Kunstmuseum.

VIDEO STILLS

EPISODES

Phase 01

Episode 01
Gibson teaches a university media studies class on the Patch, where she informs students about the early history of entrainment technology. Gibson plays them an old television program called The Common Sense. In the first episode of The Common Sense we meet Liz, Jackie and Vicki. Jackie is having a Patch installed in her uterus. As a result, Vicki receives a message saying that her Patch connection to the experience of a baby in the womb is about to start. Liz is on her way to work at the Patch Outreach Center at a university when she suddenly receives a message saying that the new Patch two-way models have arrived. Liz approaches the center excited.

Episode 02
In the classroom, the students continue watching The Common Sense. Liz arrives at work excited, and Ulysses tells her that the new Patch two ways will be used to monitor the employee’s customer service. Liz is disappointed yet again in how the Patch is being used. Gibson tells her students about how the Patch technology changed how we perceive and relate to one another but in other ways, disappointed expectations. Lina has to step out of the discussion to focus on her Patch job while in class. In Victoria’s workplace the boss asks his employees for ideas about the new Patch two-way. Liz and Ulysses serve clients at the Patch Outreach Center and Ulysses demonstrates to Jake how to use the Patch.

Episode 03
Liz is serving clients when she upsets a client at work and gets bad customer service feedback. Then she receives a message via her Patch that she is fired. Gibson talks to the class about getting feedback with the Patch the way Liz has just done in The Common Sense. She asks the students in the class if they are working at other jobs via the Patch during class, and she finds out that most of the class are at jobs. The class seem to get annoyed when she is questioning Patch feedback which has become a way that commercial operations have been seamlessly incorporated in relations. While Ulysses is at work, he gets an extremely high bill and gets upset, sending Jake who has left the center a lot of frustration because they are still connected by the Patch. A visitor to the Outreach Center has a Patch rejection. Jackie does sex work in a bathroom stall.

Episode 04
Jesse is worried that he upset one of his contacts and feels like a disaster has occurred since his contact network is the only chance he has of getting anywhere in life. He lives in an apartment shared with many other people, one of whom is Lucas, a computer programmer that could not go to college. He is a friend of Romy’s. Romy wakes up in her shared apartment. Her roommate has no food to eat for breakfast, so Romy connects with her friend so that she feels full despite not being able to eat. Romy gets to work, and her boss is upset at her because she is not wearing her Patch. He entrains with her, and she feels how close she is to being fired.

Episode 05
Victoria meets with a factory owner to convince him to use the Patch two-way in his business so that workers can give constant feedback to employees about whether they are happy with their work. Jackie visits Liz at the Outreach Center and asks Liz to help her get access to her baby’s channel. Gibson is teaching the class when all of a sudden, she notices that the students are upset and despondent. She asks them what’s wrong and they say the Patch network has turned off. Once the students realize how bad it is, they all have major panic attacks. Gibson asks Banine to visit her students to see how they are doing. The episode ends with all the class sitting in stunned silence. In a summary of coming episodes we see that Liz ends up helping Jackie.

Phase 02A

Phase 02B

Episode 01
After the Patch breaks down, Gibson wakes up to a life that feels different. All the students are at home recovering so Banine visits Lina to check on her. Lina is finding it difficult to adjust to not working via the Patch. Romy is woken up by her roommate’s alarm clock. That day at Romy’s job, the Patch suddenly turns back on causing, and all of Romy’s Patch connections to be confused. She gets a message that he is fired. As she leaves, she punches her boss. At the university, all the students have their loans revoked by lenders putting them into dire straits. Romy gets another message saying that all her loans now have to be repaid immediately because she has lost her job.

Episode 01
All the students are at home recovering and Cat is watching the show The Common Sense when her father Liam comes in. In The Common Sense, Jackie is at work when she feels her baby is moving disturbed by something. Jackie receives impressions of Victoria having a fight with her boss. Banine visits Cat to check on her after. Before Banine and Cat can talk, they meet Cat’s father Liam who offers Banine a job. When the Patch turns back on Cat has a violent Patch rejection. Banine gives a speech to an audience when she is starting her job at the Drift and as she gives her speech she talks about how people are changing from using the Patch.

Episode 02
The episode starts with an episode of The Common Sense where Liz is speaking to a group of people we do not see and she tells them how, because her girlfriend Jackie is pregnant, she has started working as a Patch connection councilor. To make extra money Frances calls Liz to because she wants Liz to help her roommates Mira and Octavia to get along better while using the Patch. Then we see a radio show where a character Joanie is discussing how despite the huge wave of protests, there is no response to change people’s situations. Romy connects to her roommate again to give her a sense of having eaten and hears from her about huge protests happening. The protest are against how the Patch has reshaped people’s lives to tie them into work and interconnect money to every aspect of their relations with people. Lina and Jesse meet Romy and Lucas at the protests. Gibson joins them. The protests get upsetting when Romy is beaten up by the police. Victoria checks indexes tracking global political conflict. Liz visits Frances, Mira and Octavia and discusses how Octavia feels.

Episode 02
Banine continues her speech, revealing that all Patch rejection victims are showing signs that their brains are growing a new organ. Banine begins her job at the Drift. She starts working on her research and doing studies with Patch memories. On The Common Sense, Victoria remembers how in the past she met with an angel investor about getting capital to start a Patch related business. Liam asks Banine to do a secret research project with him.

Episode 03
On The Common Sense, Liz is telling the unknown group about her contact with Frances, Mira and Octavia while they are in the library studying. Mira and Octavia argue over a book while wearing their Patch and the feedback between them is too much for both of them. Lina, Lucas, Romy, Gibson, and Jesse have discussions with many people in Jesse’s shared apartment. They all discuss how people can live without money and as the meeting finishes, we get an inkling that they are all being surveilled by the police. At another meeting people talk about life now that people are deciding to stop using the Patch. Romy and Lina are more militant about rejecting the Patch, while Gibson thinks that the Patch is a useful social and political tool. After the meeting, Lina and Romy ask people to attend a meeting of their group that uses the Patch to find ways to develop people’s needs that are not individual but rather collective needs. Romy talks about an example from her own life about how many people use the Patch to suppress hunger.

Episode 03
Banine begins working with Gibson and Saar. Victoria remembers how after she pitched her idea to the investor, a man does a pitch to start the same type of business and the investor invests his capital in the man instead of her. That man, Jamie Jack, ends up becoming Victoria’s boss. William is fired from the Drift for hiding his research. After he is fired, he storms off into the offices as if he is going to do something unpredictable, but a security guard stops him before he can. At the end of the day, Victoria has a sex worker over to her apartment.

Episode 04
Lina, Romy, Gibson and Banine visit a daycare and while they are talking it becomes clear that they have different ideas of how people should use the Patch. Octavia gets upset so she and Liz talk. Mira and Octavia tell Liz about their interdisciplinary research with Frances where they are working to get people to care as much about events in the world as they do about the events in their personal lives. Jackie is working as a dishwasher and feels her baby feeling disturbed in her womb. Lucas goes to visit Gibson and Banine who are working with children to teach them to use the Patch to connect to multiple people at once.

Episode 04
William asks Banine to start doing research off-site. Gibson has to go back to work so Lina takes her place. During her experiments with Lina and Saar she discovers that the common element in all the Patch recordings are that desires and needs are satisfied in the end by money. Thinking about how all the Patch data samples that Liam has giving her trace the connection between needs and their realization through purchases, makes Banine realize what Liam’s secret research project is. She realizes that Liam is studying the similarities between the Patch and money.

Episode 05
Riots break out in response to the terrible living conditions of all the people with low income pay and their lives of constant work. Saar and Lina take part in the riots and protests, along with many other people. As the episode ends, the police arrest Lina and Romy. At the end of the episode, we finally meet the group that Liz has been talking to. They are a left political group, and Joanie who we saw on the radio show in episode 2 is one of the people among the group.

Episode 05
On The Common Sense, it is the same evening and Victoria is upset. She connects to a factory full of workers working a night shift and transmits her anger to all of the workers, pushing them to work faster and harder. Jackie feels the upset from her baby and is suddenly having intense pains. As Victoria forces the factory workers to work more and more intensely, she abruptly switches their feelings onto two-way so that she receives all of their hard work, frustration and pain. Victoria breaks down, Jackie breaks down and The Common Sense episode ends. Banine tells Liam that she has figured out his plan. Liam tries to convince her to continue to work with him but she decides she will not work with Liam.

CREDITS

  • Victoria – Vicki Kim
    Liz – Stacey Iseman
    Jackie – Jackie Rowland
    Boss – Scott Walker
    Ulysses – Ulysses Castellano
    Frances – Tina Hung
    Octavia – Sheri Beatty
    Mira – Samara Stern
    Company owner – Bruce Gram
    Investor – Tom Ackers
    CEO – Josh Dolphin
    Mack – Jesse Nahmabin
    Speaker – Neils Hodsman
    Michelle – Michelle Jedrzejewski
    Joanie – Samantha Wright
    Male student – Scott Sobere-Yu
    Jake – Rudy Tijerino
    Female student – Adele Hicks
    Friend – Jessica Callaghan
    Dominique Sheffel-Durand
    Brian Cantwell- Smith
    Joey – Christopher Golvchenko
    Patty – Victoria Sullivan
    Larissa – Danka Scepanovic
    Listener / female runner – Kirsty Hong
    Christopher (squash player) – Christopher Regimbal
    Vinod (squash player) – Vinod Vaikuntanathan
    Rodrigo (squash player) – Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez

  • Producer / Directors
    Producer: Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
    Director/Curator: Barbara Fischer
    Gallery Contact: Christopher Regimbal
    Gallery Staff: Rebecca Gimmi
    Director: Melanie Gilligan
    Assistant to Ms Gilligan: tom ackers

    Production
    Production Manager: Coral Aiken
    Production Coordinator: Heather Young
    Production Assistant: Michael Makrimichalos
    Production Assistant: Cassandra Tierney
    Production Assistant: Chad Thomson
    Production Assistant: Liza Mae Padilla
    Production Assistant: Mariana Hernandez-Glez
    Production Assistant: laura mackenzie
    Driver: Kipling Harrop
    Production Assistant: elene Mekete
    Production Assistant: Stephen T Corston
    Production Assistant: Alvin Sun

    Assistant Directors
    1st Assistant Director: Andrew Nicholas Mccann Smith
    2nd Assistant Director: Charlie Newrick

    Art Department
    Production Designer: Jennifer Thomas
    Set decorator: Zosia Mackenziec
    Art Dept: Kelsey Tremblay

    Camera department
    Director of Photography: Cabot Mcnenly
    1st Assistant Camera: Adam Burrows
    2nd Assistant Camera/dmt: Alex Motley
    Camera Trainee: Korbyn Mclean

    Grip/electric Department
    Gaffer: Ryan Hernandez
    Gaffer: Chris Spatafora
    Gaffer: Jhordan Naoe
    Key grip: Briana Blades
    Grip swing: Cheryl Sileikis
    Swing: Courtney Bruneau
    Swing: Alex Poutiainen
    Best boy: Adam Belyea

    Hair & Makeup Department
    Key hair makeup / wardrobe: Jessica Panetta
    Hair makeup / wardrobe: Christina Spina
    Wardrobe assist: Alissa von Malachowskic

    Locations Department
    Locations manager: Tom Ackers
    ALM: Camila Tamburini
    University of Toronto: Elizabeth Cragg/Office of Space Management manager

    Sound department
    Location sound: Paolo di Teodoro
    Location sound: Voice Gajic

    Equipment suppliers
    Camera/grip/lighting: Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT)
    Vehicles: Advantage
    Camera/grip/lighting: Charles Street Video

  • Annemarie Ooft – Gibson
    Judith Edixhoven - Banine
    Djamilla Landbrug – Lina
    Yardeen Roos - Romy
    Cat Smits – Saar
    Thijs Prein – Jesse
    William Sutton – Liam
    Pepijn Cladder – Lucas

    Extras
    Inge Rots, Zuleika Coffie, Dave van Creij, Lydia Jevtic, Toby Unigwe, Ada Unigwe, Ulrica de la Mar, Charlie Curilan, Rick Kuitems, Sandra San, Fleur Sinkgraven, Emyron Paula, Sofie Groot Dengerink, Francine Beusekom, Rinke de Haan, Gerben Vaillant, Guusje America, Leo Wassing, Joselien Dijkstra, Robert Roest, Ayesha Ghanchi, Mirjam Marinus, Kim Duinmeijer, Eleni Mina, Ana Mafalda Gomes, Arnold van Egmond, Irene Minneboo, Iris Wissenburg, Rianne van Leeuwen, Suzanne van Tielraden, Quint Swart, Saïd van Hattum, Mario van Megen, Maarten Nouw, Xander Karstens, Eric de Bruyn, Jacob Kemmeren, Joris van Beusekom, Sensie Mourik, Simon Atis, Lorenzo Benedetti, Wart Rufus Frencken, Sasha Wright, Monique Johanna Valkenburg, Darryl Felter, Roosmarijn Hompe, Helena Meix Casas, Deborah Sielert, Maya Knight, Adeline s. Banker, Alexis Hudson, Alicia Wright, Vasiliki Belia, Laurn Soldano, Vivian Ziherl, Nora Wohlfeil, J.A. van Rijk, Marcus van Bimsbergen, Robin Schroauwers, C.G.M. van der Mark, Jeanine Belger, Anna, Lotte, Isis, Rivka, Ilja, Robyn, Franka, Jimmie, Joya, Yash, Mattieu, Sophie, Darius, Ivar, Evelien

  • Artist: Melanie Gilligan
    Producer: Danielle Guirguis
    Producer Manager: Peter Wingender
    Directors assistant: Saskia Kampuis
    Director of Photography: Matthew Noel-Tod
    Camera help: Manuel Marini
    Gaffer: Otto Ligt
    Sound: Ruud Bouma
    Intern/Production Assistant: Lara Garcia Diaz
    Production Assistant: Emma Panza
    Production Assistant: Carlijn Bakker
    Intern / Production Assistant: Bjorn van de Logt