Boswell in Space was the final project to be funded by Central Station’s Member Fund. It’s an experiment in documentary-making using a variety of old and new forms of communication, including illustration, photography, video and blogging. It is also an exploration of narrative, character and performance in the virtual world. Mitch Miller and Emma Lennox, the pair behind the project, sit down with the man himself (albeit in a spiritual incarnation) to reveal the thinking behind their interactive documentary adventure.

Boswell’s Ghost: I note that in your advertisements as to your undertaking, that you refer to my past incarnation, Mr Boswell, as the ‘first documentarian’. I must ask you to tell me more about this as I am unfamiliar with the term.

Emma: Well, your methods of documentation are very similar to today. You write very thoroughly about the human experience and you are particularly good at describing people’s character. I’d like to think that if you were still alive today, you’d have a film crew tagging along after you while you tweeted from your iphone.

Boswell’s Ghost: Madam, I am not a bird!

Emma: …not that kind of tweeting. Anyway, trust me I think you would find all these new ways of communication fascinating.

Mitch: Pretty much what Emma says. You obviously precede the invention of film, but all of the techniques we see documentary filmmakers using – recording the detail of what they see, interviewing, subtly changing their behaviour or approach as necessary, eavesdropping on conversation, fashioning characters out of real people – even creating situations and set pieces to see what happens – are all techniques you actually pioneered, just in print, not celluloid. I read this book about Direct Cinema once that outlined ‘crisis’ theory – that it is when you put real people in difficult situations that they reveal their character, and forget they’re being observed. I’ve noted that you did this all the time – you took Dr. Johnson into the Highlands where he was in every way out of his comfort zone, or introduced him to people he was politically or morally opposed to – just to watch what happened. And, like Nick Broomfield, you are always in the story yourself, often posing as an idiot (which if you don’t mind me saying was, in many ways, not a huge stretch for you…

Boswell’s Ghost: Not a huge stretch!?

Mitch: …BUT, to be sure, you are a clever, clever guy. You use your talents in acting to make people underestimate you, make them drop their guard. Above all, as Emma points out, you were indeed scrupulous in collecting details and tracking down facts and quotations – if only more journalists were like you!
Boswell’s Ghost: Sir, I find many of them fail in absolutely every regard!

Mitch: Exactly. You were interested in absolutely everything, and wrote it all down, which gives your books enormous documentary value, but also value as imaginative works of art. In fact, I think anyone interested in working in a documentary form should read your introduction to The Life of Johnson  (a great book by the way) which lays out how you worked – those methods still hold good today, and we wanted to explore that in Boswell in Space.

Boswell’s Ghost: It satisfied me that so much more of my work is known now – and increasingly valued, I hear. But pray, how did you come up with ‘Boswell in Space’?

Emma: Mitch came up with the idea. I just thought it would be great to tag along in a 21st Century style.
Boswell’s Ghost: Indeed. So much more is revealed by watching carefully from the back of the room.

Mitch: What she said…I’d noticed how ‘psycho-geographically’ you write about some places – like Child’s Coffee House, the description of Mrs Rudd’s dining room, or your home at Auchinleck – and wanted to explore that through trying to draw them. Spaces aren’t just a backdrop – they help create the ‘characters’ and are, in a sense, characters themselves. Emma then observed how you would be to a bloggers world, we started to spark off each other…

Emma: And then it all went out of control…

Mitch: That’s one way of looking at it.

Boswell’s Ghost: So your endeavours began in mid November, which I note is the anniversary of my past self’s great adventure to London in 1762. Many of us have, to be sure, been fascinated by the first of your episodes, but what stage are you at now?

Emma: We had a delayed start to the project, so we’re still playing catch up; filming actors’ readings, editing, writing and drawing. Everything has taken longer than expected so I have a load of material to edit, and Mitch is looking very ink stained. Fortunately our web designer, Ewan Sinclair, has been very patient with us!

Mitch: It’s been a struggle at times, no question – we’re trying a lot of stuff we’ve never tried before, and inevitably, that means there are occasional difficulties, and a need to reverse and rethink. Just gaining access to some places has been a major headache! Some of the other things we wanted to try – like making more use of email to create a narrative, for example – just wasn’t possible because of the limitations of available software (I’m looking at YOU Google mail) but I’m pleased at what we have achieved, with a mix of old, new, the specially designed and the freely available on the web.

Emma: what has worked though, has worked very well, such as animating the drawings and linking them up with my blogs and photographs, and we’ve also interacted with some great people along the way, who help to flesh out the themes of the journey and encourage people to look at them in a new way.

Boswell’s Ghost: What though, would you say has had cause to surprise you on this journey? Travel can be precarious…

Emma: A pleasant surprise has been exploring areas and finding that although the people and buildings may have changed in the last 250 years, the nature of the place is still the same. For instance the site of Child’s Coffee house near St Paul’s in London is now an area covered in coffee shops and cafes. We may think of coffee shops as a modern convenience, but people having been going o St Paul’s Churchyard for a cup of ground beans for centuries.

Boswell’s Ghost: I am glad to hear that the citizens of London still sit in the shadow of that great, edifying building to conduct their business. It ensures the spiritual is retained even as we are engaged in our material wellbeing.

Boswell’s Ghost: The impression sir (and madam) of this project is of a happy union of disciplines that results in a most felicitous variety of experience in the eye of the beholder. Are there other such associations of artists and poets who have come together in a cross-disciplinary undertaking that have had cause to inspire you?

Emma: I think we’re inspired by all the traditional methods of documentation, but have put them together in an unusual way. I’ve been looking at online documentaries such as Maisie Crow the photographer, and the story4 journalists. Creating the navigation of the website was one of the hardest parts, and along with Ewan we looked at the Dummy Jim website, and even the Donnie Darko website from a few years ago. We’re probably closer to a web comic than anything else.

Mitch: I’ve liked Chris Dooks’ work on ‘Ayrtime’ - a mixture of live events, art, music and podcasting to help generate activity and interest in his local area. I also came across the Book of the Erinyes, which combines bookbinding, printmaking and surreal fiction, and documents it online.

Boswell’s Ghost: But what next for your partnership? Surely this will not be the last collaboration between you?

Emma: I think, sir, you are a unique character, and it’s hard to imagine doing this with any other figure. The detailed descriptions of your life that you left us have made it easy to track places down and inspire new work. But I’ve really enjoyed telling a story this way, through Mitch’s drawings my photographs and writing, so we’ll definitely do something like this again. In the meantime, I’ll be continuing with freelancing and script work.

Mitch: My thoughts are turning to the Red Road Flats and a small cinema installed inside a caravan. But I think we shall definitely work together again – though I’m going to let her come up with the idea for the next one…

Boswell in Space is unfolding at www.boswellinspace.org
 Find out about the latest developments on the Boswell in Space Facebook page.

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Boswell in Space was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.

The winner of £1,500 on round five was Bobby Niven who will be making a film about the Hair Museum in Cappedocia, Turkey. He will be documenting the cave, the owner, the pottery workshops and the landscape in the region. He’ll also make a series of ceramic and stone sculptures to accompany the film.

We had 80 submissions in July, with requests totaling over £100,000. The team really enjoyed looking through the ideas and were impressed by the breadth and variety of the projects. Unfortunately we couldn’t fund everyone.

Our last £1,500 went to Mitch Miller and Emma Lennox who will be presenting “Boswell In Space – A Strictly Ill-adviced Documentary Journey“. It caught our eye because of the project is trying to do something genuinely multimedia, in a territory that’s still struggling to establish itself with frameworks and guidelines.

Congratulations to the winners.

Here, Boswell describes the scene when two Highland soldiers entered a London theatre, and received the sharp end of anti-Scottish resentment;

…two Highland officers came in. The mob in the upper gallery roared out ‘No Scots! No Scots! Out with them!’, hissed and pelted them with apples. My heart warmed to my countrymen, my Scotch blood boiled with indignation. I jumped up on the benches, roared out, ‘Damn you, you rascals!’, hissed and was in the greatest rage. I am very sure at that this time I should have been one of the most distinguished of heroes. I hated the English; I wished from my soul that the Union was broke and that we might give them another battle of Bannockburn. …[I] asked them of what regiment they were. They told me Lord John Murray’s and that they had just come from Havana. ‘And this’ said they, ‘is the thanks that we get – to be hissed when we come home…’But,’ said one, ‘If I had a grip o yin or twa o the tamd rascals I sud let them ken what they’re about.’

So, what kind of friend of Boswell are you? Destined for immortality, or a consoling spirit such as Johnston? We would like you to follow Emma and Mitch as they follow Boswell. As a ‘FoB’ (That’s ‘Friend of Boswell’) you will receive a special username and password right before the launch of Boswell in Space online. And, in the preamble to the event, will also receive exclusive material that fleshes out the story of Boswell, and the backstory to Emma and Mitch’s jaunt.

It’s dead easy, and can be done by:

-Clicking the RSS feed and following this blog – we will take note of you as a follower, and keep in touch!

-Liking our Facebook Page

-Writing to us at boswellinspace@gmail.com, where we will add you to our mailing list.

Boswell himself has graciously agreed to haunt the proceedings, and has learned the art of tweeting. Follow BoswellsGhost to receive his thoughts on the project. Incurable gossip that he is, Mr Boswell will also be using twitter to spread rumour, hearsay and news on a fairly regular basis.

Hope to see you there!

But first, we should describe who ‘we’ are; Mitch Miller is an illustrator and Emma Lennox is a podcaster – both are also writers. We have devised an online immersive journey experience that will encourage our audience (assuming we can find one – please let us know if you have any spare), other artists and people they meet to consider the mechanics of the imaginative process. 

Our subject is one James Boswell, who you may well have heard of – he is best known as the slightly bumbling companion to the famous Dr Johnson, who wrote the first major English language dictionary, and famously toured Scotland in the late eighteenth century. Boswell is often remembered as a sycophant, a fool and a stenographer who leeched off of more impressive figures. This is not totally inaccurate (he also wrote an unforgivably idiotic poem on slavery) but he was also rigorously self-aware, an imaginative observer of his surroundings and an excellent writer of non-fiction. We reckon he was the first real documentarian – someone who took information, fact and his observation of where he was and who he was with, and made it into art. The writer worked as today’s documentarians do, drawing from his own experience, entering dialogue with his subjects and then – often at his own instigation, observing them in moments of crisis or culture shock, in order to draw out their inner character.

Miller read Boswell’s scandalous London Journal when he was 23 – the same age as Boswell when he wrote the bulk of it. He was immediately impressed by the quality of its writing and the powerful imagery of its scenes and sequences of dingy alleyways, smoky pubs and ornate drawing rooms. Ten years on, he will now attempt to draw in the ‘dialectogram’ style, a number of the locations and places mentioned so vividly in Boswell’s work – starting out in Glasgow, and going to Edinburgh, Ayrshire, Mull, St Andrews and London. These drawings will show how Boswell’s feel for space was used to create characters in his nonfiction, and draw out elements of their personality and back-story.

But that’s not all – Lennox will be dogging Miller’s steps, a Boswell Mark II whose task shall be to document the process of visiting major Boswellian locations and meeting a range of people along the way – people who know about Boswell, people who don’t, but know a lot about the places he frequented, and various waifs and strays picked up on the way. Whereas Miller will be using very traditional methods – as old fashioned as a pen and ink – Lennox will use film, sound editing, photography, podcasting and blogging to observe Miller in pursuit of his obsession, almost as a character in his own work.

And then what? Well, we will be asking anyone who is interested to sign up as a ‘Friend of James Boswell’ via Facebook and Central Station sometime in late October. As part of the group you will receive a special password that will invite you to follow our ‘journey’ as an internet event, each stage of the trip being released in episodes through a flash website. You will be able to piece together the story, and what happened, through drawing, animation, video, podcast, blog and anything else we can dream up. We will post up details about the group on this blog over the next week, so please do join us! We will be releasing ‘trailer’ material from around mid October, so hopefully you won’t get too bored waiting for the internet event to happen.

Speaking of which, the actual event will begin on Monday the 15^{th of} November.

Why then? Well, that is the same date Boswell began his London Journal. While we will be delving into various of Boswell’s other writings, the Journal will remain the focal point of much of our misadventures, so we leave you with its opening lines – with which we couldn’t agree more  (except to say that all Boswell says applies regardless of sexual orientation, race, ethnicity or gender…);

The ancient philosopher certainly gave a wise counsel when he said, ‘Know thyself.’ For surely this Knowledge is of all the most important… A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge ‘what manner or person he is’. I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal of which I shall set down my various sentiments and my various conduct, which will be not only useful but very agreeable.

James Boswell, 15 November 1762 

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Boswell in Space was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.

Originally released in episodes between November 2010 and April 2011, the entire series will be viewable through a specially redesigned website. As the documentary was originally intended to be episodic, the filmmakers recommend that audiences take the journey step by step and watch one or two episodes at a time.

Inspired by the writing of James Boswell (1740-1795), Boswell in Space is an experiment in documentary-making using a variety of old and new forms of communication; illustration, photography, video and blogging. Describing a circuit of Scotland and England, from Glasgow through London to Auchinleck, the audience can explore Boswell’s pioneering documentary method through animated maps, short films and audio. They can also explore more general concepts of narrative, character and performance in the virtual world.

The project combines the talents of Journalist/Filmmaker Emma Lennox and illustrator/writer Mitch Miller, drawing on, film, illustration, photography and new media to tell the story of their pursuit of the world’s ‘first documentarian’.  

The narrative begins in Glasgow, then unfolds in a serious of episodes at each of the locations on the Documentary journey – Edinburgh, London (in four locations in the city), Mull (the isle of Inchkenneth, just off the coast) and Auchinleck.  You can visit each of these in sequence, or at any time through clicking on the interactive map on the home page.

Boswell in Space is a unique interactive experience. To follow the whole story takes over 2 hours, so we would recommend taking it an episode at  a time at your own leisure. Each episode (with the exception of the prelude in Glasgow) consists of a specially drawn, animated ‘dialectogram’ illustration of Boswell’s experiences and those of Lennox and Miller as they follow in his footsteps. The website uses sound and vision, so make sure you are in a place where you can listen!

 Website: www.boswellinspace.org

Email us at: info@boswellinspace.org

Find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Boswell-in-Space/159277644087880

Or Twitter at @BoswellsGhost

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Boswell in Space was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.