Mark Slater’s creative-production practice · est. 2013
The practice
Crowded Mind is Mark Slater’s creative-production practice, and the name of the company he founded in 2013. It is built around one conviction: an idea arrives before its medium does. For a while, the same fragment could still become a film, a book, a song, a photograph, an artwork or a performance — and each of those futures would keep something the others give up.
Today, Crowded Mind is an umbrella around Mark’s work across composition, writing, visual culture, technology and production. The finished work may live elsewhere; this is the place where its possible forms are held together long enough to choose well.
The forms explored here — film, books, music, photography, art and theatre — are examples, not the edges of the practice. They are different notations an idea might ask for.
Explore Mark Slater’s development work
We produce the idea first, and the medium second.
Study №1 · a conceptual study
A choir rehearses in an empty station after the last train.
Choose the form it takes.
Below: the same study in all six of its possible forms.
Arrow keys move between forms; number keys 1 to 6 choose a form directly; 0 or Escape returns to undecided, showing all six documents.
ScreenplayFIRST DRAFT — UNPRODUCED
INT. RAILWAY STATION, CONCOURSE — NIGHT
The departures board has gone blank. A cleaner’s trolley stands abandoned by the barriers.
Somewhere past the ticket hall, a single voice finds a note and holds it. Another joins. Then forty.
The sound climbs into the iron roof and stays.
Film gives the idea duration — a night that must be lived through in order.
Book proofUNCORRECTED — NOT FOR SALE
One
The last train left at 23:41, and the station exhaled. It was the low voice that began it — one note set against the hum of the vending machines — and the others came in the way swimmers enter cold water: one by one, gasping, glad.
By midnight the concourse had forgotten it was ever a place for leaving.
1
A book gives the idea interiority — you are told what the singing is for.
Lead sheetdemo — unreleased
Freely, ♩ = 63 · E minor
EmG/DAm7
The last train gone, the boards all dark,
CB7sus4B7
we tune ourselves to the vending hum —
EmGC
forty voices in an iron sky.
Music gives the idea pulse — it happens again each time it is sung.
Caption sheetSTUDY — NOT PRINTED
Roll 3, frames 12–14. HP5+ pushed to 1600. Available light: board off, one service lamp. f/1.4 at 1/30.
Photography gives the idea an instant — one frame that stands for the whole night.
Gallery placardConceptual study — not exhibited
Sound installation: forty recorded voices, a decommissioned departures board, timetable paper.
Dimensions variable.
Art gives the idea an object — something that goes on standing there without you.
Prompt bookREHEARSAL COPY — UNPERFORMED
House hum. The departures board flickers out.
LX Q3 — GOTHE CHOIR enters severally through barrier 4, in coats, as passengers who missed nothing.
CONDUCTOR
(raising a hand, to the roof rather than the singers)
Listen. The building is in E.
The note begins before we see who starts it.
SQ 2 — GOTheatre gives the idea presence — bodies in the room, and the risk that tonight it goes differently.
Study №2 · a conceptual study
An orchard is divided between two brothers, tree by tree.
Choose the crossing it makes.
Below: four crossings, and what each one finds and loses.
Arrow keys move between crossings. Escape returns the idea to its uncrossed state.
Caption sheetSTUDY — NOT PRINTED
Frame 7 — Two ladders against one apple tree, leaning from opposite sides. Late light. Nobody in frame.
Foundthe image — two ladders, one tree. Lostwhich brother owns it.
Gallery placardConceptual study — not exhibited
The Inventory, undated. 214 numbered brass tags, one orchard map cut in half. Dimensions variable.
Foundthe count — division made physical. Lostthe season.
ScreenplayFIRST DRAFT — UNPRODUCED
EXT. ORCHARD — DAWN. Two men walk the rows with paint. Red marks. White marks. Neither speaks. One tree at the boundary is left unmarked.
Foundtime — the unmarked tree can wait until the last scene. Loststillness.
Book proofUNCORRECTED — NOT FOR SALE
Their father had counted the trees every autumn, and so the number 214 was the only will he needed. It did not divide by two. That was the sentence neither brother said aloud.
Foundthe reason. A book can say the unsaid number. Lostthe light.
The idea survives every crossing. The medium is a decision about what to keep.
In every choice, something is lost and something is found.
Studies №1 and №2 are conceptual examples — written to show how the practice thinks, not records of produced work. The real record follows.
The record · verified
Everything above is written to show how the practice thinks. Everything below is real, listed at its true degree of crystallisation.
Produced
Score for the fulldome film — a theatrical immersive medium — recorded with the City of Prague Philharmonic. One of several fulldome scores since 2013.
Toured · 2018
Poster art for Stevie Wonder, touring with the Song Party Tour in 2018.
Working prototype
Grew out of education work; developed and tested with real students to a working prototype.
Showcased
Developed in the company’s first year; reached a webpage showcase of the artwork and story. Still waiting to become a book.
Medium undecided
An entire world for a near-future Earth living with AI — to become a novel or a media experience. Artwork concepts and postcards from people in the world are ongoing. The register above is not a metaphor.
Verified facts
The invitation
Call sheetDAY 1 — DATE TBC
The address is real — any address at crowded-mind.com reaches the studio.
The work begins before the form is fixed.
That is where Crowded Mind begins.
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