This afternoon I doodled while watching artist Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody In The Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984?–?1992. 

Acid house is often portrayed as a movement that came out of the blue, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously impregnable boundaries of class, identity, and geography.

At one point in the documentary he shows a bunch of students one of my favorite clips of all-time: a bunch of people in a club Detroit in 1981 dancing to Kraftwerk’s “Numbers.”

“I’m happy that I live on a planet where that happened once,” he says.

After I made these notes and posted them here, I started reading Deller’s retrospective, Art is Magic, and in the very first chapter there’s a drawing, “The History of the World,” that he made in 1996:

“Everybody in the Place is, more or less, The History of the World mind map made into a film,” he writes. “The map is basically the script.”