David Malone began his career at the BBC. In the eight years he spent there he developed what the critics called a "disturbingly lyrical" styles and established a reputation for "television of the highest quality". Since becoming an independent film-maker David Malone has continued to produced single films and series for both BBC and Channel Four. His more recent work, for the Science, Religion and History departments, has been described as "breathtaking", "provocative" and "beautiful". His work ranges from the political to the philosophical.
The London Times called David Malone's award winning series Testing God, "moving and startling - as close to poetry as television gets." The sequel series Soul Searching, was described as being "good for the soul of television" itself.
In 2005 David Malone produced and directed "Voices in my Head" for Channel 4 and he has just completed a 90 minute documentary for BBC 4 entitled "Dangerous Knowledge".
In his Whitehead lecture of the autumn semester 2007, David Malone presented a talk entitled, “An Outsiders view of the Self and Certainty”. His academic background is in hominid evolution. He began his film making career at the BBC’s Science Department in 1986. During his time there he established the record for bringing Tomorrow’s World the closest it ever came to not making it to transmission. He made films ranging from the Flow of Time to the legacy of Darwinism in modern thought. More recently he has made a several series of films that have looked at questions of Consciousness, the Self and Soul as well as arguments surrounding the work of Kurt Gödel, whether Computation can ever be Conscious, how the mind models other people, the limits of Certainty and the source of Creativity. His thinking has been influenced by, amongst others, Roger Penrose and Greg Chaitin, Louis Sass and Iain McGilchrist.
An Outsiders view of the Self and Certainty.
Abtract of the Whitehead lecture of the autumn semester 2007: In this talk I will offer a series of questions that have been the basis for nine films over the last ten years. Culminating with Dangerous Knowledge shown on BBC4 this year. Like the films, each question led to the next. Beginning with wondering how to describe the relationship between Consciousness and the Self and ending with wondering if the modern Self’s obsession with Proof and Certainty is neither healthy nor perhaps inevitable.
Along the way the talk will touch upon the phenomenon of artists and scientists who hear voices, robots who believe in God, Greg Chaitin’s views on creativity and computation and Wolfram’s work on Cellular automata. My job as a documentary film maker is to find a way of posing or framing a question that draws together views which at first might seem disparate and unexpected. What comes out of this process is rarely an answer, but hopefully deeper, richer questions.
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