Making a drama out of a credit crisis

It could be a front-page headline from virtually any time over the past few months. But anyone visiting a website called Crisis in the Credit System will find something startlingly different from the familiar, dry editorialising. Instead, it's a 40-minute online drama described by its makers as "bizarre scenarios reflecting the strangeness of our situation today: life governed increasingly by abstract exchange and the accumulation of profit". Confused? You will be, almost certainly.

Divided into four short, free, downloadable episodes designed to resemble, at first sight, a television series, Crisis in the Credit System begins in a (relatively) conventional vein, as five employees of a large investment bank gather for a brainstorming retreat at an elegant country mansion. Their assignment: to find new ways of tackling the credit crunch via role-play sessions.

These start out with predictable scenarios of profiteering, hostile takeovers and share-price manipulation. But the executives' fantasies and fears swiftly escalate into downright weirdness. A financial analyst for an outfit named Delphi Capital Management – an oracle, albeit a highly unreliable one – goes into a trance and starts speaking in tongues, hedge fund managers and private equity heads fall prey to baroque delusions, humans fuse with computers and an apocalyptic meltdown develops.

The stories were devised by Melanie Gilligan, a Canadian-born conceptual artist based in London; she had shows at Tate Britain and the Serpentine Gallery last year. Gilligan started work on this latest project seven months ago in collaboration with financial journalists, economists and City insiders. "The possibility of a financial crisis has been an important topic for me for years now," she says. Even so, she was unsettled at the speed at which life recently overtook fiction.

Racing to complete the final edit of her film this week – it incorporates some of the weekend's headlines and news stories – Gilligan, 29, cites her influences. They include the hit television crime series The Wire, the enigmatic, cerebral films of Jean-Luc Godard, Raoul Ruiz and Jacques Rivette – and Karl Marx's Das Kapital.

"A lot of that helps you understand the contemporary situation," the artist says. By the close of their weekend retreat, her masters – and mistresses – of the universe are left bewildered, exhausted, disillusioned. But Gilligan denies that her message is baldly that greed is bad. "What I'm trying to say is much more to do with the way the whole system works. We are too focused on making money and economic expansion; not on society's needs."

Is this just modish radical extremism? Not according to Willem Buiter, who is a consultant for the beleaguered former investment bank Goldman Sachs and a professor at the London School of Economics. "Marx is, of course, one of the primary prophets of the crisis of capitalism," says Professor Buiter, one of the specialist advisers for Gilligan's movie. "So it's hard to make a film about it and not run into him. As long as we don't run into Stalin as well, it's not a major issue."

Crisis in the Credit System was funded by Artangel, an organisation known for offbeat projects, often with fringe dwellers and social minorities. Its previous commissions include Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave (a re-enactment of the 1984 miners' strike), a modern version of Exodus, shot with the homeless, unemployed and refugees of Margate, and High Wire, a current installation at London's German Gymnasium about a tightrope walk in Glasgow's brutalist Red Road housing estate.

Rehana Zaman, the producer of Crisis in the Credit System, hopes Artangel's latest venture will appeal equally to the general public, art enthusiasts and anxious business folk – probably our latest and most troubled minority. The film scarcely shows the latter in a positive light but, Zaman says, "We live in cynical times." Its world view, she insists, is not a million miles from the stories peddled daily in the national media. "There is the general sense that things have got out of hand."

Ann Pettifor is another of Gilligan's consultants and the executive director of Advocacy International, which advocates investment in low-income countries. "I thought it would be tough to get ordinary people engaged in quite arcane debates. I've struggled to do this myself," says Pettifor, who led a campaign in the 1990s to cancel Third World debt.

"Even today, although the crisis is front-page news everywhere, a lot of it is still very arcane and the language is deliberately obscure. Using the arts to talk about it is a very honourable thing to try to do," adds Pettifor, who has not yet seen Gilligan's film. "There has been the odd Hollywood movie, but they tend to be just about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll on Wall Street with a bit of gambling finance on the side. To discuss it in terms of bigger economic structures is much more challenging."

Still, all the talk in Crisis in the Credit System of arbitrage, tranches and derivatives may leave many ordinary viewers thoroughly bamboozled. Here's one of the more perplexing script highlights: "Mispricing in the land of efficiency. A derivative for friends, and a short shrift for enemies. Pan-Asian, global balanced: 77.37xd, €1.3779xd, down 17 per cent by start of 3rd quarter. Class B (est) $1,916.28. Class B (est) €1,880.92."

"It tells you as much about how the City works as Airplane! does about flying a jet liner," said one investment banker after viewing the film this week. Gilligan and Zaman admit Crisis in the Credit System is dense and complex, but like to think that the free online access will encourage repeat viewing. "There are various levels to it and we hope different people will find it interesting in different ways," Zaman says.

And perhaps illuminating these murky matters is, after all, an impossible order. Professor Buiter remains robustly sceptical that anyone can make much sense of it at the moment. "Since people in the financial sector don't know what's going on, it's hardly likely the general public would understand the first bit about it. Everyone is running around like a chicken without a head."

www.crisisinthecreditsystem.org.uk