An intelligent design on religion

Loyal fans trouped to a Fairfax movie house on Monday to watch a show based on a long-running public radio program. But it wasn’t the new film based on “A Prairie Home Companion.” It wasn’t even a film. It was a live performance of “Over the Edge,” the media manipulation/social criticism/hoax assembled weekly by members of the Negativland audiovisual art combine for Berkeley’s KPFA-FM (94.1).

“Prairie” star Garrison Keillor touches on religion (mostly Lutheranism) in his tales from the fictional Lake Wobegon, but nothing like Negativland’s presentation Monday. Titled “It’s All in Your Head FM,” it tackled the entire topic of monotheism in the modern world.

A complex creation -- intelligently designed, if you will -- the episode showed off Negativland’s masterful audio collage skills, with found-sound clips, music sources -- the sound effects and scripted bits ebbing and flowing between rhetorical satire and artistic impressionism.

Loosely structured as a “broadcast” on the “Universal Media Netweb,” the show was threaded by “Over the Edge” originator Don Joyce in the role of cultural researcher Dr. Oslo Norway, putting forth the notion that humans created the concept of God and the afterlife.

It’s hardly a new idea, but the Negativland approach is artistic enough to carry the conceits. Joyce wove hundreds of sampled voice clips into the rhetorical tapestry, and fellow Negativland members Mark Hosler and Peter Conheim deftly handled the music and sound effects/processing, sometimes poignant, sometimes snarky, sometimes light-hearted and sometimes heavy-handed.

Preachers, philosophers, social critics, scientists and plain folks were all represented among the unidentified voices, some presented straight, some radically edited and manipulated. The show’s first half largely took a mocking tone toward American Christianity; the second half a more somber approach addressing Islam.

Was this really meant to make converts? Well, the issue has been contested for thousands of years. Negativland wasn’t going to resolve it in two hours.