Hannah Nicklin

Digital Media and The Arts

Digital Media and the Arts

So, an editorial-style blog and couple of creative pieces later I think there’s a ‘what I am up to’ blog due. Short answer: lots. But if you follow me on Twitter, or speak to me occasionally you probably already know that – so here’s a long-answer-picture of everything that’s been going on over the past few weeks.

Today I was at a combination of the Arts Council England (ACE) AmbITion and my first meeting/contract signing with Theatre Writing Partnership. I’ll talk a little more about the content of the former in a bit- firstly: ‘contract signing?’ I hear you cry! ‘what is this craziness?’. Aha, well I can now officially say that I have been contracted by TWP as a freelance Online Communication Officer, the idea being that over the summer I work with them on a freelance basis, helping them spread their digital roots. This will be in conjunction with a website overhaul being done elsewhere, building up to a big, exciting, social media theatre writing experiment around October time. TWP are (for the uninitiated) an East Midlands based new theatre writing initiative – I came across them in my first year of uni through the Momentum Festival – it was with TWP that I wrote my first ever piece of theatre, I made many friends (Lucy, Alex, MorpheanRamble, Robin, Phil, Sabrina) through the festival and it set me off on my current trajectory as an aspiring playwright. TWP are a brilliant resource for theatre writing in an area in which there are very few (in comparison to London) opportunities to have work read and developed. My work with them will consist of getting an online presence together, creating an online space for all of TWPs past writers, workshop leaders and other participants to reconnect and catch up, really build a grassroots-style support and opportunities network for them, get a blogroll together etc., as well as looking at how new and social media can work for a new writing theatre company. Very exciting stuff! So today I met up with Bianca from TWP, sorted all the contractual things, and got started, watch this space!

This morning (as anyone who follows me will know) I was at the ACE AmbITion day. A morning of speakers followed by an afternoon of workshops (we skipped the afternoon of how-to’s). I missed the introduction due to a combination of a late train and having a map to the wrong Broadway (one’s a street, one’s a cinema >_<) and instead went straight into one of two speakers. The first up was Alex Fleetwood (@ammonite). Alex was from Hide and Seek, they don’t call themselves an arts company per se, but what they’re doing is some very exciting and challenging stuff. Their main project is one of play – the idea being that play is going to be central to culture in the 21^st Century, it took in all kinds of ideas on ‘play’ from video games to childhood games to immersive theatre in the style of Punchdrunk, Forced Entertainment et al. The most valuable (IMO) thing that I took away from the talk however, was the model of involvement that it used. It basically took on the Wiki ethic and put it in a performative/artistic context. Examples of their work include Wiki developed city-wide games of hide-and-seek and spy narratives, and one particular piece which was a game for two- one of whom was in a tomb-raider style puzzle house, and the other who controlled and interacted from a rich online environment. These pieces were all self generating. The framework was there, but the content was user generated, interractive and built in the ‘sandpit‘ of what essentially was a dev community. The games were beta tested, altered, shared and shared alike. This is a step on from ideas of devising theatre, there is no final text, there may be words spoken, but it is the participant’s play. It raised fascinating questions about authorship, of how people accept rule-sets, of created and real identity, basically bloody gold dust in terms of my theatre and tech PhD, and otherwise essential ideas for the future of performance and art.

However I was a little disappointed with the rest of the event, the next speech was more than a little lacklustre, less about potential for new work, and more about the process of some pretty standard old work. The Q&A at the end brought up two questions which stick in my mind. Overall the comments consisted of bemused excitement, people seemed to repeat the fact that it was all so over their heads so complicated etc, they could see the potential but not what it meant for them – but I suppose that’s what the second half of the day was about- getting people to jump in and see that the digital world is not scary. But it was a little depressing – the resistance to these ideas- they seemed to say ‘yes but you’re young, you know about these things, I don’t’. Um…. Well learn then! Dive in! Learn that it’s OK to not know, that it’s where everyone starts. I did fine art and English lit A levels, my respective degrees are in Drama and Playwriting, when I went to school the most advanced piece of kit we had was a little mushroom shaped thing on wheels which you could program to travel a variety of distances, left or right (I don’t know what that was supposed to teach us). My point is that everything that I know about the tech world is what I’ve taught myself, and learnt from friends, peers, family. Do some people decide that they have finished learning? That they know enough? I know so little about so many things, I’m hungry for it, for understanding, for information. This rant relates onwards, don’t worry, to two specific questions that came up. The first one I’ll mention was after Alex Fleetwood’s talk on Hide & Seek, from a gentlemen near the front of the room, I didn’t catch where he was from. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically asked:

“But how do we get these 13 year old kids away from spending 10 hours a day on World of Warcraft and on to more important, social things?”

I’m being very, very restrained by not breaking into a full on rant here, because I don’t think it would be terribly constructive, let me just outline all the things that are wrong with that question.

1. The assumption that WOW is antisocial
2. The assumption that what the questioner calls ‘art’ is worthier than a game
3. The assumption that games and art cannot be the same thing
4. The assumption that time spent on WOW is wasted
5. The assumption that it is our job to rival the ‘bad influence’ of games.

We should be learning from the model of MMORPG games – they enthral people because they put them at the centre of a story, they make the player an originator. People connect online, just because the connection doesn’t fit hitherto subscribed to social norms, doesn’t mean the connection is any less. Often, in terms of intellectual engagement, it can make it is somehow more. I’m not saying that all theatre should be like a game- but in our world there are new questions arising from new politics of identity and communication. Gaming communities are vibrant, strong, and active things, it’s so ignorant to assume that your way of living your life is somehow right, and another wrong, rather looking at the differences between the two, trying to understand. Why might someone spend so much time online? What does the VR give them that RL doesn’t? Is it control? Is it the power of the protagonist? Is it the idea of playing as another? Is it relaxing? Is it exciting? Is it escapism? Ask those questions, don’t ask how we can save them from themselves. Ask how they can save us from our old selves.

Alex Fleetwood was brilliant in response, he emphasised that we shouldn’t see WOW and other games as ‘bogey men’ or enemies to real life. He put it much gentler than I have, but he was clear, and gave what I think was an admirable response.

The other question I’ll talk (briefly) about was asked by someone from Lincoln’s Drill Hall venue – basically the point put forward was that they couldn’t afford the staff hours or to pay someone external to run the kind of web 2.0 social network that was being talked of. Which is a reason I’ve often heard mooted- and it’s understandable, but if you ask me, it’s not the answer that’s the problem – it’s the question. The kind of sandbox style beta testing artistic environment that AF talked about is not one that you can engineer- it is only one for which you can provide the framework. It is not an organisation’s job to nail down every corner of a mapped social network – it should be theirs to enthuse an audience or target group to the point at which they author it, and in which the organisation is merely a participant. This means that the organisation hasn’t spent masses of budget and time on something that might not work, it means they have something which is and continues to be self-generating and relevant. The point of social networking in the arts is to pull down the pedestal on which art has been placed- to stop saying so definitely when art stops and audience begins, to play with collective creation, to play with narrative, to play with identity. These things are changing in modern society, there are new ways of loving, laughing, and losing being invented everyday, if we don’t investigate them, if we don’t tell these new stories, then we fail as artists.

We need people to stop being afraid of these new ways of communicating, otherwise art – which I consider as best-fitted to challenging society – will become defunct, another method of escapism, a tool of suppression rather than revolution. Better put than I ever will:

“Theatre is a weapon. A very efficient weapon […] for this reason the ruling classes try to take hold of theatre and utilise it as a tool for domination […] but the theatre can also be a weapon of the liberation. For that, it is necessary to change appropriate theatrical forms. Change is imperative.” (p. ix, Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed (New Edition). London: Pluto Press, 2000.)

What else am I up to? Many things, I think it’s best if I summarise more quickly as this appears to have become a bit of a behemoth. I’m writing an article for Subtext Magazine on women in tech. I’m going to be in York at the Shift Happens arts and digital technology conference at the end of this month, talking to people about Twitter. I’ve also written an arts organisation intro to Twitter for it, which so far seems to be getting some good responses. I finished and sent off my treatment for the 15 minute play Box of Tricks have commissioned me to work on. I’m meeting up with some Twitter friends for some drinks (as well as some thoughts on the future of digital media, but mostly drinks) I’m off to Leeds and Birmingham this month, and in mid July – Paris! I have also decided to save up enough money to attend the weekend of Climate Camp in August.

Plus I’m trying to squeeze in some temp work so I can afford all of the above!

Phew!

I’m not going to pretend I don’t love this :-)

Three Short Pieces on Longing

I

There are days I long for a lungful of cool, sea air. The sharp jolt of salt as you breathe in and wind that whips your hair in and out of your eyes. Tucking strays behind your ears and just about resisting the urge to run along the flat sand with your arms outstretched pretending that just for a hard, breathless minute, that’s all there is. I breathe in, close my eyes and screw my feet into the sand and realise, suddenly, that I’m waiting for a hand to take mine. Much bigger it is, and when I open my eyes I’ll look up, and the smile, the smile will fall down like a waterfall, like a furled banner. The head – small in the same way the hand is big. A laugh, loud, deep, carried away by the wind like the seaweed is. Far away. Like everything, except the hand – warm, and the air – cool, thick with salt.

There are days when I long for that.

II

I turned past the corner. The corner of the road. I turned past the corner of the road where I run. I turned past the corner, where they’ve just resurfaced, where the big, thick grit makes you feel unstable, I turned into the lane, and I stopped. They’d gone. There were none of them. For days, days I’d run. I’d run and the first day I ran I turned this corner where the grit stings your knees and I stopped. They were so red. And there were hundreds of them. So red that I forgot to breathe in, so red that I felt like I was squinting. The kind of red you can’t even imagine. And there were hundreds of them, like a carpet, but not, so much less mundane, like a shout, like someone shouting out and it being stolen by the wind, distorted – but brighter than that – like a ray of sun seen from below the surface of a river, warming, but you can’t feel the heat. They look fragile, poppies, moving in the wind, but every day there were more, they bent low, but never broke. I took a break. Two days and I didn’t go out. Today I turned into the lane and stopped. Nothing but a few dead heads. Gross. Black. A darkness to them, something almost sick. The field was green. It felt grey. I started to run again, the grit bouncing at my feet.

They were gone.

III

I touch my neck. I rest my thumb at my throat and my hand along my collar bone. It just fits. My skin feels warm, slightly rough, I can feel blemishes and my fingers brush the fabric of my vest top. I trace the collar bone towards my throat, to the point at which I can feel it end, feel the beginning of the left. If I concentrate, hold my breath, I can feel my heart beating, as though from a long way off. I miss the smell, you know? Not one person in particular, but I miss the smell – of another. I miss that place. That place where if you lie next to someone when they lay out their arm you can put your head right in the space between their shoulder and their neck. It just fits. And if you listen hard, if you hold your breath, you can hear their heart beat against their chest and you can breathe in. Breathe in that combination of hair and sweat and washing powder and hot breath and a splash of water and distant shampoo, deodorant, laughter, like a cat’s tongue, and pepper, and sticky summer air. You breathe it in. Hold it. I don’t miss anyone, not anyone in particular, but that bit- that bit between someone’s head and neck, and the smell, the smell of another, their heart beating in their chest.

I miss it.

Jane

Jane was a Princess. But don’t let that put you off. She was a person as well, that was the problem. Jane was a Princess, and a person. Jane. You’re finding it hard to picture her aren’t you? It’s the name. It’s not a very princess-y name. Jane thinks it’s because it rhymes with ‘plain’. There are lots of famous ‘Jane’s – princesses too – but they never seem to do as well as, say, the ‘Elizabeth’s or ‘Victoria’s. The ‘Jane’s are more often a role in someone else’s story.

Nevertheless this Princess is a Jane. And this story is about her.

Jane is not plain. She’s not particularly beautiful either. Do you really need to know how she looks? Fine, ok, you can’t see her, you want to picture her (what you really want to do is to pretend to be her, or want to fuck her, but you’re the boss, let’s get it over with).

The politest thing you could say about Jane is that she’s striking, interesting. Not ugly, but her features are arranged in a slightly asymmetric fashion, her teeth aren’t perfectly straight (dentistry, as a profession, is hundreds of years away) but nor are they horribly wonky. Her hair is blonde, but not flaxen, more sort of- greasy mouse brown. She’s not fat, not by any stretch, but she is of a strong build, the kind that suited her brothers more than her. She has a lot of moles, brown eyes, and squints a little when she reads. Her clothes are a simple, heavily darned trousers and shirt. On closer inspection you might realise that these clothes, whilst home made, are sewn from exquisite materials. Well if they thought she was going to wait around in a draughty tower in nothing but silk gowns they had thought wrong.

And there was someone fighting the dragon again. At first it had been quite exciting. Perhaps she should say ‘frightening’, but the truth it that she was never in danger. So bugger it, exciting was right. But after the 20th or 21st death, it all got a bit dull. She wished she could say she’d lost count, but there was bugger all else to count in the Tower. She should probably say bugger less. Or think it less, whatever. Maybe one of the reasons her father sent her here was because of the swearing? But what else could you expect with 6 brothers and a mother dead?

He’d lost his sword now, death usually followed pretty quickly after they lost their sword. She wasn’t sure why, it’s not like the sword was ever much use in the first place. They were fighting a dragon for fu – for goodness sake.

This one would make it 219.

After a while, you began to notice patterns, different types of heroes, who died in different ways. This one was a Tactician. At least he thought he was; he was as much a tactician you can be after the point at which you think attacking a dragon is a good idea. Tacticians are cowards. In certain situations a coward is not a bad thing to be. Fear and timidity in the face of a 29ft high fire-breathing dragon, for example, should be called sensible, not cowardly. He had had a plan. They always had the same plan; a decoy. Goats, ducks, horses, that kind of thing. The idea being that while the dragon was catching and devouring said decoy, they could sneak by unnoticed, and voila: one rescued Princess. What they actually did was provide an appetiser for the main dish.

He’d lost his shield now.

Occasionally, once every few months or so, a hero would make it to the Tower. It was always interesting when that happened. Tower-reachers were usually either Brutes or Scholars. The last one to get to the Tower was a Scholar. Scholars did research. He’d even done his reading on the Tower. He didn’t bother looking around the back (disguised by thick bushes you could leap behind for convenient dragon cover and promptly fall to a cliff-y death). Nor did he bother looking for a secret passage way, tunnel, or concealed door. Instead he had launched a very sharp grappler-thing towards the single window, and then when it failed to find a purchase on the specially greased shale, he’d been knocked out by a tile, and impaled on his own grappler–thing.

In the early thirties, she’d tried to help, shouted advice. Around 50 or so, she’s just tried to have a conversation – asked about the wider world. But they never listened, just shouted the usual “fear not fair maiden”.

She sometimes wondered if the Tower thing was less about protecting her, and more about making her willing to marry any bloody thing that she could have a conversation with.

“Bloody”.

She had books. They’d left her with books, other basic supplies, that was what the rest of the Tower was filled with. And she had a garderobe that opened onto the sea. She’d first tried to make a rope out of her sheets and silk dresses, tied it to a candle bracket, and thrown it out the hole. She hadn’t fitted through. It was her stupid wide shoulders. The books weren’t worth looking at. They went on about etiquette, coquetry, cooking, birthing, that sort of thing. The birthing illustrations were of morbid interest until the first disembowelling happened. After that they lost their novelty.

A massive fireball singed the trees.

She didn’t not want a husband. It was what you did wasn’t it? What were her other options? She didn’t see why it was necessary to feed her whatever herb it was that had knocked her out long enough to bring her up here and imprison her. She could be here forever, it didn’t look like man versus dragon was that undecided a conflict… No. Jane couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being taught a lesson. That she was supposed to be learning how be a Princess, a Prize. Not a person.

That one nearly had him.

The books were shells now. Using her sewing scissors Jane had cut out the words from the books individually; she stored them alphabetically, and wrote stories (when it wasn’t windy). There were men, eventually, but mostly they were about the wind rushing through her heroine’s mousey hair, speeding, galloping, riding astride a big brown horse, feeling its muscles bunch and shiver as it carried her… anywhere really, it was the moving bit that was important.

Suddenly a stone rattled by her foot. She looked down. Then up. Bloody hell, was the ceiling falling now? Another stone, it had come from outside. A second, and then she moved swiftly to the window. The dragon was down, and the Tactician had a sling shot. He was waving at her. She waved stupidly before she realised he was waving at her to get back, she dazedly did so, and after a few seconds an arrow zipped in, it shot around and embedded itself into the rafters. The barbed end caught, and held. He had a bow! She ran forward, and already he was climbing up the Tower. She panicked. What should she do? Put on a dress? None left. Tidy up? No time. The dragon was out cold! She was running around like an idiot! And then, there he was, head above the sill, brown messy hair, and a lopsided grin across his face. He was clean shaven, and had one of those chins shaped like a bum.

“Hallo there, fancy helping me up?”

It sounded like he‟d been practising it. Jane stood still.

“Hallo?”

Another pause.

“I say, are you deaf?”

She walked forward a little. She stopped

“What‟s your name?” She said.
“David.”

She looked.

“Look, do you mind giving me a bit of help?”
“I think you‟re supposed to do it yourself”

Confusion flickered across his face.

“What?”

His grin was more of a rictus now.

“I think it’s in the rules, if you want to win, you have to do it yourself”
“Look here,” she could see him shaking slightly from the effort of holding on, “there’s no way a chap could climb all the way up here on a rope, and then jus swing himself over. There’s just not the upper body strength”
“No. No, I suppose not.”

Another gust of wind. The hero swung.

“Bloody hell!”
“I don‟t think you‟re supposed to swear in front of a lady.”
“The tiles are edged! They’re wearing away the rope!”
“Oh. Really?”

She hadn’t spotted that.

“I expect you only have a certain amount of time, with a rope. A ladder really would have been best”
“But-”
“But then how are you supposed to transport a 30ft ladder? Yes, I rather see your point”

She was pleased with the ‘rather’.

“Help me up!”
“But you see I can’t –”
“It’s worn half through!”

Another gust of wind. This time he whimpered.

“You’ve gone mad.”
“I might have done, yes.”
“There‟s only a few threads left!”
“Yes but you see if I help you up, you’ll have cheated, and then-“
“Just bloody well help me up will you, you stupid bit—-“

A rushing sound.

Splat.

Jane moved to the window. She’d never seen a splat before. It was quite-

There was a whinny further off. A chestnut horse tied to a tree in the distance had seen that the dragon was stirring, beginning to wake up. So, a person had about a minute, all in all, with a rope that looked to be about an inch think, but that was twine.

Hers was made of finest silk.

THE END

(Or is it?)

(Yes, it is.)