Hannah Nicklin

Autumn in the Air

This is just a quick post to say that I will be off the radar for the next week or so. This is due to a a myriad of different things I’ve been working on all culminating in the first two weeks of October. A lot of what I’m doing is going to be really interesting, vibrant stuff, so I’m hoping to fit in a couple of blogs, but if not, the best place to find out what I’m up to is Twitter.

In the meantime, here’s a snapshot (in no particular order) of what I’m up to over the next 2 weeks:

• I’m working with Theatre Writing Partnership to amplify the launch of Momentum 2009, which includes a two day city-wide writing adventure (from which I will be micro, audio and video blogging), as well as co-ordinating an online task which allows anyone to participate remotely, more on that in coming days, but it looks to be really exciting.
• I’m moving house this Sunday, and (this is another reason for radio silence) because it’s a new build, getting the internet fitted is going to be a real pain. The people I’m talking to have been really helpful, but I may be reduced to buying pints of apple juice in Wi-Fi enabled bars to get my work done… but that’s a minor gripe, really, because the fact remains I am MOVING INTO MY OWN HOUSE. All mine, all of it. It’s not huge, but it’s awesomely situated, and after having lived in over 16 houses in 7 years, never sharing with fewer than 3 people (the most was 8), I’m really looking for ward to giving the whole ‘in-one-place-for-a-bit’ thing a go. Hopefully I’ll like it.

• I’m attending the EMUA ‘Beyond Boundaries’ conference (the day after I move). Lots of intriguing stuff going on there, a lot of it feels over-academicised (though that may just be the way it’s written up). I’m certainly intrigued, after having dipped my toes in the on the ground ‘grass roots’ tech scene,  as to how realistic the academic take on it all is.

• I’m going to Stratford-on-Avon to crash the press night of the two Former Soviet-Union plays they have on at the moment. Very excited about this, I haven’t seen very much theatre at all this Summer, this is me changing that.

• I’m taking my brother to see Marcus Brigstocke in Nottingham for his birthday. It’s been too long, hopefully should be a brilliant night.

• I’m going to London for a ‘Playwriting for the iPod Generation’ workshop. “what happens to the story when mobile technology takes your writing outside of the theatre space.  How can the architecture of a space shape your story? What happens when your stage is full of unrehearsed passers-by?”. Hopefully this is going to be bloody amazing.

• I’m writing the first draft of a commission due on the 12^th of October. Buh >_<
• And I begin my PhD on the 1^st

Plus Autumn is coming. I really love Autumn. I like the taste of the air.

Debategraph

Think about 10 years time, the real digital future, not this analogue/digital crossover, if you do, that future will come faster, better. @billt at Shift Happens 2.0

There are plenty of really exciting ways of using existing social media and tech-based tools that are beginning to be explored by the arts. We have the National Theatre’s live streaming events, The BBC Prom’s use of Audioboo, C&T’s Living Newspaper, and smaller companies making use of the collaborative and immediate aspect of social media to open up their offices and creative processes.

But part of what I’m going to be pushing for in my work with the arts sector is finding and developing the next tools, becoming a part of the community that innovates and tests the future, as well as the one that works with the present aspects of tech in our lives.

Tech is particularly good at working with data, the whole world trades in it, visualising data and mashing up two or more data sets to makes something more powerful and accessible is an incredibly exciting prospect. The world now is full of information, just lying around, visualisations and mashups make it work, make it more powerful than the sum of its parts.  I also believe the arts are built on information, signals, triggers, scents, subtleties, there are so many layers. And in the same way as facts, they’re driven by questions, but more than facts, the arts dramatise those questions, turning points. Who is this character? What memories, smells, encounters is she built of? Consider the moment of the intricate choice between a highlight or a deeper dark on a painting, or the textures you could feel when you first heard the stirrings of a new song.

Imagine an AR app developed by someone like the National Portrait Gallery that allowed you to see under the layers of paint, to peel back the process, or see other works painted over, or corrected. Imagine using that app to trigger audio clips with facts and context for the work, or reactions that other people like you have recorded whilst standing there.

We can build new ways of exploring and creating art.

I was recently pointed in the direction of Debategraph by @abi281. Debategraph is a web-based, creative commons project which provides an interactive way of mapping wiki debates. I’ve embedded it here for you to play with, which is much easier than my trying to explain it, click, explore, hover, drag, see what you think. For those who want to know every in and out check out the ‘about’ on the debategraph website.

Why am I looking at debate graph?

I would love to see something like this developed for use by arts organisations, if you were to take this bare-bones structure, bring it onto a large touch display, and crucially, allow the addition of video, images and audio, you have a very very powerful tool for representing the artistic process, character development, the context of a play, or the building of a piece of art.

This could be installed in large multi person interactive multi-touch screen displays, similar to the NT ‘Big Wall‘, but created within a wiki environment, a creative commons model that could be released into the wild, that people could truly interract with. An installation  in which people could build new routes, not travel one of several pre-planned ones; drag and zooming, exploring creative questions, contexts, characters through native video/image/audio embeds. Better still  we could use the model to collaborate, to create a huge, sprawling, reactive and interactive piece of audio/visual wiki art in which you could still follow curated paths, or which you could explore  yourself, have it on screens that surround you, covering the walls of a whole room, tailoring your own personal theatre, or working with others to build a specific, live and individual experience.

Where would you start? Do you know people who would be interested in working on projects like this, do you think it’s worth working on, or do you think it invades the ineffability of art? Basically: discuss.

Flipping the Script Follow-up

I thought I should do a quick follow up entry to the Flipping the Script live-stream issues. In case you didn’t see, insufficient planning/equipment meant that the exciting streamed new reading didn’t actually work until the last 20 minutes, and at that point was running very poor video, and appalling audio quality.

I found this really disappointing for many reasons, but most particularly because as my role as a freelance online comms bod for Theatre Writing Partnership, I’d really been pushing the event, and felt we’d been let down, and worse, had let others down, when it turned into such of a shambles.

This was my (ranty) reaction as I left the mini event we’d set up at the TWP offices:

It turns out they had been trying to use a webcam over a shared wifi connection to run it, and according to a friend who had logged on earlier, had only tested it an hour previously. Although admittedly the reaction audiobooed above is very ranty, the whole experience has reminded me of the importance of emphasising the need to make the tech part of a project, rather than adding it on at the last minute or treating it as a gimmick.

Of course I’m sure Talawa/The Young Vic aren’t going to jump at my height-of-anger offer of interference (why would they), but I was pleased to see that Talawa did respond to the comments in the chat-area of the livestream:

I would like to thank you and at the same time apologise sincerely for the loss of our streaming feed yesterday. Unfortunately, we were relying on WiFi and once the studio doors were closed the signal went with it. We subsequently established a permanent cable link but it was late in the reading. We are grateful for your comments and the very lively exchanges. We learned quite a lot from you and are now ready to hit the ground running with a boosted up, infinitely more reliable, and multi-camera streaming on 8th October. So please join again, or email your comments and/or introduce yourself to me christopher@talawa.com.

I’m really glad that the first knockback hasn’t phased them, and hopefully the 8th of October will provide the brilliant experiment in online new-writing dissemination that the 8th of September failed to deliver. This has been a reminder on my part not to make assumptions about companies’ knowledge or tech-capabilities (for better or for worse), and by far the most positive thing about the experience is that they have revised their approach, and are trying again. Kudos.

Also, on a personal note, my subsequent rant in the mini-gathering at the office about the need to integrate and investigate technology in theatre got me another invite to talk at a conference! That makes three in total, before I’ve even officially started my work. Though always surprised to find people think my rants are of exterior value, it’s thrilling to see that other people are thinking about these things too, and makes me really excited about the prospect of my research. Good stuff.

Flipping the Script

LIVE STREAMED NEW PLAY READING: WHITE PAPER, by Stevie Amuzu – 8^TH SEPTEMBER @ 7PM eventbrite event here, hashtag: #scriptflipping

This is just a quick blog post asking you all (arts folk or no) to get involved in a new writing theatre event next Tuesday (8^th September) at 7pm. You can do so entirely from the comfort of your own home, because Theatre Writing Partnership (TWP), Talawa and The Young Vic are going to be working together to live stream a new reading of a piece of theatre. Watch it, comment on the stream, tweet about it, the hashtag for the event is #scriptflipping.

I have been doing some work with TWP (@TWPGoSee) this summer,  and am really excited to be working with them on a couple of very cool projects aiming to bring the arts world into the digital one. I’m not blogging on behalf of them right now though, this is just me asking you to tune in. Pioneering events like this need uptake, if people don’t participate; arts orgs just become more and more reluctant to be involved.

Theatre and digital tech are the basis of my PhD, I love both worlds, I think theatre plays a massive role in showing us the society we live in, in exploring big political and intimate personal questions, but I don’t think it will be able to continue to do so if it resists involvement in the digital world(s). I think the ethics emerging from the digital world(s) will have a lot to do with changing the way things work IRL (politics, media, collaboration and distribution) and I think the arts need to be at the forefront of these new worlds, pushing and questioning these new ways of creation, proliferation and collaboration.

Live streaming readings provides work in development with a very cheap and instant audience, it provides a new work with feedback from all over the world (breaking down that London-only barrier of the majority of the new theatre writing world), and opens up the writing process. This allows a theatre and a writer to make new work less of a risk, and at the same time engage with potential audiences.

These kind of events are still very new, and experiments more than anything, so that’s why I’m asking you to be one of our early adopters and get involved.

Let people know about the event, or add it to your diary via our Eventbrite page from there you can push it to various social networks, or email your friends.

And after all that: here’s the blurb about the piece being aired!

Talawa presents an exciting development in its ‘Flipping the Script’ readings at the Young Vic. Live streaming of the readings will allow writers across the UK to join in and comment on what we consider to be the best untold Black British stories as Talawa continues to pursue a UK wide discussion around Black British work.

The series has always proved to be a sold out success but has been limited to London audiences.  Now, Talawa wants the writers of Theatre Writing Partnership to share in the rich abundance of plays reaching Talawa’s offices and that would otherwise remain unknown.

The first play, WHITE PAPER, by Stevie Amuzu, is a heart-rending and wickedly funny investigation of generations of a mixed race family and the false loyalties of parentage. Its style is unusual – subtle story telling emerging from a storm of words – and we’d like your comments.  Does this approach represent a new direction in story telling?

Please join us on September 8^th at 7 p.m. at  http://www.livestream.com/talawabroadcasts for live streaming of the event and join in the continuous online chatroom feedback. It’s time to talk to each other.

As soon as I can release the details, I’ll let you know about the other exciting things I’ve been working on, in the meantime, get involved with Flipping the Script. I’ll be blogging, tweeting etc., from TWP in Nottingham (if any local bloggers/twitter folk want to get involved, let me know). See you then.