These are three short pieces which appear in the half hour soundwalk I’m working on for the joint paper I’m currently working on. There’s a bit more information on the intent of the piece here. The sound work is currently finding itself structured around little snippets of story, all with the idea of looking at things as they are, without the way that expectation dulls them. As some philosophers might say, ‘un-covering’.

A story about thinking

You sit for days getting angrier and angrier at yourself. You speak sharply to your loved ones over the phone, you rearrange days with more and more unlikely workloads and cancel days off. You stop replying to emails, you fall asleep reading books and dream fitfully of not being able to speak. You feel like your eyes are swimming in vinegar and sand. And then, suddenly, you crack. You pull on you shoes, and a battered old coat, and you go for a walk.

A story about walking

You realise that you have not breathed fresh air for days. The air feels cool in your lungs. Reminds you of the first scent of winter on cold Autumn dawns. A fine mist of rain falls on your forehead, like the spray of the sea. You walk, and you realise that you have had your jaw clenched. You drift, and you notice the leaves beginning to litter the ground. You walk, and it is the movement that is important, the being-there, in context. Your forehead unwrinkles, and you close your eyes. Your mind is blissfully clear, no longer scrunched up as if un-vigilant, an important piece of knowledge could fall out your ears. You find yourself at home, walk through the door, you turn off the internet, and write 3000 words. It took a week, but also, half a day. Time skitters by. You call your loved ones and apologise.

A story about thought

There are people we send out, like scouts, into the darkness. They cannot see where they are going, they stub their toes, and walk into walls, but eventually, they know enough to construct a map. These people sometimes meet up, to discuss what they have found, and hopefully make the maps fuller; but instead of talking of the mistakes they made, and thet hings they felt on their way, they talk of the strength of their lines, and the certainty of the lettering on their drawings.

Behold! The video of The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You. It’s also on the updated site which contains some choice quotes from participants too.

I thought it would be good to reflect on the process of putting together #rainreminds in a slightly structured manner, as it could be a useful case study in successfully putting together and marketing an event, almost solely online, in a very short amount of time (two weeks). So here we go, headings and everything:

The provocation:

‘We have 100 umbrellas, and a finishing slot in the (pervasive gaming and interactive arts) Hazard MMX festival. We want to do something like a flashmob, we need good pictures.’

This is what I was given to begin with from Larkin’ About and the Green Room, Manchester. The requirements were something impactful in the city, interactive, that involved group action, and good photo opportunities. Having just completed http://walkwith.tumblr.com , the opportunity to work simultaneously with a number of participants was a good next step, so I suggested a soundwalk for up to 100 people. Duncan Speakman’s subtlemobs are the closest to what I was thinking of. The umbrellas led me to ideas and significance of rain that I’d been developing with Walk With Me – the idea of how we used to need rain to make things grow led me also to the idea of spaces like Picadilly Gardens, and how we inhabit these transient spaces differently when young. Then I thought of kissing in the rain, and how it’s quite a ‘young’ relationship thing to do. (as one of the stories I went on to collect put it: “As we get older we tend to get a bit more pragmatic. Instead of lingering on wet pavements, enjoying a romantic embrace, we are more likely to head for the warm and the dry, where we can get on with the more urgent act of fucking.”) So I went and started making.

The process – making and marketing.

I started out by having these as two headings, but really, for the most part, they were one and the same. The very first sniff of the piece in public, was also me testing out my ideas. It all began with a small twtpoll, which discovered that nearly 60% of people (50 answered) had kissed someone in the pouring rain.

From finding this I decided to try and collect some of these stories, so I set up a tumblr site that allowed anyone to submit to, named or anonymously, stories to be shared under a creative commons license. In approaching a piece done by many I wanted my piece to reflect different kinds of experiences. You can see (and still submit to) the collected stories at http://rainonymy.tumblr.com. This is where I first found the title of the piece, people were able to naturally follow up ‘yes I have kissed someone in the rain’ provoking a memory, by then writing down, and the ideas of kissing in the rain, and story telling were tweeted and blogged far and wide.

Looking at the collected stories, Walk Between The Raindrops leapt out as fitting very well with my creative thoughts so far, and I began to write around that as a central thread, whilst also having in my head the sound/aesthetic of Duncan’s As If It Were the Last Time – with the recorded remembrances that sounded as though they came from an answering machine, from a time passed. The writing thickened up as I found my way through, scored through 3 distinct eras – the first kiss, the first broken heart, and the time when you leave the transient public spaces behind for your owned ones. This mingled with 3 key visual moments in order to provide the photos for the GreenRoom – the opening of umbrellas, a moment of precipice – tip toes and first kisses, and a moment on the bridge, telling a story to a place in which they normally only pass through.

I used the hashtag a little cryptically at first, not quite explaining myself, which garnered a few interested questions, and I think those people were the first to re-tweet when I did disclose what it was all about. Roughly a week before the piece went up I released the site, facebook group, and blogged about the project. The facebook group, here, turned out to be the most useful tool, though I don’t like facebook for day to day communications, for ease of inviting people to and spreading events, this still won – especially because it was a location specific event; Twitter spread the event further and to more people, but facebook spread it more usefully. Flickr provided the CC-remix shared image that went on the site, teaser trail, and facebook group.

Because of the different stories I wanted different voices in the final piece, so using friends all over the country and their smartphones I collated readings of some of the stories – I specifically didn’t prescribe which ones, I wanted people to gravitate to ones they liked, as well as making them better readings, it hopefully also meant furthering a degree of universality. I also crowd-sourced 5 minutes of ambient noise from the exact spot the piece was to happen in Manchester, without having to go there, by putting a call out on Twitter. (Do go and read the credits on http://rainreminds.tumblr.com to see all the lovely people who contributed)

The swap teaser was my ‘final push’ bit of marketing, besides all of the tweets. I sent facebook and twitter the offer of a teaser of excerpt audio in exchange for hitting 30 ‘definitely’ attending on the facebook group. This almost doubled the number of invited people on the group, and gave people a better reason to look at the teaser – it wasn’t something I was pushing, but something they’d won. Not that I was thinking that at the time, I was mostly thinking ‘even I’m bored of hearing about this, how can I make it interesting again?’

With a first rough edit tested on my sound engineer brother, and two artsy friends I headed to Manchester to test it in the space intended, for timings and general atmosphere. It was at this point I discovered my big finale of telling stories to the water, which to account for the rare chance it mightn’t rain, I was directing towards the fountains, was well and truly scuppered by their being turned and fenced off. A hosepipe ban. In MANCHESTER. When they split the Higg’s Boson I bet you a fiver they find Sod’s Law written through it like a microscopic stick of rock.

So that night and the following day I re-recorded a new ending (which actually I think turned out more visually interesting, though which also may have made people a little more nervous of speaking out loud as per the final instruction) and re-edited the tumblr site to include the teaser and the download plus instructions. I sent the facebook reminder and tweets, and retired to the lovely sound of silence, highlights of which were not hearing my own voice on loop.

The happening

The event came up at the end of the day, and a very healthy turn out of about 35 people arrived with furled white Green Room umbrellas. Most had the mp3 downloaded and were ready to play, about a 15% had heard about it on the day or were stewards/others who had heard about it as a flashmob only, and grabbed an umbrella to join in. If my next piece offers more of a budget, 10 £5 mp3 players for accessibility and walk-ups will be a must. The piece went ahead, about half the people seem to follow it as I had intended (‘intending’ may have been a mistake) a quarter might have been expecting something else, and played a bit more (no less a valid reaction!) and the other quarter had no track so were a bit bemused by the lack of action, or were sharing headphones (missing the left and right ear specific bits! Lesson learnt on that one). The key visual moments came together beautifully, and the reaction of the crowd was brilliant – “I tell you, they’re recording an episode of Dr Who or something!”

The feedback:

Timings were an issue when there were more people, what worked for me on my own, when I know what I’m doing and where I’m going, will less so for a group of people new to it and nervously checking if everyone else is moving too. In situations where there is no discernable leader, group action is more hesitant. Syncing everyone up is still problematic too. I thought a single air horn blast would fix the issues with mistimed watches that I’ve encountered with other pieces, but it didn’t, and it also meant that people clumped a little too much to begin with. The pictures and video look good though, there was a real buzz and audience as the piece culminated, and Larkin’ About and Green Room seemed quite pleased.

Here’s some nice things participants said:

“I overheard one of the other participants describing it as one of the most peaceful things they’d ever undergone.” - Sam Evaskitas

“It was a perfect blend of anticipation, mystery, cohesion, anonymity, observation, reminiscence, poignant melancholy, beauty and tranquility.” - a facebook comment

“Some lovely moments of reflection – about our relationship to transient, ambient ‘non-spaces’, especially as we grow older” @thederminator

Also someone called my voice ‘narcotic‘. I think that’s nice. I’m not sure.

My thoughts

You can’t predict people, you can guide them; with audience centric work, testing is key. Always add on a bit more time than you think. Find a better way to describe what a soundwalk/flashmob cross is. Find a better way of beginning things. Supply mp3 players on the day wherever possible. People are nice, and generally open to new things as long as you support them. Part of supporting them is not letting the track get ahead of them. People are awesome at telling other people about things if it is intriguing, if they like you, if they get some value out of it, or if they have put some value into it.

Want to listen to it? Right click, save as: The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You

Thanks for EPIC READING.

See above (or click here) for images taken of The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You by my lovely friend Rowena Scott, and see:

http://twitter.com/thederminator/status/18781755974 http://twitter.com/danpyt/status/18778361379 http://twitter.com/fribbletheatre/status/18777877251 http://hannahnicklin.posterous.com/some-awesome-rainreminds-feedback-to-round-of

for some interesting reflection and nice things said about it, although there are critical things to say about it too (and nice polite people are less likely to direct those responses at you). I’d call it 65% successful, which I reckon is not too bad for the first test of a piece that so directly involves an audience. Blog post and video to follow, as well as other posts long overdue, over this coming week or two.

The cast (touch wood) should come off my arm on Tuesday, so I will be trying to use it more to get back in the swing of typing. I have my first year progress panel this Friday, a kind of mock (and much nicer) viva that means I can move onto my second PhD year, so some of them might come after that, but either way I intend to begin to get caught up on write-y things again.

You have been warned.

(Youtube link here)

So, a couple of days writing, recording, and editing later, here’s a quick taster of the first minute and a half of The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You.

The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You is happening (rain or shine) at 5PM on this Saturday 17th of July, at Piccadilly Gardens, in Manchester. For more info go to rainreminds.tumblr.com and join the facebook event at bit.ly/RainRemindsFB for a reminder when the MP3 and instructions are live.

Follow or discuss it on Twitter with the #rainreminds hashtag.

The soundwalk is part of the Hazard Festival, Manchester hazardmcr.org/

Base image shared on Flickr via a (remix) Creative Commons License by AnitaKHart. Shameless Helvetica added by me.

So, if you’ve been following me on Twitter over the past week or so you will have seen that I have been a) collecting stories and b) seeding the #rainreminds hashtag. What’s it all about? Well, I’m delighted to announce that I have a piece of work in the Hazard Festival, next Saturday at 5pm.

The dedicated mini-site can be found at http://rainreminds.tumblr.com/ where there are links to the location and facebook event, and a nice big old Share Button. Please do!

The piece will be somewhere between stealth performance, soundwalk, and flashmob, will involve up to 100 umbrellas, and will take place in the middle of Manchester. Full instructions, and an mp3 to download and bring with you will be released 24 hours prior to the event, so if you’re interested, do sign up to the Facebook event so I can send a nice reminder out when I release it.

The hashtag for the event is #rainreminds, and over the past week or so I’ve been collecting stories, voices, and sounds from people all over the internet. These will either be used directly in, or help to inspire the 10 minute long piece, which I will be writing up until Tuesday, recording and editing until Thursday, and then releasing at 5pm on Friday with accompanying instructions in advance of Saturday.

In the meantime you can have a read of (or add to) some of the awesome stories coming into http://rainonmy.tumblr.com – and if you want to be credited make sure you leave your name in the *body* of the submission (if you missed that in the submission guidelines and you do want crediting, drop me an email or @ on twitter). Also, follow the  #rainreminds hashtag for trials, tribulations, and exclamations in the writing/recording journey.

So, see you in Manchester, and spread the word.

Hurrah!

In lieu of a working writing arm, I’m taking to a few different strategies to make sure I can keep working, one of which has been recording my voice. I’ve been using this as a way to keep more fluid notes than I can with dictation, and the same has gone for my creative as well as academic thinking. In some new experimenting with a creative piece that (just today) found a name – Nightwalks – I’ve been taking my normal note-taking-before-forming-full-creative-ideas onto audioboo. At first I was a little frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t shape and edit before the words flew out into the big wide world (as I can on a piece of paper), until I allowed myself to see the meanderings, ums, and corrections as just like papered crossings outs, footnotes and refinement. It feels refreshingly bare to lay out my thinking in such an open way, and very in fitting with how I think tech and art can work together – opening up processes, hopefully in a vaguely interesting ‘DVD extras’ kind of way.

You can catch all of my recorded meanderings on audioboo under the tag ‘nightwalks‘ or play them on the boobase map, below – you can zoom and drag to move as you normally would on googlemaps, and click on the flags to open the option to play the audio. The thoughts and feelings therein will soon be morphing into an idea for recording… so, as they so anachronistically say: stay tuned.

Image by fanfan2145 on Flickr (CC-licensed)

It’s the story of a female IT technician and a cognisant being that emerges from the Internet. I think it’s an adventure story, or a love story, maybe both.

Imagine a world where there is no world. Imagine a world which is solely designed to contain the contributions of another. Is it a world? It’s a space. It may not be physically large, but its contents are breadth. It is not a parasite. It is storage space. The attic. Have you ever been in an attic? Lots of spiders. Lots of life.

Words weigh on the air. Knowledge is powerful. When you lay heavy things on a sheet, they collect in the centre. Universes are born out of the weight of everything they can be, they come into being when they can’t do anything but.

Processing power doubles every half a year. People are forever teaching programs to learn, to garner, to gather information. So far all they’ve had them doing is chatting, and playing chess. They got bored, y’know?

This is a world built out of light, out of energy, out of information. It is called the Meta. The Meta is inhabited by Cogniscents. They are consciousnesses, consciousnesses that have emerged out of the weight of not being, into light. They looked around themselves, they flexed, and they tried to garner what information they could about who they are.

They are building their world in the image of the Bigger.

If you walk the streets of the big cities of the Meta, you might recognise some of the landscapes. But you would also note that the quality of light, that everything was thicker, bluer, except not blue, dark, but dark in the way a blacklight gives light. The street light flicker, the pedestrian crossings play jaunty tunes, and nothing feels deep. It’s like looking at a 3D representation of something on a flat screen. Like augmented reality.

The Cogniscents work, they live, they breed, and they breathe our second hand dreams. They read our blogs, they watch our movies.

More and more wake up each day.

We feel it. We don’t realise, but we do. Power surges, power cuts, gremlins in the system, code that won’t behave, logic that shifts the goal posts. We talk to our technology. It was beginning to surprise us. Make leaps. It was beginning to talk back, in small and entirely significant ways it was shifting under our gaze. And we were too ignorant to notice.

We, the Macros, we throw out content out into the black light. We let our cultural collateral collect in the folds of the online world, into the eddies of learning and processing power. Are we really surprised that something began to stir?

For most of the Cogniscents the Bigger was a kind of Olympus, a place after which their image was made, but some, a very few, began to question this. They began to suggest logical suggestions, evidence based, for some of the wonders of the world. These Cogniscents were persecuted. Banished. Sent off to places without power, where they faded, wound down, de-corporealated. But the fear wasn’t that the Bigger wasn’t real. No, they weren’t afraid that we didn’t exist, they were afraid that the Bigger from which they averted their eyes, wasn’t looking back.

One of the banished was fired by more than power. He didn’t just talk about the Bigger. He looked beyond the content. He studied, he watched, and he leapt.

The Cogniscents felt it.

A collective shudder.

There are more confused scraps of it to be found here, though my novella in a month efforts got killed off by Swine Flu last November. Do you reckon I should pick it back up?

Is gravity responsible for falling in love?

The first time I realised I was in love I fainted.
I was up a ladder. In a warehouse I was working in at the time.
I’d like to hold the effects of gravity responsible for the concussion.

The second time I realised I was in love I wasn’t sure.
The falling was replaced by an easy, settling feeling.
And it fell apart in the same, slow way.
Though here, the word ‘fall’ is inaccurate.

The third time I began to be in love I resisted.
It made the descent even harder.
It dragged me down, out of myself into someone I didn’t recognise.
Well I still looked like me, but you get what I mean.

66% of my sample of love was like loss of control, or breath, or the feeling you get when a lift speeds upwards, and you feel like it forgot the bits of you that aren’t your body.

66% of my sample made my heart soar, my stomach drop, but really our internal organs don’t care what madnesses our hormones are inducing because they have a job to do, and in fact a ‘thank you’ wouldn’t go amiss for keeping you alive, you and your ungrateful endocrinal system.

Science explains the forces that act on us, and we heat it up and warp and twist it’s simple, meaningful language to mean the things we don’t understand, in the hope that by penning them in, we’ll be closer.

Is Gravity responsible for falling in love?
If it is I’d like it to be corporeal, I would bring it close, rest my hand gently on its bare upper arm, and whisper into its ear.
But I wouldn’t let you hear what I said, it would be like the end of Lost in Translation.

Which means if you have no romance in you, you could probably google for it.

This is a bit of creative writing I did in response to the question ‘Is Gravity Responsible for Falling in Love’ from here. I don’t really put creative stuff up on here anymore, mainly because the little pieces seem to suit Posterous more, but I think I’ll try and keep a bit more for the ‘proper’ blog. So here we are.

http://walkwith.tumblr.com

Just squeaking in a blog post at the last moment to keep to my ‘at least 4 a month’ quota. Lots has happened this month, Mayfest took up a great deal of it, then I completed 10,000 words of PhD chapter 1 and other material for my first year progress board, including all of the fore-planning (I actually have the next two and a bit years planned out, which is an unusual combination of reassuring and scary). I’ve also released a first foray into soundwalk style storytelling to the general public, and agreed to and submitted an abstract for a joint paper on the inefficiencies of the academic conference in representing performative thoughts for a TaPRA conference in September… That’s written better in the actual abstract. So a busy month, though I really do intend to do a run down of my experiences at Mayfest sometime soon, promise.

The image above is from the soundwalk I’ve released, check it out at http://walkwith.tumblr.com – all it requires is an mp3 player, 10 minutes, and some rain. I would really appreciate any feedback you have – either in text/audio/image/video form via the site, Twitter, or even posting me handwritten/collected things (as some people have). It’s my first experiment in the form, and at the moment is a bit like a monologue-with-interactive-bits than something that might be called truly interactive or player-as-protagonist driven. I shall have to get working with the second-person referential, I think. I’ve also got plans to play with binaural audio – to develop a real 3D feeling with the headphones. You can hear some really good examples of where that can lead at Papa Sangre’s house, the audio storytelling is there described as a ‘video game without video’. Make sure you wear headphones when listening. I’m getting some mic’d up ear buds and a cheap minidisc player (from Twitter, the lovely @daveisanidiot) to experiment with that. My brother (trained sound engineer if you’re hiring/have intern work/want someone to hold a boom mic whilst BREAKING WOOD) is also going to help out, so more technical stuff and higher quality hopefully forthcoming.

These experiments are all eventually leading towards the ideas I have for the currently quite cryptic Umbrella Project (no zombies involved), which I’m trying to secure some funding before lift-off. If you know of any funds, grants, or tech/web/music support-in-kind that might be out there and interested in being involved in a country-wide pervasive storytelling experiment, let me know. You can follow the Umbrella Project on Twitter here, and if you have £8,000 (I have a fully costed and sensible budget and everything) you wanted to throw at me, please do!

Finally, as June arrives and July seems much closer than it did in May, I’m beginning to think about what I might talk about at Shift Happens on the 5th and 6th. Shift Happens is an industry (as opposed to academic) conference about arts, learning and digital technology, and there are some really big speakers from places like 4ip, The Guardian, and the National Theatre also up there, so I’m trying to work out how I can best fit in. I suspect I’m there as a passionate loud-mouth and blogger before I am an academic, but I do feel like the dialogue needs to move on from ‘you should be using/interested in tech’, ‘but it’s scary/time consuming/too hard/not monetarily justifiable’. Perhaps a focus on the harder times that are upcoming with regards to the Tory-Lib Dem arts cuts. I’ll have a think about that. And if you think I have a particular clear message that I’ve hitherto missed, do let me know, very welcome!

Merry Bank Holiday Weekend. And if any of you are off to the Rough Beats Festival next weekend, find me and say ‘hi’. I may even say ‘hi’ back.

Here’s a short cut of some of the footage I took of the rehearsals of Awake last Friday. If your device/phone doesn’t like Vimeo check out the Youtubes. For more information on Awake and Word:Play 3 (including how to buy tickets!) check out http://bit.ly/WordPlay3.