Hannah Nicklin

A City Speaks

All images © Christian Payne.

Over the summer I have been working with Theatre Writing Partnership as a freelance online communications officer, looking at social media and other possible approaches to the digital world/s in their work.

TWP have a really special place in my heart, they were the first company who ever took an interest in my writing, and way back in 2005 gave me my first ever production. Because of that I have really relished the opportunity to give back to them by helping them cultivate a digital footprint and focus their new digital angle to coincide with the company’s re-launch. They have been wonderfully receptive to all my over-enthusiastic tech-rants, and my work with them culminated this weekend, with the two day City Adventure/City Staged event. So I thought I’d just take a few minutes to throw down some reflections and some of the gorgeous documentation that came out of the project.

What was it all?

The first day was a city-wide adventure – a kind of treasure-hunt with clues and tasks that produced images, sounds and creative writing in the morning, and then a coming together of participants to produce scripts and monologues in the afternoon. The second day brought a director and 4 actors to the material, producing a performance and presentation that evening: A City Staged.

Here’s Documentally talking to Kate Chapman about the first day: A City Adventure.

A City Adventure/Staged was born out of Stan’s Cafe’s idea of ‘risk days’. Basically TWP and SC got together and set out on the two day project, knowing very little about the content of the finished product. Likewise participants showed up on the day, never having met their partners, and having received mysterious, not-to-be-opened envelopes. It was a bold and unusual experiment in theatre writing which was really exciting to be a part of.

On the first day I was working alongside the excellent Christian Payne (Documentally), not amplifying the event as two observers, but traversing the adventure in exactly the same way as the rest of the participants, (only grabbing audio, video, text and images along the way too). This, I think, is a really good example of how theatre can use social media, we weren’t amplifying an event, as much as we were amplifying the experience, something that seemed to garner a decent reaction from the twittersphere.

Here’s a quick taste of video turning points in the Adventure…

There was something in recording the experience, too, that the participants really seemed to latch on to, I got many of them asking for where all the material would be posted. There was a wholeness of experience involved in the work – they walked it, they wrote it, and then they watched others bring life to what they’d written, all within the space of 48 hours – they weren’t a traditional audience any more, and in a small way the digital content seemed to allow them an opportunity to reflect on their experiences, and to hold on to them a bit longer.

Here we have Documentally interviewing several of them, just back from the morning’s adventure.

As a half formed thought/aside: although IRL the trad audience didn’t exist any more –you could argue that the people following and engaging with the online content, watching characters, framed, performing a found narrative – you could argue that they were performing the trad audience role, just in a media-snacking style format.

The material that the City Adventure participants produced was on the Saturday wrought into shape by TWP’s Artistic Director Kate Chapman, and a team of four actors. Here’s a couple of short interviews with actors Gary and Rochi, just before and after the performance, talking a little about the process involved, and how it felt to meld the material into shape:

There was a real sense that structuring the piece – something you might think to be a problem with 18 different writers involved – was surprisingly simple, and in fact that what emerged was place – site – the city of Derby breathed through it all, leading a way. In the same way, the ability to geo-tag (particularly) the digital media we took meant that our journey, too, was scored through the city. There’s something really fascinating there about site-specific work with a digital arm (echoed in the Playwriting for the iPod Generation workshop, which focussed on digital storytelling tied to actual space, more later!) which I think is going to bear a lot more investigation from me as I begin to launch into my PhD…

The final City Staged presentation took the form of a collection of images and sounds recorded throughout the day, and a staged reading of the theatre-writing. Here’s a quick four minute excerpt from the piece I took with my iPhone, it catches the move between a collage of image and sound into the performance of the writing:

There are loads more images, video and audio on TWP’s Posterous. The audioboos recorded throughout the two days are the best way to follow the tasks and process in detail, (the form of geo-tagged audio, complete with picture, turned out to be the best way of tracking such a location-specific event) you can find them under the tag cityadventure (I could embed a playlist, but there’s probably enough embed-loveage going on here already)

You can also find the audioboos mapped, and listen to them without leaving the map view, here. (Massive thanks to code-ninja @buddhamagnet for the mapping facility – something which I think is the most exciting piece of content from the day, if only we could have geo-tagged/mapped all of our content! [another thing to work on])

I think I’ll finish an interview with Jayne, one of the City Adventure participants reflecting on the feeling of seeing her writing staged, and a slideshow of some of the images taken by Documentally . It really was a extraordinary couple of days, massive thanks to Documentally for all his hard work, and congrats to the TWP team, for a wonderful launch to their new programme.

PhD starts properly tomorrow! Can’t wait to get my hand on some big ideas… books ho!

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.

10:10

Global warming is not a complicated issue. The science has been done, the outlook only gets worse. The aim has been established: keep global warming under the 2°C ‘tipping point’ –the point at which it is almost universally agreed (I say almost, because there are crazies in all communities, including scientific ones) that the earth’s climate becomes so de-stabilised that there’s no saving us. Here’s a quick 1:21 on that:

This video was recorded in 2007, since then the figures have been informed by the discovery of startling and terrifying rates of change.

If we cut global emissions by 85% we will have a 50/50 chance of keeping global temperature rise under the 2°C tipping point. Because the UK pollutes more than developing countries, our share of that is greater, we will have to cut roughly 93% of our emissions. Source. HOW we cut the emissions is equally important, a paper published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has determined that that “wherever temperatures peak, that is more or less where they will stay. There is no going back.” Source and the slower we cut, the more emissions we put out, cumulatively speaking.

To deliver a high chance of preventing two degrees of warming, we would need to cut global emissions by something like 10% by the end of next year and 25% by 2012(7). This is a challenge that no government is yet prepared to accept. Source

Global Warming is not a complicated issue. It’s very simple, either we alter our behaviour, or we die. The sooner and greater we act, the better: 2050, that’s the deadline.

What happens if we don’t meet it?

On a meteorological level it means flash floods, coastal flooding, droughts, tsunamis, tornadoes and hurricanes, on a human level it means destroyed homes, water shortages, disease, ruined harvests, ever depleting world food stocks, looting, violence, and the destabilisation of power. At current rates of sea level rise by 5050 almost all of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire will be underwater, as well as a good amount of London.

If you read that and thought ‘I don’t live there, I’ll be OK’ consider the 150 million environmental refugees that would exist by 2050. Consider their destabilising effect on the surviving population. Consider the wars for resources, the land grabs, the drought, the famine and disease that will occur in every country. Can you be sure that of the 80% of the world’s population will have been “wiped out“by 2100, none of them will be of you and yours?

I sat on a hill, high up in Leicestershire a week ago. I sat there with 3 of my good friends, and we just chatted in the sunshine. It was a warm day, not too hot, but the clouds hung down, grey. One of them asked me about climate change, so I pretty much said all of what I just have. They listened. Then they shrugged. ‘We’re all dead then, aren’t we’.

No, we are not.

This is the attitude that worries me most. That horrible fallacy which has been placed into people’s heads by the ease of modern living, a deadening lazy media, and a carefully cultivated cultural apathy; the idea that we have no power. That we cannot change things. Society is built of single units, working together, it works because we give it credence. They have no real control over us, to really control a society there would need to be 3 police officers to hold down every one person. We only give them power because it benefits us to subscribe the system. But the point at which the system threatens you, the point at which the system offers you more harm than protection, is the point at which you rise up, and you change it.

Governments exist to be re-elected, yes they have other aims, but they rarely, and in real terms, look beyond a 4 or 8 year mark. Government is simply not suited to dealing with long term decisions. Democratically elected governments cannot afford to be progressive, they have to be as conservative as the loudest majority. And in society which has been told there is no such thing, the single unit rules. Enter: the NIMBY. Wheelie bins, incandescent light bulbs, wind farms. People operate on the same lines, ‘this effects me right here, right now, my personal rights are far more important than the greater good, because what do I ever see of the greater good? It’s just good, you don’t notice it, right?’

Enter the ‘save money’ approach, monetising sure does make the ‘greater good’ more attractive, huh? Flourescent bulbs will save your £45 per year! Insulating your house properly can save you up to £300 a year! That’s a family holiday to Majorca if you fly Easyjet and shit in a plastic bag! (rather than use the pay-toilets) Wait… didn’t I hear flying is bad?*

I’ll offset the emissions then! What do you mean offsetting is a ‘dangerous distraction’ actually encouraging greater consumption rather than displacing it?

The greatest battle we face on climate change is lifestyle. We could cover 1/3 of the UK in wind and solar farms, combine that with tidal, hot rock, offshore wind power, and nuclear power plants along the whole of our coastline, we would still fall seriously short of our current energy consumption levels Source. Because we’re not just talking about electricity here, we’re talking about heating, transport, manufacturing, agriculture, how and what we eat, gadgets, where consumables and clothes come from, how we throw them away, how we shop, what we expect from our food, our holidays, how we do our jobs. It all uses energy, it all contributes to the 93% that we, as a nation, have to cut.

And that really is down to us.

You can make changes to your own life. Achievable, small changes, that will add up. YES you will be inconvenienced. But it’s a small price to pay. It’s not the greater good, it’s our greater good, let’s fight for it, OK?

Don’t know where to start? Here’s your chance:

This afternoon the team that made the film The Age of Stupid is launching the 10:10 campaign: which aims for a 10% cut in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions during 2010. This seems to be roughly the trajectory needed to deliver a good chance of averting two degrees of warming. By encouraging people and businesses and institutions to sign up, the campaign hopes to shame the UK government into adopting this as its national target. This would give the government the moral leverage to demand immediate sharp cuts from other nations, based on current science rather than political convenience. Source

See http://www.1010uk.org/ or @tentenuk on Twitter. Today, Tuesday the 1st of September 4-7pm at the Tate Modern, there is live music,  free champagne and a token, a recycled piece of 747 of your very own, available to the first 1,000 people to sign up to cut their emissions by 10% in a year. Get involved, speak up, because we haven’t got long. Join the rest of the country in shouting out as the world works towards the Copenhagen Climate Conference. Join the Wave, participate.

My current CO2 emissions are roughly 3.53 tonnes per year (I used this calculator) 3.177 is my target. I intend to stick to it.

747 to 1010 in 34 seconds from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

*RE air travel: Taking one intercontinental trip per year uses about 30 kWh† per day. To put that in perspective, using a car to travel 50km every day for a year produces 40kWhpd

To put that further in perspective, 40kWhpd is twice the amount that would be generated by, for example, covering the windiest 10% of the UK with wind turbines (delivering 2 W/m²)

ALSO ” Flying creates other greenhouse gases in addition to CO₂, such as water and ozone, and indirect greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxides. If you want to estimate your carbon footprint in tons of CO₂- equivalent, then you should take the actual CO₂ emissions of your flights and bump them up two- or three-fold.” Source

Yes flying is bad. I’m sorry.

†Kilowatt hours are “one unit” on electricity bills, about 10p in the UK in 2008 – one 40 W (incandescent) lightbulb, kept switched on all the time, uses one kilowatt-hour per day. Source

Dinosaurs Will Die

Image by Stéfan, shared via a Creative Commons licence

Cards on the table, music means a lot to me. It’s scored many critical moments of my life so far, and papered over the cracks in the boring bits. Music has brought me back from the edge, when I felt like my brain was going to leap out of my head, music has set me far freer than alcohol ever has, whisky helps, but give me a dirty rock club, heat, smoke, lights and I will dance until I can’t breathe, until I feel like I could disappear.

For every heart break, there’s a song that goes with it, for every break up, an album you have to reclaim, for every beautiful moment, a piece of music. Music is reciprocal, it’s shared, it brings people together, it makes moments, and it is inspired by them. It is an essential form that talks to us of the universal; rhythm scores our lives, all life.

I like music, you get that. But I would have heard none of the tracks above had it not been for file-sharing. I am not poor, not in real terms, I have a roof over my head, food in the fridge, an education. But my food budget for the past two years was something between £7.50 and £10 a week, I have roughly zero disposable income. I download files. Illegally. So does almost everyone I know. If you took that music away from me, you’d be taking away the thickness of experience. You’d be halving the substance of my memories.

This is a blog in reaction to Peter Mandleson’s threat to cut off internet access to persistent file-sharers.  There are two questions here; one is it legal, two, is it useful?

Despite the fact that the in depth Digital Britain report released in June 09 ruled out cutting off P2P sharers (“The most draconian penalty considered at the time was to slow down a persistent filesharer’s broadband connection”. Source) Peter Mandleson has since announced a new plan that

Calls for the secretary of state to be given the power to direct the communications regulator Ofcom to implement technical measures against illegal peer-to-peer filesharing. Source

So, is it legal? There’s quite a strong argument against these measures in terms of them being unenforceable – you cannot cut off 7 million people’s internet connections without due process of law. (I shouldn’t have to say this but) you cannot assume guilt; it’s perfectly easy to piggy back on unsecured wireless connections, just as it is possible that a connection is shared by a building, a family, a business. Is Mandleson proposing to process each illegal filesharer through the justice system? (And at the cost of the taxpayer – “Her Majesty’s Court System currently holds 200,000 criminal cases per year” source – how is it going to deal with millions)? Or is he advocating a form of marshal law, where ISPs are sheriffs, and users are guilty until proven innocent?

The second argument against the idea is that it actually directly contravenes our human rights under EU legislation:

Disconnecting people from the internet does not fully comply with EU legislation. In fact it directly contravenes EU legislation. I am referring to amendment 138/46 which [...] declared that access to the internet was a fundamental human right. source

The action also contravenes what was pretty much the whole conclusion of the Digital Britain report: that broadband internet access was a right, not a privilege.

These actions are bolstered by false accounting for losses to the creative industries, and even aside from the exaggerated and erroneous figures involved in the headlines (see Ben Goldacre’s excellent blog post for more) their maths is flawed at the point they assume every download is a lost sale.

It’s all beginning to sound a bit desperate isn’t it?

Whitehall insiders believe the U-turn is more likely to have been caused by a prior meeting with one of the most powerful figures in the British music business, Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music – Source

Do you know what might save you a lot of money Universal? How about pulling out of all of those lawsuits, cutting down on those very finely paid lawyers of yours. A shiny penny to anyone who can set Universal Music Group’s legal costs against their projected losses to file sharing.

What we are seeing here, is the end of one type of business: the physical distribution of digital products. Source

These movements against progress are nothing less than the death throes of a nasty, parasitic part of a very worthy industry. They are not useful.

Copyright was originally brought about in 1709 to “encourage the creation of artistic works by granting a right to copy for 14 years.” It now stands between 50 and 95 years Source. Its aim was to encourage a profession. I am not arguing for an artistic community that consists solely of amateurs, I understand, boy do I understand that artists need to be paid. But being paid is not the ends for which art is made, it is the encouragement. The leveller. Not the stick with which to beat the consumer.

Culture is not only enjoyable, it is vital to us as a species, culture frames our existence; it helps us reflect of our selves, it asks big questions. Culture was also vital to our evolution, the ability to tell stories- to imagine differing outcomes was key to our growth– we teach out young using stories, cautionary tales and nursery rhymes. Our cultural heritage is open source, peer to peer, shared. See ballads, fairy tales, myths, legends, and performance like commedia dell’arte (its latter day incarnation is pantomime, but it used to be free to view political satire, kind of like a Spitting Image road show). The ownership of stories (told visually, actively, aurally) have changed since then, with the advent of a market economy, came patronage, and then a global capitalist system decided that not only did it want to own our stories, it wanted to sell them to us too. Distribution. But now the system is changing again.

The great chaotic utopia envisaged by some online evangelists would be culturally impoverished – a world that would create millions of buskers, but no Beatles. Source

I, and many of my peers are not calling for an end to the creative industries, we’re calling for changes to a very specific aspect of them – distribution. I’m not talking about some ‘choatic utopia’, what I am saying is the way that we consume is changing. Myspace, and Spotify have already changed the way that that we access music, and that artist distribute their wares. Youtube allows anyone with a camera and a computer to have their say. The Age of Stupid crowd-sourced the complete £450K production budget and are pioneering a system that allows anyone to buy a licence to screen it whenever and wherever they like – keeping the profits for themselves or their climate campaign.

Here’s a theory:

The world of ideas is changing, the news is becoming mutual, Obama’s politics was mutual- not driven by spin, broadcast control and brand [...] It’s all about the pull [...] Think pirates. Think mavericks, think renegades. They will re-form our world, they can tell us what the future might look like. It’s critical that artists are engaged with the digital world, not for marketing, but to ask difficult, big questions of it – Charles Leadbeater @wethink at Shift Happens

Here’s an industry perspective:

The majority of my audiences watch my films over the BitTorrent system, a system so revolutionarily brilliant that it means I, an independent film-maker, can distribute a film in full High Definition to hundreds of millions of viewers with absolutely no cost incurred to me – Monaghan Media source

And that of a consumer

Now, I muster all the spare cash I have to pay for an internet connection, and go to gigs as often as possible. I tell my mates (and a bunch of strangers on the interweb) about all the new bands I’ve heard of, and encourage them to see them live. So, I’m paying for the music I like, I’m paying the costs of distributing it, and I’m promoting it source

P2P filesharing is revolutionary, it’s zero cost, close to zero in carbon emissions (servers), it runs on recommendations. It is another shift to the ‘pull’ ethic of the digital world. In a hyper-connected, information heavy existence, you cannot deliver neatly packaged tales of what we should buy and how we should be, because there are a million other voices that will simultaneously disagree. People taped music from CDs and radio before now, that’s been going on for years, what really scares the Powers That Be is the peer – peer review, peer sharing. Theirs is no longer dominant voice, we’re building our own stories.

I believe that cutting off filesharing is fundamentally unfair, fundamentally unjust – and penalises the young, and the less well off.

Yes artists need to make a living, but hierarchical distribution is not the only way to do that. Radiohead released their album In Rainbows allowing people to pay ‘what they thought it was worth’, you could pay as little as 1p for it. The average paid was around $6 (source). They also very recently gave away a song for free. In a world where everyone is vying for your attention a loyal fan base matters more than ever, you cultivate that through trust, interaction and recommendation.

Ben Walker, (the man who did the Twitter song [and much else besides]) suggests that “when it’s so easy to make and share music, you’d be an unpopular person if you charged for music.”

Copyright has evolved, we now have Creative Commons, and likewise we can find new models from which artists can make a living, offering “goods that are infinitely duplicated (music) for free and tying them to scarce goods (vinyl records, t-shirts, collector’s items etc.)” source, is one method, Likewise we are never going to be able to duplicate the  singular experience of seeing a performance live, people still pay for that. Artists will still make a living, what digital distribution demolishes is the hierarchy – superstars and massive profit margins.

Johnathan Phan, of Pirate Party UK suggests that

Whereas earlier we had [one] artist making 10 million, we now have a hundred people making 1 million. source

It is not useful for Peter Mandleson to be attempting to tackle file-sharing. What he should be doing, as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, is using the Digital Britain report to offer big business a manual to the digital world, if they want to survive, they have to evolve, Mandleson is doing the country a disservice when he panders to their childish cries to stem the tide of change.

Our world is slowly realising that unrelenting growth is not a sustainable model, in economics, in the environment, in our populace. Unfortunately this message takes the longest to reach the people at the top. What’s the answer? Support artists, not labels. Go to gigs, love music, share your love with others.

And if anyone tries to prosecute you for sharing torrents, show them the Pirate Google, and tell them to fuck off.