Hannah Nicklin

What if…

You may have spotted a brief rant by me on Twitter the other day (1, 2, 3) in response to this article on the effect of the internet and other digital technology on theatre audiences. The article itself is balanced, reasoned, and puts forward a point I very much agree with:

… ultimately, we should avoid looking at the net as either intrinsically good or bad. Rather, we should see it as a tool, and like all tools, it is only as good as the person or people using it. (source)

The piece was responding to criticism of how the “constant feedback demanded by interactive technology can, in effect, become like a “giant focus group” that challenges “the autonomy of the artist”.” (ibid) and that “these digital and virtual connections, [… are] not particularly human.” (ibid) by which the artist being quoted means not of interest or destructive to theatre/artists.

There is a misconception, I believe, that technology is driving us apart. In fact (and as I put more thoroughly in the paper I recently delivered at the recent TaPRA postgrad symposium) I believe we are living in an era that is coming to be defined by the removal of the interface. Of the removal of the sanctioning of knowledge and of the mediatisation of our relationship with the information and entertainment we consume.

Likewise with 100% of 6-10 year olds gaming (Source (PDF)), and as a nation our spending 30% more on video games than on the consumption of film, we are also now a generation of people becoming much more used to being closer more embedded in its stories. This is political as well as social, adverts and didactic politics are also able to embed themselves in the player or person at the centre of these stories, and less perceptively so, so we also need tools to allow us to interrogate that embeddedness. Theatre, is a powerfully political form, it embodies the question what if. The question that has been so evolutionarily important to us, and the question which is the basis of all politics. For theatre to preserve it’s political power/relevance (see The Player as Poltical for more) I believe it needs to be wading into Technoculture, examining how it is changing the way we live, and who we are.

After all, how is anyone who wishes to make theatre about people who live now able to do so without acknowledging that way that we are mediated and the ways that we communicate are integral to the way we live? If Michiko Kakutani is able to admit that his audiences have changed, perhaps he should consider who it is that we make our art for, about.

Acknowledging technology in your art doesn’t have to mean using it. It can, and powerfully so, but it can also be about understanding living in technoculture, about how you open up your processes, how you market your work, the processes by which you make it, and the way you approach the telling of it.

Let me introduce you to the future. We’ve always had it. It’s always been perceived to be degrading us somehow. By all means sign off on your own obsolescence, but know this: to investigate our digital technoculture is necessary. To discount its cultural relevance is at best ignorant, at worst, dangerous.

It’s time to stop having this conversation about if it’s right that theatre should embrace digital technology/technoculture, and instead start looking about how it’s being done. If you are scared of it, if you believe it is degrading how we live, that is exactly why you should be examining it.

Blog posts like this are just as guilty of continuing this conversation. So this will be the last I write on the matter for a while – of course it’s always necessary to reexamine your assumptions – but for the next few posts I do RE the arts, I’m going to stop talking about how and why the arts and tech should/can work together, and instead talk about the tools and ways they’re being used. If we should be looking at digital technology “as a tool, and like all tools, it is only as good as the person or people using it” (source) it’s time for me to stop blogging about why, and start looking at who and how.

Belonging

The Player as Political

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century (McDonough 2004, 10)

From the bypassing of human interface devices (HIDs) such as mice and keyboards represented by the iPhone and the iPad, to the removal of a media interface represented by the increasing popularity of social media, the current trend in digital technology centres around the removal of the interface. This trend has recently been seen as becoming increasingly prevalent in theatre and performance.

[A] key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves […] increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

In 2009 the biggest selling entertainment item on Amazon.co.uk was a video game – COD:MW2 outsold both Harry Potter and Twilight on DVD. We spent 30% more on video games last year than we did on going to the cinema and purchasing DVDs combined. And in a recent survey done by the BBC, 100% of 6-10 year olds gamed regularly.

With gaming you’re involved and in control. With other things you just have to sit back and watch. I’ve been gaming for most of my life. – Callum, aged 10 (BBC 2005 Source (PDF))

Although digital strategies and ideas have been examined in a performative context since the 1960s, this technology and these strategies have reached a point where they are ubiquitous enough to form a real trend in narrative consumption. As thus ours is a culture becoming much more used to being embedded in its stories, political as well as social. In Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture Matthew Causey discusses the political move from simulation to embeddedness, suggesting that

The site of power has shifted from the exterior screens of simulation to the interior body of the material subject. (Causey 2006, 179)

The example drawn by Causey contrasts the illusion of Gulf War I – of cut together clips, narrators, and news packages – to the rolling embedded coverage of Gulf War II. ‘This is happening now’, the spectacle says, ‘there is no room for editing, cutting, or simulation; this is reality’. In our age of so-called reality TV, 24-hour rolling news, and the advent of the ‘real-time’ and ‘social’ web, we are witnessing a corruption of the data-flow of contemporary life. We are led to believe that the data we receive is live, uncut, unmediated and true. As thus we lose the critical tools afforded us by distance and reflection. It is the ‘interior body of the material subject’ where the political battle for subjectivity must now be fought, in our selves.

Pervasive gaming and interactive theatre takes the digital idea of player-as-protagonist, and applies it to the lived body of performance. Pervasive games are ‘playful experiences’ which combine aspects of childhood parlour games and video game ethics and t to be played in groups across large urban spaces, interactive theatre moves these ideas into thicker narratives. Both forms allow the audience to become agent, and can be seen to expand their storytelling over space, technology, and/or time.

“All theatre is interactive. To call this diverse spectrum of work ‘Interactive Arts’, is only to suggest that it acknowledges that relationship and seeks, in some way, to interrogate it.” (Field 2010)

Continue reading…

My First Paper

Twitter strikes again! This time one of the postgrad organisers at  the Theatre and Performance Research Association spotted me on Twitter, found my blog and invited me to submit a paper to their Dealing with the Digital symposium. They’ve kindly agreed to let me post my proposal here. I’ll be writing the paper over the next 2 weeks, and no doubt will blog some of my thoughts/conclusions along the way. Enjoy:

Proposal for a 10 minute paper at

DEALING WITH THE DIGITAL

TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium

10 – 5.30, 20th March 2010, Bedford Square, London

The Player as Political.

The video game ethic of player-as-protagonist is beginning to influence mainstream non-digital approaches to narrative. In theatre this is seen in the emerging popularity of interactive forms pioneered by companies such as Blast Theory, and current being popularised by Pervasive Gaming companies such as Hide and Seek and the mp3 or locative technology driven soundwalks of Duncan Speakman and Subtlemob.  This paper examines the root of the current drive towards total and pervasive performative immersion, and how we can tackle the traditional problems of immersion that are suffered by video games and other escapist narratives – a loss of political power, objectivity and community experience – within a theatrical context. This paper investigates the ethical implications of suspending the weight of disbelief in one person, and suggests that in hyperlocal performance, and a new world of fractured, multi-facet identities, gentler tactics are necessary, and locative and site-responsive aspects are the best way of preserving the political power of theatre within an individualist context.

Hannah Nicklin

Hannah Nicklin is a first year PhD student at Loughborough University. Her research interests include questions of theatre and digital technology, with a particular focus on selfhood and storytelling in a digital age. She has spoken at Nottingham Trent and Leeds Met universities on new narrative forms and social media for theatre companies, drawing on her work with Foursight Theatre and Theatre Writing Partnership. She maintains a blog at hannahnicklin.com, pieces of which have been reproduced by the Telegraph, Subtext Magazine, and the Arts Council, and she will be speaking at the Shift Happens UK arts, learning and tech conference in Summer 2010. Hannah is also a playwright, her most recent work Awake – the story of a gamer meeting her avatar - will be performed at Theatre503 this March.