Hannah Nicklin

Don’t Let Them Get Away With It

Image shared on Flickr via a CC licence by Russell Higgs

Edit: I also recorded a slightly abridged version of this blog (with pretty moving pictures) which you can listen to on Youtube, click here.

This is just a quick blog post, I’m not sure what difference, if any, it’s going to make, but I have to say this, if at the very least to have somewhere to point people so I don’t have to keep on repeating myself.  Warning: may contain anger.

The Tories are going to break our economy. They’re going to dismantle all that is admirable about our state in the false name of saving money.

The Tories, aided by the centre right Lib Dems, are going to tear the heart out of our country. Because they have never needed one, because they can’t conceive (for the most part) what it’s like to be anything but supremely privileged.

And they’re going to do so whilst skipping along to the tune they have a lazy, complicit, right wing media parroting ad nauseum; ‘this is Labour’s fault’ ‘in the current climate’…

Since when was applying market values to education and health provision ever a good idea? How is that working out for the US? We need expertise, and we need efficient, competent services. Market capitalism brings us to bust, or it provides us with a service at the lowest cost. How much is your health, how much are your children worth?

When did we all forget that this was a global financial crisis? Or did I hear wrong, did it not hit the US (well known for their incredibly profligate education and health provision) just as badly as us, and everyone else? When did we forget that it was Cameron and Osborne’s pals the de-regulated (hello Thatcher) bankers that got us here? When did we forget that the NHS was founded in the largest period of national debt our country has ever known?

Fallacy number 1:

‘This is down to years of Labour’s Profligacy’

Did you know that public spending (as a % of national income) in 1999-2000 was the lowest since 1957-58?

Source (PDF)

There was pretty much a similar degree of fluctuation over Labour’s terms in power as have been going on since 1950, notably with a large injection of cash following 2007 in order to stop the bottom falling out of our little capitalist world. So, y’know, probably forgivable.

And you know what? I am happy for public spending to rise.

“Estimates from the Office for National Statistics suggest that public services have improved considerably over the period from 1997 to 2007 with measured outputs suggesting a one- third increase in the quantity and quality of public services” Source (PDF)

Continue reading…

Hide & Seek Weekender 2010

How late is this blog post? Somewhere in the region of ‘epically’, or if you like, ‘roughly a month’. I shall continue to use this as an excuse, and in fact, as the fracture clinic doctor told me it won’t really be totally all right (not his exact words) until this time next year, I shall be continuing to use it to excuse tardiness in all hand/arm related things for many more months to come.

The good news, however, is that the cast is off, and after catching up with my life, work, writing, passing my first year PhD progress panel, and getting over all the related hangovers, I return to you, Lo, with tantalising tales of my exploits at the Hide & Seek Weekender at the National Theatre!

The Hide and Seek Weekender ran from Friday the 9^th to Sunday the 11^th of July, and was hosted by the National, in a variety of foyer and outside spaces (I didn’t see any work in the performance spaces, though that doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t any, as there was an awful lot going on). I attended the Sunday, but you can see and download the full program here. I didn’t get much of an opportunity to take photos or videos as I was still be-casted at that point, but I used my MIND CAMERA instead. Here are some of the games, sights and sounds it captured:

The big focus of the Sunday seemed to be on the Delhi Games section, most of which I stuck with throughout the day as it wasn’t too precarious-movement-heavy. Also it was a new interesting dimension on the pervasive gaming that I’ve so far done – rather than just reclaiming physical or tech space, the Delhi Games also played across cultural boundaries. These games variously used skype, facebook, and text messages to collaborate on different playful experiences with two groups of artists and players, one in Delhi, and the other in London. Here are the ones I participated in:

Noah’s International Lark (I can’t find info on who this one was by). This was a simple but effective getting-to-know-you type game played over Skype. Two teams made up of both India and Britain-based participants had a limited amount of time to work out several ‘things in common’ shared by the team members. Each ‘thing in common’ had to include participants from both countries, and was scored (eventually) by how rare it was. The ‘rarity’ score was then multiplied by the number of people in the group who shared the ‘thing in common’. The other rule was that everyone in the group needed to be in at least one of the ‘things in common’ groupings. Sound complicated? It wasn’t. Example: We found that 5 people across both countries had met a prime minister or ex-prime minister. This was considered 4-points worth of rare (5 being most rare) so the points scored there were 20. You see? We discovered things like at least 3 people had physically stopped an aeroplane taking off, that 4 people had been arrested, that every single one of us had sent an embarrassing text to the wrong person. Continue reading…

Rain Reminds Reflections

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. Continue reading…