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.

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.

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.

I’ve been meaning to write a post on the Unlimited Theatre (@untheatre) show which I went to see at Curve in the middle of April for a couple of weeks. I am currently struggling to blog with other commitments crashing into my schedule, including (but not limited to) the preparation of the material for my first year PhD progress panel, but I really wanted to talk about Ethics of Progress. Not in a traditional ‘review’ sense, but more in terms of my personal reaction to the subject matter. So here I am. Bear with me.

At the age of 16, and having got the same grades across the board at GCSE, I found myself facing a choice – the local science specialist 6th form – to do Maths, Chemistry, and Physics, or the specialist performing arts 6th form, to do Performing Arts, English Lit and Fine Art. Being young and unburdened with worry, I left it to chance, and gravity, and tossed a coin. The arts it was. I don’t regret that, but I regret being made to choose, and I am lucky to have in some degree returned to it in my PhD.

If you know one thing about me, know this: I work hard at learning.

I passionately believe, above all, that there is nothing that you cannot understand, and that knowledge and understanding are two of the most subversive tools at our disposal.

There is nothing you cannot understand, only the voices of others instilled in your head that tell you some kinds of knowledge are not for you.

The recent forcing through of the ignorant and immensely damaging Digital Economy Bill did not speak to me, as it did to many, of a broken democracy. It spoke to me, ultimately, of a society that fetishes technological ignorance. A society that contains within it whole swathes of people who will proudly declare that they’ve never sent an email. Politicians who will believe the monied hands of lobbyists over the people interacting in online worlds every day and who understand them. A country who will believe the tabloid journalist over the eminent peer-reviewed scientist. Pretty is stupid. Clever is dangerous. How many people have you heard utter the phrase ‘I just don’t understand politics’?

A democracy is really broken when the people are convinced that it is beyond their understanding.

A society is fractured each time a person considers any of its contents beyond their comprehension.

I have found in my reading on the history of computing that the biggest advances in science and technology are driven by the military. Turing‘s work at Bletchley Park, VR, pioneered first and foremost as a flight and war sim. As Unlimited Theatre intimate in Ethics of Progress: “follow the money”. Who’s in charge of these leaps in technology? Quantum computing will mark a massive advancement in computing power, it will also allow whoever develops it first an incredible upper hand in encryption and decryption of intelligence (it’s all about the prime numbers).

Ethics of Progress was about quantum physics, it tackled 3 main concepts, superposition, entanglement, and the possibilities of teleportation.

Teleportation.

Imagine a truly green method of travel. Imagine a safe and immediate way to evacuate people from disaster areas. Imagine working in Hull but living in Cairo. My friend who was caught with illegal pamphlets disappeared yesterday. She still looks the same, she can move and act in all the same ways. But they disappeared her. If you are simultaneous destroyed in one place, and rebuilt in another, you may be made of the same particles, but are you the same person?

Theatre, performance, the arts in general, I believe are a society’s way of questioning itself. They imagine, they experiment, they test theories of the human. They are how we examine our culture and challenge the ethical assumptions we make every day. I believe that science and art are both in pursuit of truth.

Truth is important to me. (This is why I am sometimes a tad difficult to talk to, I tend to reference my inaccuracies or omissions as I go). Scientific and ethical truth. What Ethics of Progress spoke of, beyond the scientific content, was the fact that these ideas were not beyond comprehension. In fact it urged us – out of responsibility – to understand, challenge and consider the implications of the ideas that it discussed.

The arts and science have too long been told that they are incompatible. I believe the most powerful thing that the age of collaboration being brought to us by technology can offer;* is the reconciliation of the humanities and sciences. Ethics of Progress lights the touch-paper under that concept.

*Superposition and string theory I get, the proper use of semi-colons, I’m working on.

“A strong-minded woman! Much like her mother, eh? Wears green spectacles and writes learned books … She wants to upset the universe, and play dice with the hemispheres. Women never know when to stop … “ William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine.

A large part of the history of the struggle for women’s rights has been the fight for participation in the public sphere; for the vote, for a say in politics, economic rights, for a voice, and worth in the public arena. We hear again and again that technology is a powerful tool, that blogs and social networking phenomena such as Twitter are becoming more and more involved in politics, and that people gather, communicate, and agitate from online. There is no doubt that as a forum for discussion and a place to co-ordinate action, technology is an invaluable platform. New online tools are creating a new public sphere – in such a fast moving medium, we simply cannot afford to be left behind. Women need to be on the front line, both participating in and originating new technology, and whilst women represent roughly 55% of the people online, and a 2008 study by Tesco’s Computers for Schools initiative found that from as early as seven years old, girls are outstripping boys when it comes to computer literacy (Taherreport, 2008), this isn’t being born out in the tech industry itself:

While women influence 80% of consumer spending decisions, 90% of technology products and services are designed by men [...] Women make up approximately 20% (and sometimes less) of panelists at major tech conferences. Even fewer are asked to be keynote speakers. Furthermore, women in tech are rarely quoted and sought out as experts by the mainstream media covering technology. (Kapin, 2009)

Women are hideously underrepresented in the tech world, this is due to more universal problems encountered by women in and en route to the work place, but it is also down to the pervading myth (and it is a myth, but one that unfortunately one that is woven into our education right from the kinds of toys that children are given to learn from) that women just can’t do tech as well as men. What is largely accepted as true is that role models are one of the best ways to break down that misconception. Enter Ada Lovelace Day – A day named after the world’s first computer programmer – countess of Lovelace, Ada. Ada Lovelace Day brings bloggers together to share stories and role models of women that are important to the/their history of digital technology/computing.

There are plenty of excellent programmers and engineers which other people are going to do much better justice than I. The person I have decided to talk about is a bit different, but the kind of person who I think also makes a big difference. I’d have to, really, because she’s an academic.

Theorists are often seen as derivative of the do-ers, but Ada Lovelace, devoid of the hardware that could run her code, was in essence a theorist, some of the biggest imaginative leaps can cause the biggest scientific and technological pushes. This short blog post today is dedicated to Sadie Plant.

I discovered Sadie Plant first as a writer on the complex and revolutionary artistic ideas of the Situationist International – looking at how advance capitalism can be tackled by the revelation of the spectacle, before discovering that she founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, and then getting my hands on a (signed, no less, thanks go out to @toodamnninja for that find) copy of Zeros + Ones.

Zeroes + Ones is a magnificent piece of writing, a glorious, hubristic, and enthusiastic look at women in digital technoculture. It moves from science fiction, to the history of zero, to Freud, Frankenstein, and Ada Lovelace in her own words; tracing the history of women as portrayed in technoculture, and women as the body of digital tech. Plant looks at weaving and the Jacquard Loom‘s punched cards as a precursor to the analytical engine,  the notion of binary sex/gender, and how the way women have had to exist in the workplace places them ideally for the way workplaces are reconfiguring in a digital age. Through a complex and incredibly varied text Plant allows Ada herself to emerge as a kind of guide, the book progressing as an almost ode to Ada’s mind:

“‘nothing but very close & intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement’”

Plant looks at how women, given the task of interfacing throughout history – the secretary, the PA, the typist, the telephone operator – find themselves ideally suited to the future of tech, as well as woven throughout its history:

“When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. They have not made some trifling contribution to an otherwise man-made tale: when computers became the miniaturised circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them. Theirs is not a subsidiary role which needs to be rescued for posterity, a small supplement whose inclusion would set the existing records straight: when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female. Hardware, software wetware–before their beginnings and beyond their ends, women have been the simulators, assemblers, and programmers of the digital machines.”

The first computer programming language was named Ada, after the founder of modern computer programming; Ada Lovelace. Women played a key role in code-breaking at Bletchley Park during WWII, in 1942 the ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic  computer) was programmed by six women and Grace Hopper, the second programmer, inspired the development of the COBOL programming language. Women are the majority of online users (55%) and tech consumers (80%).  When I speak to my programming friends they have no clue about any of this. The battle (as ever) for women in tech is reclaiming our past as well as our present.

Plant then looks to the future, touching on Donna Haraway’s Cyberfeminist manifesto and at ideas of consciousness and cyborgs in fiction, theory, and reality:

“Only the most highly coded and perfectly integrated machines are unable to see the extent of their own programming. The bladerunner’s blind conviction in his own humanity proves only how efficient the programming can be.”

Zeroes + Ones was written in 1997 and is an invaluable book for all people interested and working in the world of technology. Looking back, as well as far forward the ideas, facts, figures and concepts shifting under its covers slowly reveal a full picture, pregnant with the full potential of a powerful, feminine, digital age.

Buy it, read it. Laugh, smile, disagree, but above all, feature this fuller history in your mind and in your deeds, because, as an excellent blog post I read today puts it:

“the problem is […] thoughtlessness, a kind of – oh, God, I’m going to say it – institutional sexism, where nobody thinks to notice and object because nobody realises what’s happening. […] it’s not what we believe and value that counts. It’s not what we think in our head and hearts that counts. It’s what we do, often by mistake and often without knowing that we’re doing it. It’s what we do when that effectively runs counter to what we believe that needs attending to.” Colin Smith

My Ada Lovelace Day is dedicated to Sadie Plant, because nothing has shown me that as a woman I belong in tech – and that it belongs to me – better and brighter than this book.

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)

The player-as-protagonist form borrows from the actor of theatre and the avatar of online worlds, but removes the interface, allowing the user to play with aspects of the double and the void in the self. Allowing us to interrogate our selves as constructs, the player-as-protagonist format brings us back to a truer sense of self and reality, through their present absence.

Absences – of meaning, participation, reality, and identity – can constitute useful tactics in the struggle to unmask the social and economic relations of contemporary capitalist society. (Plant 1992, 181)

Though these pervasive games and interactive performances often involve recorded or other technology, which can disengage you, this is countered by the danger of placing you as the avatar in the world-constituting process. These kinds of performances represent:

An embracing of the total impossibility of getting away from the world around us. So much theatre strives to make the stage into an almost sanctified other place […] A space for coolness and distance and clarity. For conveying social messages and great untainted truths. But I don’t think you can hold back the weight of the world. It comes flooding in regardless. [interactive theatre/art] doesn’t just understand that, it relies on it. It swims in reality. (Field, In the World Not About the World 2010)

However it is important to note that one very integral aspect of the political power of theatre is in danger of being lost to immersion.

The major objection against immersion is the alleged incompatibility of the experience with the exercise of critical faculties. (Ryan 2001, 10)

Branding, politics, media and art are all exhibiting a shift towards the immersive, personal – or hyperlocal. A radical or uncritical shift towards the hyperlocal could be incredibly dangerous. If you forward politics only on an individual basis or understanding you lose a sense of the bigger ‘better good’. You lose the politics of community, the politics that acknowledges that in some aspects we are all alike, and should all have equal footing, privilege and rights. How far is the hyperlocal different from a proactive version of NIMBYism? 

Likewise we need to acknowledge the dangers posed to people’s sense of self and belief, by work that so directly involves audiences. We no longer rely on a set, actors, a whole audience to maintain the suspension of disbelief, but one person on whom the whole of their narrative rests. Although we are more and more used to traversing different worlds and identities in virtual and real spaces, we also need to acknowledge that these conceptions of the ‘self’ are still very rigid. There’s something to be said for easing people away from hegemonic visions of identity, encouraging fluidity, but we should also acknowledge that to assume a fluid transition, assumes identity is a blank slate, sculpted, opted. Does this also apply to people who aren’t white, CIS-gered, hetero, able bodied, middle class, developed-world men? What about the majority cast as an ongoing ‘Other’ – to whom identity is more important, or more integral, people who are defined by their difference? Identity is dangerous when it is thoughtlessly fragmented or assaulted.

However within this danger lies a new political power. When the arts immerse people in narrative we are asking them to augment their bodily identity, an action much more powerful and dangerous than its equivalent in a virtual space.

Our bodies are where we experience the intersection of our individuality and the cultural sphere. (Hillis 1999, 172)

There’s something of using our physical bodies to explore aspects of digital, political and mediatised embeddedness which is incredibly important – which seeks to reconcile our lived body with our virtual selves (mediated or performed). This produces a kind of ‘mixed’ or augmented reality that requires a gentler and more playful set of performative tactics to support participants and preserve a connection to community and critical faculties.

These tactics are best exemplified by the work of people and companies such as Duncan Speakman, Coney, and Blast Theory. These works are often locative and site-specific, they are rooted – allowing for the safety of the participant, and for a connection to the ‘bigger picture’. Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke and Duncan Speakman’s Always Something Somewhere Else are self-created and generative pieces of work that use GPS units

[…] to discover fragments of other people’s audio recordings, [creating] a space in which digital tracking equipment can do more than just map our place within a geographical grid. It can remake our relationship to the rich network of memories and thoughts and people that truly make up the city we inhabit.  (Field, Playing Games 2010)

The most effective of this work also uses the more traditional TIE ideas of role-play to explore issues of morality and community on a narrative/micro level, whilst the bodily presence and physical engagement acknowledges the macro/societal. In a recent series of blogs for the British Council, Andy Field describes how work such as Coney’s Small Town Anywhere and Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines allow us to engage with

[…] a society at a point of fracture and collapse. We engage not by watching but by playing – by becoming one small fragment of this disintegrating world. (Ibid)

This is a profoundly political act, indeed, as Field goes on to say:

Politics is as much about form as it is about content. It is a way of doing things. Interpersonal relationships, the structure of our communities, our reading of and relationship to the place we inhabit. How we understand our being in the world. What [interactive arts] allow us is an opportunity to explore and experiment with how we do things. In displacing or undermining our usual, unconsidered way of relating to the people and things around us, they generate a vital context for reflection and experimentation. (Ibid)

These works deftly combine the intense and culturally relevant player-as-protagonist format with a political power that respects the weight of the immersive experience. The tactics are playful, but this does not mean they are trivial. By writing its stories on the bodies of its participants performance is able to hand people the critical tools to interrogate our culture of embeddness. We are able to locate the battleground of the ‘interior body of the material subject’ and the player-as-protagonist can become the player-as-political.

Works Cited.

BBC. “Digital Play, Digital Lifestyles.” BBC Creative Research and Development. Alice Taylor & Dr Adrian Woolard. December 2005.

http://open.bbc.co.uk/newmediaresearch/files/BBC_UK_Games_Research_2005.pdf (accessed March 18, 2010).

Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture, from simulation to Embeddedness. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.

Field, Andy. In the World Not About the World. Febuary 25, 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/in-the-world-not-about-the-world/ (accessed March 16, 2010).

Field, Andy. Interactivity. Febuary 10, 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/interactivity/ (accessed March 16, 2010)

Field, Andy, Playing Games. February 20, 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/playing-games/ (accessed March 16, 2010).

Haydon, Andrew. The year in theatre: trends of 2009. December 30, 2009.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/dec/30/theatre-trends-2009 (accessed January 1, 2010).

Hillis, Ken. Digital Sensations, Space, Identity, and embodiment in virtual reality (. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture, the Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge, 1992.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality, Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. . Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001.

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.

click for source

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

Another key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves in shows like Coney’s Small Town Anywhere, increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

From 1957-69 a new radical reading of the commodification of western capitalist society emerged. The situationists, born out of the fiery nihilism of the Dadaists and the irreverent playfulness of the Surrealists cast their gaze over society and saw:

That the alienation which in the nineteenth century was rooted in production had, in the twentieth century, become rooted in consumption. Consumption had come to define happiness and to suppress all other possibilities of freedom and selfhood. […] Everyone was first and foremost a member of an economy based on commodities” (McDonough 2004, 3)

The situationists identified a transition from the Marxist state of alienation, to a once-removed state of spectacular illusion. This ‘spectacle’ transformed every inch of our lives into an empty capitalist dream, maintained through the mutation of desires into needs. However the situationists believed that the image of society as it is was still intact behind the spectacle, and so they set about attempting to break the illusion.

“Just as the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy” –out of Marx’s dictum that philosophy, having interpreted the world, must set about changing it – now one had to look to the demands of art (McDonough 2004, 11)

The situationists saw art as the solution – an art practised by every member of society, an art that ceased to be art and became a continually revised way of seeing.  The situationists (though they didn’t credit it) were summoning the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ aspect of art:

Phenomenologists like to pick objects up with their minds, so to speak, and turn them around, examining them from all sides. This cannot be accomplished by viewing them frontally as they are embedded in the rest of the experiential world – hence bracketing (Roach 1992, 354)

This bracketing aspect – or epoché – that art provides is at the root of its ability to reveal the spectacle.

Art was at the root of the situationists’ calls for reclamation of public space and leisure time, they intended to use it to deconstruct the spectacular way of seeing, and reconstruct playful new ways of being. The tools which the situationists put forward were the détournement and the dérive. The détournement worked within the spectacle to highlight and ridicule the way it presented itself, this was a radical (though playful) reclamation of news footage, advertising, as well as the ridiculing of stars, celebrity and subversion of print material from popular culture.

The situationists also promoted a kind of unitary urbanism, they wanted each individual to augment their own environment; to take it and twist it, to reveal spaces as space, and not a means-to-an-end, a journey to work, the supermarket, a transaction in time. They wanted to reclaim architecture and urban space by subverting its use and design, and to also rediscover it as a place in its own right. They proposed this be done through the dérive. Reclaiming being-oriented rather than commodity-oriented experiencing of space.

The Situationists burned brightly and rapidly. They were radical, didactic, and sought revolution – a revolution built on the reclamation of our individual selves from the spectacle of capitalist society. They recognised that the political function of the arts is to provide people with a vision of the way the world is constructed, and they offered tools to rebuild it in our image. Their ideas reached their culmination with the events of May 1968, but

If the situationist idea of general contestation was realized in May 1968, the idea also realized its limits. The theory of the exemplary act […] may have gone as far as such a theory or such an act can go.” (McDonough 2004, 18)

However their tools are still useful to us. With the advent of the 21^st century we find ourselves in a new “‘era of the spectacle’ where the site of power has shifted from the exterior screens of simulation to the interior body of the material subject.” (Causey 2006, 179) We are now living in an era of embeddedness.

Technologized cultural systems resist simulating signs of the real to mask the real and instead practice a technique of embeddedness […] which draws attention to a reconstructed material truth and ocular proof that seeks to coerce through a type of shock and awe. The strategy of simulation and spectacle has been extended and fundamentally altered. The linked performances of terror, war, propaganda and consumerism have not fully abandoned the strategies of illusory simulation, but have instead complicated their operation with an image regime and the bodily presence of a material embeddedness. (Causey 2006, 151)

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 or cutting, we use embedded reporters, there is no room for simulation; this is reality’. In this age of celebrity and self-deluding X factor hopefuls, we no longer only find our desires maintained as needs, we find our dreams regulated too. This corruption of the data-flow of contemporary life extends beyond ‘reality TV’ to 24-hour rolling news, the advent of the ‘real-time’ and ‘social’ web. We are led to believe that the data we receive is live, uncut, and true. Through these tools the spectacle embeds itself in our lives. And in our Technoculture capitalism has a new currency: information. Facebook, Google, Youtube, we are now data packages, not only are we consumers, but we are consumed. It is the ‘interior body of the material subject’ where the battle for subjectivity must now be fought, in our selves.

A heavy task indeed, and a harder one as the remnants of reality are fundamentally altered rather than hidden by the spectacle. But we have a fight-back on our hands. The advent of the social-political online world, the wiki, and the prevalence of online gaming, also points towards a trend in narrative consumption and rebellion – this is the player as protagonist, everyone as editor, this is a gasp, a cry, a demand for the opportunity for us to eschew our bit-parts in the spectacle. To take control, to remake our selves, our surroundings, our ways of seeing.

This is the movement from audience to participant.

A new way of being is starting to emerge, it is imperative to bring the arts to that world to report from it. (Thompson 2009)

The situationists, I suggest, have provided us with the tools to deal with the spectacle, and phenomenology the way of seeing how we are embedded.

Phenomenology was the first movement to focus on the specific conditions of human embeddedness in an environment, and to make visible the phenomenon of the environment itself.  (Moran 2002, 5)

Phenomenology emphasises “world-constituting consciousness” (Moran 2002, 22) – an understanding of world-constituting processes is important in order to examine all aspects of the spectacular world. Art is the realm of the double – of re-representation. Nowhere has this been truer than of the theatre. But it is also true, now, of a new world: the virtual.

In virtual worlds, technology is widely allowing us to reclaim the reporting of our world, to take control over data, our information. Online spaces must be reclaimed, prevented from being colonised. It may currently be a place where our data is bought and sold, but it is also a place where we can take control, trade data on our own terms.

The online world is deeply involved in new trends of narrative and world-constituting. We see echoes in the avatar/online game, of theatre’s actor/play, and on discussion and image boards – we find the void, anonymity. Anonymity is fuelling subversive attempts to opt out of the organisation of myth, to bomb the spectacle. Just as the Angry Brigade of the 60s and 70s

Cultivated an image of a large, diffuse, and unidentifiable collection of dissenters: ‘The AB is the man or woman sitting next to you. They have guns in their pockets and anger in their minds.’

Now we are too many to know each other […]‘THEY COULD NOT JAIL US FOR WE DID NOT EXIST’ (Plant 1992, 126-7)

We now see online spaces such as 4chan and /b/ giving rise to phenomena such as Anonymous, DDoS attacks and defacement of the websites of celebrities, political targets, the Church of Scientology.  They are digital terrorists.

[Anonymous is] the first internet-based superconsciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they’re a group? Because they’re travelling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely. (Landers 2008)

Other attempts to break out of the embedded spectacle include Orange Alternative style playful recuperation – subvertising, flashmobs, cultural memes and viral videos. However in the fast paced world of technology, capitalism and the establishment promptly absorb these forms. The flashmob and viral video have been taken on by advertising, and when social networks are used by political subversives, they are quickly infiltrated by virtual Agent Provocateurs – as was seen in the #IranElection Twitter fuelled riots of 2009.

Only Anonymous have resisted recuperation by the spectacle. They are dangerous, racist, misogynistic, righteous and unpredictable by turn. They are all things, they are anyone, they are nothing and they are no one. They embody that of virtual worlds which is made in the void; they do not exist, their potential is everywhere. And as yet they have resisted that which the Angry Brigade succumbed to, the AB could not be caught, but they were labelled ‘terror’. The void with which the AB threatened Italian society was turned into a useful bogeyman for the spectacle:

The spectacle of terrorism provides a socially cohesive common enemy, legitimised needs for vigilance, security, and new forms of police repression, and encourages the opinion that even the faultiest of democracies is superior to the reign of terror. (Plant 1992, 128)

The web and the online ethic also continues to be colonised by the capitalist spectacle. The groups of people on a night out, frozen in wide smiles and pouts, shuddering ever so-slightly as they wait for the flash to go off. ‘It didn’t happen if there aren’t photos of it on Facebook’. They are cultivating digital versions of themselves. Personal data, buying habits, images, memories, thoughts and feelings are entrusted to huge multinational companies and – much more than the goods we make, our money, our time – they trade in pieces of our selves.

So while situationists offer the tools, and phenomenology the way of seeing, it is in theatre that we find world-constituting in its purest expression, and theatre in which we need to find new forms to tackle the spectacle’s colonisation of the self. As the spectacle in our society warps the raw data of contemporary being, theatre too, struggles to maintain its political power. As the corruption runs deeper and deeper, all of the virtual and theatre worlds are compromised and their revolutionary potential smothered.

To preserve their revolutionary potential, these worlds need each other.

Theatre has always been in the business of world-constituting. It could bracket the spectacle and show you a new illusion. And now, with the advent of the player-as-protagonist ethic of online worlds, theatre can bracket the modern spectacle and embed you in other realities.

In the last century the situationists called for the

Invention of a new species of games. The most general aim must be to broaden the nonmediocre portion of life, to reduce its empty moments as much as possible. […] The situationist game stands out from the standard conception of the game by the radical negation of the ludic features of competition and of its separation from the stream of life. (Debord 2004, 45)

This is exactly what Pervasive Games do. Pervasive Gaming is a fluid term for location (often) urban-based games. The Pervasive Gaming collective Hide&Seek describe their work as “social games and playful experiences” (Hide&Seek 2010). They are somewhere between computer games, and the games you used to play as a child, they have also worked with pioneering theatre companies such as Punchdrunk on what they term ‘Multiplatform Immersive Theatre Experiences’ or MITE – using virtual and real worlds, and exploring narrative in the spaces between them.

In this study I am widening the definition of ‘Pervasive Gaming’ to include all performance strategies that involve augmenting personal or environmental reality from a player-as-protagonist perspective.

The playful games of Hide&Seek use a wiki-ethic to create, and run their games and events. Using the web as a place to assemble their ideas, anyone can edit and invent new games for the collective, propose and run new events, and all of the work is available under a free-to-use Creative Commons licence. Likewise they run ‘sandpit’ events – which take a similar approach to beta testing in the world of software development. The games played by Hide&Seek are never played for prizes, and take place in large groups across urban spaces. Every player is an associate artist.

In a classless society, it might be said, there will be no more painters, only situationists who, among other things, make paintings (Debord 2004, 48)

Though the majority of the games are simple and light hearted they represent a détournement of urban space, a reclamation of play and an application of player-as-protagonist ethics.

The player-as-protagonist borrows from the actor of theatre and the avatar of online worlds, allowing the user to play with aspects of the double and the void – being and nothingness – our selves as constructs. The player-as-protagonist brings us back to a truer sense of self, through absence.

Absences – of meaning, participation, reality, and identity – can constitute useful tactics in the struggle to unmask the social and economic relations of contemporary capitalist society. (Plant 1992, 181)

Theatre is death, nothing, life, everything. It is the creation of a world in front of our very eyes.  New theatrical forms like Pervasive Gaming are using digital ethics to take this way of seeing to the subject.

The ego does not believe in the possibility of its death. The unconscious thinks it is immortal. The uncanny experience of the double is death made material, unavoidable, present. (Causey 2006, 18)

To examine life as it is constituted you also need to understand death. Technology, avatars, the spaces theatre traverses between being and suspension of disbelief; there we find death, and also life. 0, 1, 0, 1, every second.

Though these Pervasive Games and events often involve recorded or other technology, which can disengage you from “the power of the double and of illusion, and thereby of the spectre of the corporeal body (death).”(Causey 2006, 98), this is countered by the danger of placing you as the avatar in the world-constituting process. You are sole creator.

Pervasive Games pick us up from our embedded state and allow us to look at ourselves from different angles. They take devices that are often designed to separate us from reality; iPods, GPS units, smart phones, and they use them to bring us into closer contact with the world. Some of the most interesting aspects of Pervasive Gaming is exemplified by the Subtlemob. Based on the idea of secret gatherings of people that the flashmob popularised, but bringing people together quietly, and conspiratorially to walk the narrative of a story.

As if it Were the Last Time was a free a sound walk-come-performance devised by Duncan Speakman and in association with Subtlemob. It took place on a small number of streets near Covent Garden. It was a (performance? Experience? Neither of these words do) for two people. Two days before the event, participants were provided with a map, an mp3, and told to set it going at 6pm.

For each and every person who took part, the experience was theirs. Entirely. And not, in staged theatre, as each audience member receiving the piece from a different perspective. This was each participant doing. The movements, the characters, the gestures, and the touch of someone’s hand on a shoulder, were all completely yours. Of your making.

Conventional suspension of disbelief – the time and credence that you pay into conventional, staged performance – pales into comparison to the weight of belief that you pour into this kind of experience. Traditional theatre is by no means irrelevant, the video game didn’t kill the cinema, theatre is powerful, but this is a form that is powerful in new and important ways. A piece of staged theatre is a rip in the space-time continuum, it is a hundred different hours, poured into one, it is a hundred held breaths, a hundred moments of people turning one thing, into another. As if it Were the Last Time was one whole moment, it was the heat of one breath, it was noticing how the ripples of rain in a puddle shake the light of shop fronts in time to a piece of music. It was stories, yours, of others, and your reflection in the window. It was one voice, lost, and your own, quiet.

You were embedded in a new world instead of conspiring with another.

Time comes to us first and foremost as an individual lifetime. (Fortier 2002, 41)

The phenomenological way of seeing pays great attention to time. Life is not Aristotelian, we need new temporal strategies in our storytelling if we are to constitute the wholeness of worlds. In As if it Were the Last Time the narrative was fractured, the one solid piece of information you were given was that the piece was in memory of another. However instead of talking about the person lost, it asked you to find yourself there as if it were your last half hour.  It was the story of a person seeing the world as they’d never see it again, you heard thoughts that occurred to them as they saw the same things you did, the memories prompted. The narrative built like a collage, like a barrage of images and sounds and ideas that didn’t fit, and then you realised they were building a whole person. And it hurt. And it was wonderful. You felt like you were falling off a building. Or maybe ‘you’ didn’t, maybe only I did.

This was a piece truly about the thickness of experience. It went all the way around the back. It also talked about ‘drifting’, asked you to dérive–find places that made you feel certain ways.

There were moments when it faltered, when things didn’t fit with what you were hearing, but you were seeking, willing them to get back on track, because this was you – your belief at risk. This wasn’t an actor fluffing their lines, it was you, as an avatar of the narrative.

[An avatar is] a machine that is attached to the psychology of its user. From within that machine the driver can peek out, squinting through alien eyes, and find a new world. And, oddly, the driver can also look into himself, as if gazing into his navel, and find a new landscape inside as well (Meadows 2008, 8)

I wrote on my blog after returning from the experience:

“Those thirty minutes were the most vivid, most high contrast of my week. It was true augmented reality, and I want to take my friends and loved ones back to share it. It hurts that I can’t. But that’s kind of what being is, isn’t it?”

‘A work of art born on the stage lives only for a moment, and no matter how beautiful it may be it cannot be commanded to stay with us’ (Fortier 2002, 49)

Works Cited

Alderman, Harold. “Heidegger’s Critique of Science and Technology.” In Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, edited by M Murray. New York: Yale University Press, 1978.

Auslander, Philip. Liveness, Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin. London: Fontana Press, 1992.

Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture, from simulation to Embeddedness. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.

Debord, Guy. “Report in the Construction of Situations.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist Internatinal, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Debord, Guy. “The Great Sleep and its Clients.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Debord, Guy. “The Situationist and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Dusek, Val. Philosophy of Technology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006.

Fortier, Mark. Theory/Theatre. London: Routledge, 2002.

Haydon, Andrew. The year in theatre: trends of 2009. December 30, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/dec/30/theatre-trends-2009 (accessed January 1, 2010).

Hide&Seek. Hide and Seek – Projects. January 6, 2010. http://hideandseekfest.co.uk/projects (accessed January 6, 2010).

Husserl, E. “Introduction to the Logical Investigations.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Husserl, Edmund. “Consciousness as Intentional Experience.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Landers, Chris. Serious Business: Anonymous Takes on Scientology. March 2, 2008. http://www.citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=15543 (accessed July 3, 2008).

“Editorial Notes: Priority Communication.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

McDonough, Tom. “Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art.” In Guy Deb ord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

McDonough, Tom. “Introduction.” In Guy Debord and the Situatinist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

McDonough, Tom. “Situationist Space.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Meadows, Mark Stephen. I, Avatar, the Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. Berkley, CA: New Riders, 2008.

Moran, Dermot. “Introduction.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture, the Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge, 1992.

Reinach, Adolf. “Concerning Phenomenology.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Roach, Joseph R. “Introduction to Phenomenology and Hermeneutics .” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G Reinelt and Joseph R Roach. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Scheler, Max. “The Being of the Person.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, On the Phenomenology of Theater. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

States, Bert O. “The Phenomenological Attitude.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G Reinelt and Joseph R Roach. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Subtlemob. Subtlemob. http://subtlemob.com (accessed 10 06, 2009).

Thompson, Bill. Speech at the Shift Happens 2.0 Arts and Technology Conference. (June 30, 2009).

Tsakos, Natasha. “Natasha Tsakos’ Multimedia Theatrical Adventure.” TED Talks. http://www.ted.com/talks/natasha_tsakos_multimedia_theatrical_adventure.html (accessed October 6, 2009).

Various. “Extracts from Letters to the Situationist International.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

—. Pervasive Game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervasive_game (accessed January 6, 2010).

The Situationists, Phenomenology and Pervasive Gaming: New Narrative Strategies. by Hannah Nicklin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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I struck a deal with my PhD supervisor today. After being told in no uncertain terms that I was never to publish any of my thoughts or work for free on the internet in my induction, I had a small altercation with person running it – because my work is so closely tied to examining open processes and wiki ethics in the arts, and my personal politics are more of the idealistic, free and open for all persuasion – I thought it was important to keep my research open, or otherwise risk horrible hypocrisy.

However, the fact remains is that the university is paying for me to generate original research on their behalf, it’s not useful for me to be a liability, and I do value the opportunity to get paid to do something I love and care about with as many fibres of my being that aren’t already taken up with friends, family, and political activism. So I thought finding a nice, sensible, but still open middle ground was a good idea.

Here’s what we worked out:

• - I’m fine to carry on blogging and posting quotes, thoughts, breakthroughs, snippets, points of interest the whole way through.

• - I’m also fine to blog large chunks of my first year which is mainly exploratory – and so much not the deep, critical and original thinking of the final 2 years. (I will soon be popping up a blog post of my first 1/3 of this year’s work).

• - When it does get to that thicker stage of thinking then it’s useful to release extracts, talking points, struggles and particular sticking points, anything up to about 800 words is fine.

• - Then I make the decision of whether I want to play the game of academia (write a book), try and redefine the rules (work on making ebooks and web-published, open stuff just as important as writing a book), or go in an entirely different direction (and just release the material as is and run off into the sunset with my arms flailing)

So that’s where we are. I think that’s pretty fair to the uni, myself, and my principles, and much further on than the ‘say nothing to no one’ approach demanded at my induction. But what do you think? Do you think that’s too much? Too little? Do you even care? Well, you read this far so I imagine you do a bit. Or you’re really bored. Go and do something useful. Or comment.

“We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch.”

It’s looking like this January it going to be an extremely busy one, some really exciting happenings; a redraft of the commission for Box Of Tricks, the chance to get some 3000 words or so down towards my study, I’m looking at producing a five minute soundwalk performance for Loughborough and Leicester, and I’m also visiting Leeds Met on the 19th and Nottingham Trent on the 13th to talk about narrative and audience interactivity in a digital age. I’d also like to get Eismas redrafted for an Ice and Fire competition deadline due around the end of the month, and take a wander down to London for the V&A Digital Design Sensations exhibition.

An exciting schedule that should produce some (hopefully equally) interesting content for the blog, and all my other feeds. As well as lots of new people, places and ideas for my head!

I’m currently working on http://hannahscontent.co.uk (idea came via @rasga on Twitter) as a space to collate and archive my digital footprint. So that might be an interesting place to keep an eye on, and may allow me to eventually clean up hannahnicklin.com a bit… Hopefully I’ll find the best and prettiest way of bringing everything in there, let’s see.

And finally, with all of the wonderful and exciting things filling my wild monkey mind at the moment, I just wanted to share with you something that is making my creative and academic writing immeasurably more pleasurable and doable: OmmWriter. A simple, quiet space for you to write on your computer, it’s like opening a door to an alternate world, your own private Narnia (without all the pained Christian overtones and scary snow queens). Watch the video, and give it a go. Simple and effective. Now all I need is to find a way to develop a playwriting template that mashes with it…