Image of my gormless face taken by and shared with the permission of @documentally

The beginning of my week was spent at Shift Happens 2010, where I had the very awesome and slightly scary opportunity of giving a 10 minute talk on where I think theatre and digital tech are going. A brilliant couple of days, with inspiration abound, and some really lovely little pieces of performance woven in. I’m still not really up to long bouts of typing yet (the cast comes off in T-minus 12 days), so have embedded a couple of things here to give you a taste of what I took to the event, mostly in flash though, apologies for that.

The first a slideshare version of my talk – with me actually talking (apologies for the pops in the audio) through my ideas on it, and the second is a phlog done by a local community radio station talking to me and Babba Israel from Contact Theatre in Manchester. I’ve also put on Contact’s weekly video blog, the second half of which covers Shift Happens, which should at least give those of you on iPhones a sense of it. You can also download a pdf of the talk here, and for links to other presentations and sources mentioned, check out this very useful post by Matthew Linley.

It will be interesting to see where the next Shift goes. There was much less dissent this year, which although at least means the arts industry is catching up, perhaps means we now need to be pushing further, aiming to (as Andy Field had it)

“dream stupid, impossibly grand visions of what the future might look like”.

Do we now need an arts and tech conference which is more than just entry level? And that also challenge the conventions of a conference? I’m doing a joint paper with my supervisor for the TaPRA 2010 Conference which seeks to interrogate the failings of the top-down conference form in properly communicating the wholeness of performance and academic thought. To move the arts/tech world on do we need to find something that falls somewhere between festival, workshop, conference and digital and performative playground? What do you think?

Finally, I’ve got something exciting and performance-y to announce this weekend, which will be happening in Manchester on the 17th of July, so keep your feeds peeled, and watch out for the hashtag #rainreminds on Twitter.

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.

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.

This is a post about identity politics in the spaces between personal and professional that we now inhabit.

My ideas aren’t fully formed on this yet, but I thought it was important to open up a discussion, because (as I intend to go on to say) it’s important to get a collective as well as personal view on this, because as much as new mediums suggest that I am at the centre of my social and political universe, and as politics and marketing turn their sights to the hyperlocal, I believe the collective, and the universal should still be part of the dialogue.

At the NCVO New Politics conference that I attended in early January there was a real sense of charities and not-for-profit organisations turning towards the ‘hyper-local’, an approach that especially suits relatively new social media tools that allow unmediated (in a conventional sense) conversation with individuals. In this interview with a couple of NCVO members organisation representatives, I chatted about this trend.

In a lot of ways a hyperlocal approach is empowering for both parties, but in another way I believe a radical or uncritical shift towards the hyperlocal could be incredibly dangerous. If you forward your cause or politics only on an individual basis – this is how this directly affects you, and why you should care – you lose a sense of the bigger ‘better good’. You lose the politics that acknowledges that in some aspects we are all alike, and should all have equal footing, privilege and rights. Why should someone have to empathise on an individual level to support human rights and environmental causes? How far is hyperlocal different from a proactive version of NIMBYism? This is not the fault of the tools (social media) but how we use them.

There’s another aspect of this shift in personal/professional spaces which is endlessly fascinating to me. As someone who’s very resistant to advertising (it’s the main reason I don’t watch television) and any message that attempts to shape me to a hegemonic vision of consumer driven happiness, I am very conscious of how we are now opening up and splitting ourselves over different platforms, and how vulnerable that makes us to pernicious outside visions of identity.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that twitter, facebook, digital photography, photoshop et al are necessarily dangerous, these are new mediums for a very old way of communicating, I believe we are operating by the same rules as we always have done, just that on here the longtail is evidential, physically left. Recently I’ve been looking after a couple of friends who’ve gone through pretty bad break ups, both of which has been made almost insurmountably worse by the presence of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr – public spaces that are experienced personally, hyperlocally. Whenever I’ve broken up with someone, we’ve always done the 3 month mutual block/unfollow. But it’s always *there*. The long tail to your relationship. The relationship status change.

I went out on Friday night, and found that rather than asking for people’s numbers, 18 and 19 years olds are now more likely to ask for a full name – like a QRcode can hold so much more information than text, a facebook profile gives you so much more upfront. But it is also meticulously constructed, groups are the badges showing politics, bands, humour, unflattering photos are untagged, people are constructing online versions of themselves, whether you want to call it a profile or an avatar or a character, we de- and reconstruct ourselves daily. Are we making ourselves more vulnerable?

Enter personal brand ambassadors

More so than ever before children are being used to influence their peers, via social networking and IRL, on behalf of certain brands. Likewise throughout Twitter and blogs we hear the calls to the ‘personalised brand’ or the personal-as-brand. People (myself included) now find Twitter a space that shifts from personal to professional daily, and indeed this is technically no different to how we exist IRL – we shift between personas daily, at work me, public transport me, parent me, partner me – however extra dangers persist and in the preservation, we can lose context. Does social media focussing on the personal as brand, political, important, or central, distort our world view? And how do we critique a world built on personal brand? What happens when the brands we tire of are implicit? Integral?

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 the fluid transition of personal to professional, person to brand, in archived spaces assumes identity is a blank slate, sculpted, opted. Does this also apply to people who aren’t white, CIS, hetero, able bodied, middle class, developed-world men? What about the majority cast as 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 – and is at the root of an awful lot of hurt, destruction, and aggression throughout the world.

Acknowledging the cartesian mind/body split is all very well, but the split mightn’t be so simple with people whose bodies have shaped their mind’s experience – as a defining characteristic, a battleground, an Other.

My own experiences haven’t been particularly traumatic, but I have certainly been faced with difficult decisions when it comes to being female and on the internet. For a while I used an unconnected name (I still do on Comment is Free etc.) and photos that you couldn’t really discern me from. I got a bit angry at this, though. Although I’m not happy to fill the public internet (my facebook is mostly private) with pictures of myself as my main ‘selling point’, I also don’t feel like I should have to divorce myself from my image in order to be taken seriously. Which prompts people (even people I valued the opinions of) to accuse me of only having a certain amount of Twitter followers, or interaction online because I was ‘a pretty girl’. In what space will I ever be my words first?

These are fragmented thoughts, on a political, professional and personal level. I want to emphasise that in no way do I think social media, longtails, hyperlocal politics and activism are in any way bad. What it cannot be, however, is the only tool, left uncriticised. I’d be interested in what you think, and whether you think it’s something that’s being talked about enough, or too much. Go forth and comment.

People “have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that … has marked the experience of living as embodied creatures […] Although VR may afford simulated access to a virtual and digitised community of representations — arguably a kind of “global public sphere” achieved at the loss of embeddedness and context — given the individuated manner in which the technology is being developed and will be accessed, the conflation between the conception it affords the user and the user’s own perceptivity needs to be acknowledged and theorised” pp.15-6 N Katherine Hayles in Digital Sensations, by Ken Hillis.

NB I know it’s a bit of a wanky title, but I thought the one I really wanted to use (Cybrands – like Cyborgs, geddit?) looked a bit like a pharmaceutical product, so there we are.

And yes the robot picture is me. I was BORN A GEEK.

I’ve just returned home from the launch of Pilot Theatre‘s Shift Happens, the UK’s version of TED (arts, tech, and learning). This year’s version is called ‘Alt/Shift’. The conference will be taking part on the 5th and 6th of July this year and as last year they have some really exciting speakers lined up, and, also, my good self. I was asked to speak at this years shift following the Bums on Seats post I wrote after the last one, and hope to do the rest of the (incredible) line up justice. Shift Happens does brilliant work in highlighting some of the most innovative stuff that’s going on in the UK’s tech/arts/learning scene, the kind of collaborations and mash ups we should be shouting about, and showing people that it isn’t hard to get to.

I’ll have some more sustained thoughts up soon about my two talks at Nottingham Trent and Leeds Met, as following the nearing deadline for AWAKE, my diary is finally beginning to settle down. I had thought February would be entirely free, but I’ve just been invited to take part in the National Youth Theatre’s ‘Techno Stories‘ project, which aims to address climate change awareness through tech/theatre crossover, it sounds like a brilliant, exciting project, and everything I believe in, too – it just means a few more weekends ’til I get some time off, and checking that I can afford all the London based to-ing and fro-ing.

Finally, let me leave you with the best taste of what Alt/Shift is all about with some audioboos I did with the people running, supporting, and speaking at it.

“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…

“There’s an issue here, I think, where lots of people are assuming a right over these things, I think people have got a bit confused about ‘rights’ issues, ‘we all have a right to cheap flights, or cheap alcohol, or cheap meat’ but these things are not rights, and actually where they’re detrimental to society as a whole I think we need to look at them.” Marcus Brigstocke, Question Time 26/11/09

Yesterday we saw the president of the COP15 summit resign, in the past few days we’ve seen rich countries try to rescind on the legally-binding Kyoto protocol, promises on critical deforestation (20% of global emissions) destroyed, and little to no progress on what is widely considered the last chance for our world to act as one to limit the potentially disastrous effects of man-made climate change.

So this looks like the question that we may have to ask now:

What do we do when it fails?

What do we do when our governments let us down? When the representatives of our world stand and suggests that they can conceive of the damages of the 1-2% GDP necessary to prevent run away climate change, but not in the 5-20% that no deal is likely to cost us. When they have lost sight of the fact that these petty discussions about money amongst developed countries for whom ‘growth’ has become synonymous with ‘good’, should be nothing to all the deaths, refugees, famine, drought, flooding and severe weather events that are taking second place to the pounds the dollars the yen, the made up values, traded through the air.

It may be up to us.

This may not be a bad thing. What has been less publicised (and much more persecuted) is the open sustainability forums and communities in Copenhagen, the 60-100,000 protestors walking through London, placards held high, the several thousand councils and organisations, schools and businesses, and tens of thousands of individuals who have signed up to 10:10, and the recent survey that revealed 75% of British voters believe “world leaders are on an important mission at the climate change conference in Copenhagen” (source).

I have spoken before about how I believe it is time for us to reclaim grassroots politics, to change top down political posturing into bottom up action. And I don’t mean the important but inactive protest actions of closing down power stations or stalling shipping routes (I do think these kind of media events [there’s no denying that’s what they are] are very valuable in raising issue awareness). What I mean is us, all of us, generating positive personal and community lead actions to reduce our own emissions, and to encourage others too. 75% of us currently support a deal in Copenhagen. People are always moaning about the ‘Nanny State’. Well now it’s time to grow up. Now it’s time for us to take responsibility for our own methods of living. Let’s return to a true meaning of ‘rights’.

You do not have a right to cheap flights, to travel, to meat in every meal, to fizzy drinks, or to change your wardrobe every season. These are luxuries. Unsustainable ones. We need to break the bonds that capitalism has sold us. Your rights are to equality, to lack of persecution, to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, to life and liberty. You do not have the right to impinge on the rights of others. Our growth driven profligacy is doing just that. Food riots, climate refugees, flooding, this is happening now. Governments can legislate – and it is important that they do so – to curb the emissions of big business, of public services, and of energy policies, but if they don’t, we still have the power to affect change.

Here’s a human right for you:

“Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” Article 29, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (though shame on them for the gendered language)

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 emissions that we, as a nation, and a world, have to cut.

And that really is down to us.

Up until the last 30 years we did not eat meat more than a couple of times a week – we have become reliant on oil based pesticides and fertilizers, on systems of farming that are eroding key nutrients and biodiversity. We ship our food over here, process it, transport it, transport ourselves to purchase it and then transport and ship away the 1/3 (one fucking third!) of it we waste (inedible food waste can be recycled too). 54% of UK transport emissions come from cars, 35% of global emissions are from agriculture and changes in land use (deforestation). These are things we can change.

“British consumers must cut down on meat and dairy produce, reduce their intake of processed foods [and bottled water] and curb waste. […] These are the three priorities identified in a report by the government’s independent advisory body on sustainability, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), which calls for radical changes in patterns of consumption.” (Source)

Reduce, Reuse, Recyle. Consumerism can be a democracy, we vote with our wallets; buy clothes that last, make smaller portions, mend things, travel less, walk to shop or buy online, take public transport, campaign to make it better, run programs at community centres, petition and force change upon local government. Support local renewable energy projects, invest in them, insulate your home, install solar panels for heating water, photovoltaic for generating your own energy, raise money for funds to support households that can’t afford simple measures like reflectors behind radiators, turn your gadgets off at the socket, buy tech that lasts longer, that you can upgrade, and that is sustainably produced and low in energy to use, encourage businesses to use tech to work more sustainably, put on jumpers and carpet your houses, eat less meat and dairy, avoid bottled water, petition your council to provide water fountains, eat more and local fruit and veg, buy fish from sustainable stocks, buy better, more expensive meat, less often.

Destroy the supermarkets, like they are destroying world food stocks. Processed food increases the energy used by – and decreases the energy value of – food and drink, it’s also making us unwell. Consider how many children you have, consider what you feed them, how you clothe them, and how you teach them to cook and live. Make your change, and do it realistically, sustainably, find new pleasures, and ways in which it does not make your life less liveable. We work hard, time is finite, so we also need to divide the workloads of our households more fairly. We need to reject the lure of fashion, of consumerism, of junk food, to provide cooking lessons at school, life education, and to provide people on low incomes with the means with which to feed their families well, shopping at a market is cheaper than at Tescos or Lidl, sometimes all it would take is an hour of childcare, or a veg box scheme with recipes.

Reduce your emissions as much and as soon as you can.

Image by Melvinheng on Flickr, shared via a creative commons license.

This is not a post about the things that are wrong with our world. This is a post about how we make them right. Of course it is not exhaustive, and by no means is it intended to be a detailed and flawless solution, in fact it openly admits that fact, because that (you will see) it is the point.

This post is in reaction to many things, but particularly in reaction to the recent #3strikes debate, the actions of Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and a recently circulated confirmed rumour that suggests the same minister may have his sights set on the leadership of the Labour party. This is not a party political post, and I do not intend to argue why one man’s leadership would be bad for Labour, instead I intend to suggest that what this man represents is an outdated vision of politics, a vision that is bad for our country, and bad for our democracy.

Our society (and although I will talk more generally, ‘our’ here refers to UK society) is governed. We have democratically elected governments who, on the whole, make decisions and enforce laws with the intention of bettering society. I do not believe that anyone gets involved in politics for any other reason but improving the society they live in. This is the desire of the BNP, just as much as it is the desire of mainstream parties, their vision of a ‘better’ society might be opposed to the majority, but that is why they are not in power. Largely speaking, the party in power is supposed to represent the majority vision of what a better society is, and then strive towards it.

I do not believe that is currently so. Leaving aside first past the post reform and candidate selection, we wholly and entirely do not currently live in a democracy. The power is very much not ‘with the people’.

The Story

When Labour came into power in 1997, it was to the tune of a wholly broken opposition. 18 years of Conservative government had systematically deconstructed all that was of society and replaced it with the ethics of individualism. This was very good for a few, and catastrophic for a many. The many had finally realised. Labour won with more than just promises to renew, however, they won with what was for the first time, politics as marketing. It wasn’t just slogans, it was shiny adverts, they weren’t just promoting the values of the party, they were selling the story of New Labour.

Something else very important happened in 1997. The death of Diana. Others have pointed out before me how this marked an important turning point, not in politics, but in the media. This was the media as story, news not as reporting events, but as representing emotions. The papers spoke as though they spoke for us as they ordered the Queen from Balmoral.

Labour was in power without a credible opposition, and suddenly the press felt powerful. They could move the Queen to action. And someone needed opposing. If it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’, The Sun could also oppose it.

Story is a very hard thing to fight. It is much older than democracy, much older than society.

That was the beginning of the era of Spin. Labour had ridden into power on a narrative, and the mainstream media had assumed the role of opposition using the same. One proposed a story of a better society, the other claimed to represent the stories (wishes) of the people who lived in it.

You notice how neither of these groups are made up of ‘us’?

This is the politics that politicians such as Peter Mandelson, David Cameron and (yes, even) Boris Johnson represent. (Can you think of a better story than the bumbling fool made good?)

An Information Economy.

Spin is all about distribution. Spin is about controlling the narrative of politics; it is about packaging and marketing your version of events. Spin requires complete control of information.

Spin is not working. Our society has grown out of it. Our country has been made undemocratic because of it. Our politicians do not fear the people, they fear the press. The people do not trust their politicians because the press exposes the antiquated attitudes and secrecy within their ranks. However the Press only constructs an oppositional story, it does not deconstruct it. The press is also not run for anything but the benefit of sales. No matter how well standing the broadsheet, how ubiquitous the tabloid. The mainstream media choose their story, and then they spin their readers and politicians into it.

The internet opposes and undermines that.

We live in an information age. For better or worse that is something that must be accepted. There is a rival economy, and it consists of information, it is a world (democratically, one might say) built of a thousand individual narratives. No one claims to speak for others, if someone is championed, it is because one person had the words that echo with others’. In this context the politics of Peter Mandelson et al will not work. He is a clever man, and I hope clever enough to see that one voice, big business, Spin, the politics of ‘push’, are gone. This is the century of pull, this is the century that politics has to become mutual.

Wikipolitics.

Well, everything needs a title doesn’t it? (/a hashtag).

I have blogged before about how I don’t believe in apathy, but I do believe in disengagement. I believe that British politics is due a reformation. I believe that we can demand that. Are you bored of the tone of the Labour government? Do you really believe that a Tory one will be different? Are you looking for a protest vote? A voice? You will not currently find it at the ballots.

What is Wikipolitics?

It is a starting point. It takes the open-source ethic and applies it to government. I don’t propose that we edit policy documents. I do believe that parliament should be opened up, demystified, and the power taken back. How do we do this? We’ve already started, look at projects such as Louder, 38 degrees, look at the Trafigura backlash, the Iran election, the G20 protests.

We now live in a world where we construct our own media consumption, where we pull together, build our own stories. Politics and the mainstream media are clinging on to old methods of distribution and delivery.

Whilst still acknowledging that at least 2/3 of the world does not have access to the internet (the UK figure is something like 30%, with a further 7-8% only having narrowband access – source) and those who do are likely to be from more affluent, developed backgrounds, we also need to be aware that instant publishing and access to our own media channels is incredibly empowering.

We also need to pull ourselves out of the luxury of political disempowerment. It is our responsibility to be involved in politics. If it is not one with which we wish to be involved, then we need to change it.

Reformation, Reclamation.

We need to tell our parties: “Arm your backbenchers with Flips, with Audioboo, with simple wordpress websites. Open up. Work in real-time. And don’t be afraid. We know you are, we know you are worried that you will be criticised, pulled apart, but please remember that although it has not been so before, that is what we mean by democracy. That is the open-source ethic. Let us participate”.

This worked for Obama, he brought the US the highest election turnout in a century. But then he stopped. And that where it’s gone wrong. That’s when Murdoch took back over.

The mainstream media has characterised us as a pack of baying wolves. The politicians have been characterised as lying snakes and fat cats. 2/3 people believe they cannot affect decision making. Trafigura, Jan Moir, proves we can. How about we take that to the rest of politics? How about we build our own wiki-guide to how we want to be engaged with, how we want to ask questions of the policy makers, of the parties? How about we offer a route that bypasses the mainstream media – taking honest debate and mobile video on the campaign trail, introducing them to the modern realities outside the political bubble, having a conversation, rather than being delivered a speech. You may argue that there’s no point in participating in a broken system, but how else are people to know how to fix it?

Because this is important. As it currently stands it would take as many years to get women equal representation, as it would a snail to crawl the length of the Great Wall of China. As it currently stands we are bickering and buying our way to climate disaster. As it currently stands we live lifestyles of excess and complete unsustainability. And for all our excess, are we happy? Or are we to some degree living the lives and values that are sold to us – other peoples’ stories?

We are facing a hyper-connected, global village era, politics cannot continue to be its own island.

This is not a manifesto, it is a call to arms. And this is where I stop, because this is a story, too. It’s a story about us, but it’s still my version. We need to write an ending together. How can we open up the political process? What do we want to know? Do we think there should be more experts involved in policy making? Do we want to see cabinet meetings taking questions from Twitter? What tools can we offer? Comment. Engage. This is up to all of us. What can we build? (We have the technology). Go.

Just a quick post before the beginning of a very hectic but exciting week, as it’s most likely I wont have a second to blog until at least Sunday. This is what I’m going to be getting up to:

Monday and Tuesday I will be attending/working at Shift Happens 2.0, Pilot Theatre’s conference about digital media in the arts. I’ll be there as a sort of Twitter ‘specialist’, as well as in my capacity as a burgeoning PhD student, soaking up as much as I can in the run up to the beginning of my Theatre and Technology research. The event looks extremely exciting, particularly looking forward to hearing more from Hide and Seek, the live streaming of Catcher In Their Eye, and the New playgrounds… Places and spaces, real and virtual panel. You can follow the conference with the hashtags #shifthappens and #shift2 I think.

Wednesday will be spent sightseeing in York (I haven’t been there since I was very young, Jorvik Viking Centre, anyone?) and then coming back to Lincoln in time for a showing of The Age of Stupid at the Drill Hall. I may also buy a big hat. I quite want a bit hat.

Thursday will be my first dedicated day working on the online communication strategy for TWP, and will be the day I set out all of my plans, hopefully informed by the Shift conference

Friday I am temping for some money to cover my activities on…

Saturday! 4 hours on 5 trains leaving at 5am to go to Greenpeace’s Mili-band, which is aiming to “bring together over a thousand people from across the country to create a human band around Kingsnorth power station to show our opposition to new dirty coal plants.” There’s the protest itself, as well as a fete, and a chance to meet up with all the green folk I’ve been following on Twitter, which should be good. This is my first attempt at following through on my previous decision to start actively demonstrating, rather than passively participating in advocating the political and social change that I believe in. It should hopefully be a nice gentle introduction before Climate Camp at the end of August. If I buy a big hat, I will try wearing it here.

And then Sunday, I may be visiting my brother in Leeds, or I may be readying myself for a full week of 8.30-5 temping with Interserve (for those who follow me on Twitter, it’s the place of #thewoodlouse) which is so dull that they actually advise you to bring a book. Might actually afford me a decent chance to get some writing done I suppose.

So yes, that is my week, all of which is apparently going to take place on the hottest week in the UK for a very long time. I shall try and catch up with everything and blog about Shift, and the Mili-band thing in a weeks time. In the meantime, you can always follow me on Twitter. I have also just sorted myself a Tumblr on which you will find links and other things of interest from the internets, and a Flickr account, on which I’ve put a few of my nicer photos, and on which I shall definitely put up anything decent that I take over the next week or so.

Thanks for reading.

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/06/shift/feed/ 2 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/06/digital-media-and-the-arts/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/06/digital-media-and-the-arts/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:31:00 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=83

Digital Media and the Arts

So, an editorial-style blog and couple of creative pieces later I think there’s a ‘what I am up to’ blog due. Short answer: lots. But if you follow me on Twitter, or speak to me occasionally you probably already know that – so here’s a long-answer-picture of everything that’s been going on over the past few weeks.

Today I was at a combination of the Arts Council England (ACE) AmbITion and my first meeting/contract signing with Theatre Writing Partnership. I’ll talk a little more about the content of the former in a bit- firstly: ‘contract signing?’ I hear you cry! ‘what is this craziness?’. Aha, well I can now officially say that I have been contracted by TWP as a freelance Online Communication Officer, the idea being that over the summer I work with them on a freelance basis, helping them spread their digital roots. This will be in conjunction with a website overhaul being done elsewhere, building up to a big, exciting, social media theatre writing experiment around October time. TWP are (for the uninitiated) an East Midlands based new theatre writing initiative – I came across them in my first year of uni through the Momentum Festival – it was with TWP that I wrote my first ever piece of theatre, I made many friends (Lucy, Alex, MorpheanRamble, Robin, Phil, Sabrina) through the festival and it set me off on my current trajectory as an aspiring playwright. TWP are a brilliant resource for theatre writing in an area in which there are very few (in comparison to London) opportunities to have work read and developed. My work with them will consist of getting an online presence together, creating an online space for all of TWPs past writers, workshop leaders and other participants to reconnect and catch up, really build a grassroots-style support and opportunities network for them, get a blogroll together etc., as well as looking at how new and social media can work for a new writing theatre company. Very exciting stuff! So today I met up with Bianca from TWP, sorted all the contractual things, and got started, watch this space!

This morning (as anyone who follows me will know) I was at the ACE AmbITion day. A morning of speakers followed by an afternoon of workshops (we skipped the afternoon of how-to’s). I missed the introduction due to a combination of a late train and having a map to the wrong Broadway (one’s a street, one’s a cinema >_<) and instead went straight into one of two speakers. The first up was Alex Fleetwood (@ammonite). Alex was from Hide and Seek, they don’t call themselves an arts company per se, but what they’re doing is some very exciting and challenging stuff. Their main project is one of play – the idea being that play is going to be central to culture in the 21^st Century, it took in all kinds of ideas on ‘play’ from video games to childhood games to immersive theatre in the style of Punchdrunk, Forced Entertainment et al. The most valuable (IMO) thing that I took away from the talk however, was the model of involvement that it used. It basically took on the Wiki ethic and put it in a performative/artistic context. Examples of their work include Wiki developed city-wide games of hide-and-seek and spy narratives, and one particular piece which was a game for two- one of whom was in a tomb-raider style puzzle house, and the other who controlled and interacted from a rich online environment. These pieces were all self generating. The framework was there, but the content was user generated, interractive and built in the ‘sandpit‘ of what essentially was a dev community. The games were beta tested, altered, shared and shared alike. This is a step on from ideas of devising theatre, there is no final text, there may be words spoken, but it is the participant’s play. It raised fascinating questions about authorship, of how people accept rule-sets, of created and real identity, basically bloody gold dust in terms of my theatre and tech PhD, and otherwise essential ideas for the future of performance and art.

However I was a little disappointed with the rest of the event, the next speech was more than a little lacklustre, less about potential for new work, and more about the process of some pretty standard old work. The Q&A at the end brought up two questions which stick in my mind. Overall the comments consisted of bemused excitement, people seemed to repeat the fact that it was all so over their heads so complicated etc, they could see the potential but not what it meant for them – but I suppose that’s what the second half of the day was about- getting people to jump in and see that the digital world is not scary. But it was a little depressing – the resistance to these ideas- they seemed to say ‘yes but you’re young, you know about these things, I don’t’. Um…. Well learn then! Dive in! Learn that it’s OK to not know, that it’s where everyone starts. I did fine art and English lit A levels, my respective degrees are in Drama and Playwriting, when I went to school the most advanced piece of kit we had was a little mushroom shaped thing on wheels which you could program to travel a variety of distances, left or right (I don’t know what that was supposed to teach us). My point is that everything that I know about the tech world is what I’ve taught myself, and learnt from friends, peers, family. Do some people decide that they have finished learning? That they know enough? I know so little about so many things, I’m hungry for it, for understanding, for information. This rant relates onwards, don’t worry, to two specific questions that came up. The first one I’ll mention was after Alex Fleetwood’s talk on Hide & Seek, from a gentlemen near the front of the room, I didn’t catch where he was from. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically asked:

“But how do we get these 13 year old kids away from spending 10 hours a day on World of Warcraft and on to more important, social things?”

I’m being very, very restrained by not breaking into a full on rant here, because I don’t think it would be terribly constructive, let me just outline all the things that are wrong with that question.

1. The assumption that WOW is antisocial
2. The assumption that what the questioner calls ‘art’ is worthier than a game
3. The assumption that games and art cannot be the same thing
4. The assumption that time spent on WOW is wasted
5. The assumption that it is our job to rival the ‘bad influence’ of games.

We should be learning from the model of MMORPG games – they enthral people because they put them at the centre of a story, they make the player an originator. People connect online, just because the connection doesn’t fit hitherto subscribed to social norms, doesn’t mean the connection is any less. Often, in terms of intellectual engagement, it can make it is somehow more. I’m not saying that all theatre should be like a game- but in our world there are new questions arising from new politics of identity and communication. Gaming communities are vibrant, strong, and active things, it’s so ignorant to assume that your way of living your life is somehow right, and another wrong, rather looking at the differences between the two, trying to understand. Why might someone spend so much time online? What does the VR give them that RL doesn’t? Is it control? Is it the power of the protagonist? Is it the idea of playing as another? Is it relaxing? Is it exciting? Is it escapism? Ask those questions, don’t ask how we can save them from themselves. Ask how they can save us from our old selves.

Alex Fleetwood was brilliant in response, he emphasised that we shouldn’t see WOW and other games as ‘bogey men’ or enemies to real life. He put it much gentler than I have, but he was clear, and gave what I think was an admirable response.

The other question I’ll talk (briefly) about was asked by someone from Lincoln’s Drill Hall venue – basically the point put forward was that they couldn’t afford the staff hours or to pay someone external to run the kind of web 2.0 social network that was being talked of. Which is a reason I’ve often heard mooted- and it’s understandable, but if you ask me, it’s not the answer that’s the problem – it’s the question. The kind of sandbox style beta testing artistic environment that AF talked about is not one that you can engineer- it is only one for which you can provide the framework. It is not an organisation’s job to nail down every corner of a mapped social network – it should be theirs to enthuse an audience or target group to the point at which they author it, and in which the organisation is merely a participant. This means that the organisation hasn’t spent masses of budget and time on something that might not work, it means they have something which is and continues to be self-generating and relevant. The point of social networking in the arts is to pull down the pedestal on which art has been placed- to stop saying so definitely when art stops and audience begins, to play with collective creation, to play with narrative, to play with identity. These things are changing in modern society, there are new ways of loving, laughing, and losing being invented everyday, if we don’t investigate them, if we don’t tell these new stories, then we fail as artists.

We need people to stop being afraid of these new ways of communicating, otherwise art – which I consider as best-fitted to challenging society – will become defunct, another method of escapism, a tool of suppression rather than revolution. Better put than I ever will:

“Theatre is a weapon. A very efficient weapon […] for this reason the ruling classes try to take hold of theatre and utilise it as a tool for domination […] but the theatre can also be a weapon of the liberation. For that, it is necessary to change appropriate theatrical forms. Change is imperative.” (p. ix, Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed (New Edition). London: Pluto Press, 2000.)

What else am I up to? Many things, I think it’s best if I summarise more quickly as this appears to have become a bit of a behemoth. I’m writing an article for Subtext Magazine on women in tech. I’m going to be in York at the Shift Happens arts and digital technology conference at the end of this month, talking to people about Twitter. I’ve also written an arts organisation intro to Twitter for it, which so far seems to be getting some good responses. I finished and sent off my treatment for the 15 minute play Box of Tricks have commissioned me to work on. I’m meeting up with some Twitter friends for some drinks (as well as some thoughts on the future of digital media, but mostly drinks) I’m off to Leeds and Birmingham this month, and in mid July – Paris! I have also decided to save up enough money to attend the weekend of Climate Camp in August.

Plus I’m trying to squeeze in some temp work so I can afford all of the above!

Phew!

I’m not going to pretend I don’t love this :-)