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.
Last Friday I went to the Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A Museum. The video picks out the pieces that interested me most, and the ones that I thought were the most successful – I’ll let the video do the describing for me, other than that, I just wanted to note main observations I came away with:
1) At what point does tech become art? The answer to that is probably something facetious, like ‘when it’s put in a gallery’, or ‘when an artist is involved in making it’, but I did feel a lot of the beginning pieces (not filmed) felt more like screensavers/music visualisations, than pieces of art. Why can’t a screen saver be a piece of art? No reason, I suppose that’s my own prejudices talking – I’m used to seeing that style of thing as ubiquitous ‘filler’ material, not the focal point. It was, I think, the reasons behind or the data informing the code which did make it art. In the same way paint is just paint until you let information express through it. Something to think on, certainly.
2) Unintuitive interaction is worse than no interaction. A lot of the stuff in that room just didn’t work well enough. Take the rotating singing head (after the rotating words in the video) it was interesting to choose what angle, inside or out, that you viewed a sculpture (very phenomenological) but as a regular touch screen user I was incredibly disappointed when I couldn’t pinch zoom, change the movement with the speed of my gesture, rotate, etc. Likewise there were delays or misses in a lot of the projected interactivity. I’m sure there was an awful lot of clever tech behind it all, but it wasn’t clever enough. Interactivity might just be an all or nothing thing – if something invites me to interact with it live, in a natural space, I will always be disappointed if it doesn’t react in a natural way to my gestures.
3) The best, most intuitive, pleasing and playful pieces were all intimately connected to the natural world; the projected leaves of the tree that fell, and that you could kick around the floor, the dandelion, the little prehistoric sea creatures that grew when you uncovered the a space from the sand, that multiplied, and evolved the longer they were exposed to the air. This goes forwards from the previous point – intuitive is important. We see ourselves, our worlds in art. Art is a way of reflecting on seeing and being, the enthusiasm for the combination of nature and tech, is encouraging for my continuing investigation of the collision of the bodied and the virtual space. It also hooked up with a sentence I read on the coach home:
“Judging by the importance of nature themes in digital installation art, many artists also seek compensation in computer simulations for the disappearance of natural environments. We hope to recapture through technology the pristine world that technological culture took away for us” – Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan.
I have been thinking a lot over the past few days about the new narrative strategies emerging in the digital age- moving on from why and what they are, and what has provoked them (pretty much everything that I put into my two speeches at Notts Trent and Leeds Met in January) and instead considering the implications for us as a society, in their being our main way of consuming stories.
Stories are a massive part of how we learn and grow as a species. They allow us to try out other eventualities, other roles, understand the feelings of others, and our own place in the world. Stories are intricately linked to play, and playing (whether actually, or theatrically) is a recognised learning technique for both adults and children. (See the massive success of TIE in schools, prisons, and deprived areas, as well as the ways that children learn about their world). Likewise play – the ability to try and test for no reason other than the fun of it – is vital to creative thinking, whether in business and tech (where it’s called ‘innovation’) or in the humanities and social sciences, play, and narrative, is at the very basis of our evolutionary and inventive potential.
There is largely considered to be a point when we ‘grow out of’ playing. It is in evidence, in teasing, between friends, but proper immersive narrative experiences are thenceforth ring-fenced. There are areas where they are ‘ok’, and they include theatrical spaces, board games, TV, music, video game, radio, film, books. The arts, in short.
The film/television experience is inarguably passive when compared with the play that we experience as children, and with the ‘old’ narrative strategies of books (and to a certain extent radio – though ‘old’ perhaps not) where we are placed, if not in the position of another, at least in a world-constituting position of one type or another. We build worlds of the books we read with our imaginations, likewise theatre is necessarily world-constituting, the tension of live-ness with narrative, reality with suspension of disbelief, is an inherently world-constituting process – and a collective one at that.
Film and television are passive forms of narrative consumption, they are involving, largely individual, and can pretend to be interactive (the arbitrary decision of whether someone stays or goes is not world constituting) and are no less a form for that, but in terms of play, in terms of one key aspect of play – there’s something missing. Empathy. The process of placing yourself at the centre of creating a narrative – constituting a world – seeing it through anthers’ eyes is largely missing (though of course there are exceptions to this). I’m not arguing that film and television is bad art, but I do believe that to subsist on a diet of only filmic narrative will provoke illness. Continue reading…
Global warming is not a complicated issue. The science has been done, the outlook only gets worse. The aim has been established: keep global warming under the 2°C ‘tipping point’ –the point at which it is almost universally agreed (I say almost, because there are crazies in all communities, including scientific ones) that the earth’s climate becomes so de-stabilised that there’s no saving us. Here’s a quick 1:21 on that:
If we cut global emissions by 85% we will have a 50/50 chance of keeping global temperature rise under the 2°C tipping point. Because the UK pollutes more than developing countries, our share of that is greater, we will have to cut roughly 93% of our emissions. Source. HOW we cut the emissions is equally important, a paper published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has determined that that “wherever temperatures peak, that is more or less where they will stay. There is no going back.” Source and the slower we cut, the more emissions we put out, cumulatively speaking.
To deliver a high chance of preventing two degrees of warming, we would need to cut global emissions by something like 10% by the end of next year and 25% by 2012(7). This is a challenge that no government is yet prepared to accept. Source
Global Warming is not a complicated issue. It’s very simple, either we alter our behaviour, or we die. The sooner and greater we act, the better: 2050, that’s the deadline.
What happens if we don’t meet it?
On a meteorological level it means flash floods, coastal flooding, droughts, tsunamis, tornadoes and hurricanes, on a human level it means destroyed homes, water shortages, disease, ruined harvests, ever depleting world food stocks, looting, violence, and the destabilisation of power. At current rates of sea level rise by 5050 almost all of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire will be underwater, as well as a good amount of London.
I sat on a hill, high up in Leicestershire a week ago. I sat there with 3 of my good friends, and we just chatted in the sunshine. It was a warm day, not too hot, but the clouds hung down, grey. One of them asked me about climate change, so I pretty much said all of what I just have. They listened. Then they shrugged. ‘We’re all dead then, aren’t we’.
No, we are not.
This is the attitude that worries me most. That horrible fallacy which has been placed into people’s heads by the ease of modern living, a deadening lazy media, and a carefully cultivated cultural apathy; the idea that we have no power. That we cannot change things. Society is built of single units, working together, it works because we give it credence. They have no real control over us, to really control a society there would need to be 3 police officers to hold down every one person. We only give them power because it benefits us to subscribe the system. But the point at which the system threatens you, the point at which the system offers you more harm than protection, is the point at which you rise up,and you change it.
Governments exist to be re-elected, yes they have other aims, but they rarely, and in real terms, look beyond a 4 or 8 year mark. Government is simply not suited to dealing with long term decisions. Democratically elected governments cannot afford to be progressive, they have to be as conservative as the loudest majority. And in society which has been told there is no such thing, the single unit rules. Enter: the NIMBY. Wheelie bins, incandescent light bulbs, wind farms. People operate on the same lines, ‘this effects me right here, right now, my personal rights are far more important than the greater good, because what do I ever see of the greater good? It’s just good, you don’t notice it, right?’
Enter the ‘save money’ approach, monetising sure does make the ‘greater good’ more attractive, huh? Flourescent bulbs will save your £45 per year! Insulating your house properly can save you up to £300 a year! That’s a family holiday to Majorca if you fly Easyjet and shit in a plastic bag! (rather than use the pay-toilets) Wait… didn’t I hear flying is bad?*
I’ll offset the emissions then! What do you mean offsetting is a ‘dangerous distraction’ actually encouraging greater consumption rather than displacing it?
The greatest battle we face on climate change is lifestyle. We could cover 1/3 of the UK in wind and solar farms, combine that with tidal, hot rock, offshore wind power, and nuclear power plants along the whole of our coastline, we would still fall seriously short of our current energy consumption levels Source. Because we’re not just talking about electricity here, we’re talking about heating, transport, manufacturing, agriculture, how and what we eat, gadgets, where consumables and clothes come from, how we throw them away, how we shop, what we expect from our food, our holidays, how we do our jobs. It all uses energy, it all contributes to the 93% that we, as a nation, have to cut.
And that really is down to us.
You can make changes to your own life. Achievable, small changes, that will add up. YES you will be inconvenienced. But it’s a small price to pay. It’s not the greater good, it’s our greater good, let’s fight for it, OK?
Don’t know where to start? Here’s your chance:
This afternoon the team that made the film The Age of Stupid is launching the 10:10 campaign: which aims for a 10% cut in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions during 2010. This seems to be roughly the trajectory needed to deliver a good chance of averting two degrees of warming. By encouraging people and businesses and institutions to sign up, the campaign hopes to shame the UK government into adopting this as its national target. This would give the government the moral leverage to demand immediate sharp cuts from other nations, based on current science rather than political convenience. Source
See http://www.1010uk.org/ or @tentenuk on Twitter. Today, Tuesday the 1st of September 4-7pm at the Tate Modern, there is live music, free champagne and a token, a recycled piece of 747 of your very own, available to the first 1,000 people to sign up to cut their emissions by 10% in a year. Get involved, speak up, because we haven’t got long. Join the rest of the country in shouting out as the world works towards the Copenhagen Climate Conference. Join the Wave, participate.
My current CO2 emissions are roughly 3.53 tonnes per year (I used this calculator) 3.177 is my target. I intend to stick to it.
*RE air travel: Taking one intercontinental trip per year uses about 30 kWh† per day. To put that in perspective, using a car to travel 50km every day for a year produces 40kWhpd
To put that further in perspective, 40kWhpd is twice the amount that would be generated by, for example, covering the windiest 10% of the UK with wind turbines (delivering 2 W/m2)
ALSO ” Flying creates other greenhouse gases in addition to CO2, such as water and ozone, and indirect greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxides. If you want to estimate your carbon footprint in tons of CO2- equivalent, then you should take the actual CO2 emissions of your flights and bump them up two- or three-fold.” Source
Yes flying is bad. I’m sorry.
†Kilowatt hours are “one unit” on electricity bills, about 10p in the UK in 2008 – one 40 W (incandescent) lightbulb, kept switched on all the time, uses one kilowatt-hour per day. Source
Global warming is not a complicated issue. The science has been done, the outlook only gets worse. The aim has been established: keep global warming under the 2°C ‘tipping point’ –the point at which it is almost universally agreed (I say almost, because there are crazies in all communities, including scientific ones) that the earth’s climate becomes so de-stabilised that there’s no saving us. Here’s a quick 1:21 on that:
I am Hannah Nicklin, a brightly coloured theatre maker, tech-enthusiast, blogger and academic. I make interactive and pervasive theatre, as well as talking at events, writing things, and working with people in the spaces between digital technology and the arts. I do other things too. Check out the pages across the top of the site to find out more.
