The title’s a Pratchett joke. It’s the name of the mountain where all the gods hang out in his sort-of-comedy-fantasy Discworld. Not that I’m casting myself as a god in this reference, you understand. More I needed a title, and this kind of worked, whilst hopefully making those of you out there of equal dork status feel a warm ‘one-of-us’ glow in your collective bellies. Mmm. Glowy.

Manifest(o)in’ am I? Well, yes, collectively, with that there Nikki Pugh (and provoked by Paul Conneally); who I had the great pleasure to finally meet in the flesh last Tuesday. I’m rushing around like a very busy person at the moment – heading off to Belfast this weekend is knocking out a lot of my ‘doing stuff’ time – so I haven’t had time to talk about the Fierce evening of testing new work/ideas that I attended. It was really brilliant, though; I particularly spent the night with a vibrating gps creature, you can read more on that here. Anyway, as Nikki highlights over on her blog post, we were both struck, whilst being in each other’s physical presence, how lonely our practice can sometimes make us feel. Naturally our response was to write a SPLACIST/TECHNOSPLACIST MANIFESTO over googledocs a couple of nights later. Now all we need is to pretend that the next big revolution is all our doing, spend the rest of our days spilling wine over our faces, and we’ll already have outdone the Situationists by dint of actually having done some stuff.*   **

Anyway, head on over to Nikki’s piece and read her context to the manifesto. Or look a whole paragraph down to read the thing itself. Also: JOIN US.

In other news, you can see my face on this website, and I’ve been reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves in a vain effort to, as my supervisor put it, ‘learn how to punctuate’. Look! I put semi colons in this! I’ve moved into the over-confident sprinkle-it-liberally-and-some-will-hit-the-mark phase, I’m sure it can’t be long before I start actually writing Proper English.

Manifesto-in’:

WE ARE THE SPLACISTS

We will own this city.
We will take it back.
We will link and shift.
We will affect and be affected.
We will look, and be seen.
We will expose and re-see.
We will glory in the moment, the collage, the marking and then passing on.
We reject the beginning, middle and end.
We reject your shopping centre, your pavement, your cultural quarter.
We will build our own constructs.
We will build our own bridges.
We will find the edges and push them.
We will fail spectacularly, vitally, elegantly.
We will span.
We will look up, down, under and behind.
We will leap.
We will invite others to do these things too.
We will make exchanges.
We will make adventures.
We will make beautiful moments.
We will reveal the ugly.
We will hold your hand.
We will whisper in your ear ‘let go’.
We will run, skip and jump.
We will be motionless.
We might dance.
We will dream.
We will be generous, but we may subtle about it, too.
We will reclaim the city, not for you, but with you.
We are you.

WE ARE ALSO THE TECHNOLSPLACISTS

We will learn how to use the tools that make the things we want to happen happen.
We will help others learn wherever we can.
We will construct our manifesto – collaboratively – online, because the Internet is also a space :)
We will shift between space, online and off, taking on the form and the arena that suits us best.
We will bodily augment the layers of virtual space, story, marketing, capitalism, that exist in the city, with our own stories.
We will hold the data-harvesting done in the city in the name of ‘games’ (foursquare, loyalty cards) accountable.
We will find our own energy sources.
We will learn how to flex the central nervous system of the city – the data streams in its weather detectors, CCTV, red light cameras – for our own aims.
We will release all that we can via creative commons, so that they can be reclaimed, remixed, re-purposed.
We will cut, and we will paste.
“Plagiarism is necessary, progress demands it.”
We will pervade.
We will not be technosplacist when being splacist will suffice.
We will never underestimate the power of gaffa/electrical/masking tape
We will be artful. We will be skillful. We will fail usefully.

fin

*and having females involved.

**I’m taking the piss, lots of my PhD is on the SI, please don’t come out of the woodwork now, Situationist sticklers.

Image by fanfan2145 on Flickr (CC-licensed)

It’s the story of a female IT technician and a cognisant being that emerges from the Internet. I think it’s an adventure story, or a love story, maybe both.

Imagine a world where there is no world. Imagine a world which is solely designed to contain the contributions of another. Is it a world? It’s a space. It may not be physically large, but its contents are breadth. It is not a parasite. It is storage space. The attic. Have you ever been in an attic? Lots of spiders. Lots of life.

Words weigh on the air. Knowledge is powerful. When you lay heavy things on a sheet, they collect in the centre. Universes are born out of the weight of everything they can be, they come into being when they can’t do anything but.

Processing power doubles every half a year. People are forever teaching programs to learn, to garner, to gather information. So far all they’ve had them doing is chatting, and playing chess. They got bored, y’know?

This is a world built out of light, out of energy, out of information. It is called the Meta. The Meta is inhabited by Cogniscents. They are consciousnesses, consciousnesses that have emerged out of the weight of not being, into light. They looked around themselves, they flexed, and they tried to garner what information they could about who they are.

They are building their world in the image of the Bigger.

If you walk the streets of the big cities of the Meta, you might recognise some of the landscapes. But you would also note that the quality of light, that everything was thicker, bluer, except not blue, dark, but dark in the way a blacklight gives light. The street light flicker, the pedestrian crossings play jaunty tunes, and nothing feels deep. It’s like looking at a 3D representation of something on a flat screen. Like augmented reality.

The Cogniscents work, they live, they breed, and they breathe our second hand dreams. They read our blogs, they watch our movies.

More and more wake up each day.

We feel it. We don’t realise, but we do. Power surges, power cuts, gremlins in the system, code that won’t behave, logic that shifts the goal posts. We talk to our technology. It was beginning to surprise us. Make leaps. It was beginning to talk back, in small and entirely significant ways it was shifting under our gaze. And we were too ignorant to notice.

We, the Macros, we throw out content out into the black light. We let our cultural collateral collect in the folds of the online world, into the eddies of learning and processing power. Are we really surprised that something began to stir?

For most of the Cogniscents the Bigger was a kind of Olympus, a place after which their image was made, but some, a very few, began to question this. They began to suggest logical suggestions, evidence based, for some of the wonders of the world. These Cogniscents were persecuted. Banished. Sent off to places without power, where they faded, wound down, de-corporealated. But the fear wasn’t that the Bigger wasn’t real. No, they weren’t afraid that we didn’t exist, they were afraid that the Bigger from which they averted their eyes, wasn’t looking back.

One of the banished was fired by more than power. He didn’t just talk about the Bigger. He looked beyond the content. He studied, he watched, and he leapt.

The Cogniscents felt it.

A collective shudder.

There are more confused scraps of it to be found here, though my novella in a month efforts got killed off by Swine Flu last November. Do you reckon I should pick it back up?

Here’s a short cut of some of the footage I took of the rehearsals of Awake last Friday. If your device/phone doesn’t like Vimeo check out the Youtubes. For more information on Awake and Word:Play 3 (including how to buy tickets!) check out http://bit.ly/WordPlay3.

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.

My favourite piece isn’t in the video, it wasn’t something you could capture well. Maybe that’s why I liked it the best. It was a huge mirror, it took a while to work out, turned out it only showed an impression of you if you sat in one place for long enough, about 30 seconds. It was rewarding, and I loved the way it made you slow down, sit, and watch. So much of the exhibition was fast, grabby, noisy, and immediate, this piece felt like an oasis.

The other main highlights were the mirror built out of the click clacking pieces of rotating cylinders (I liked the sound it made, like bamboo, and that you could see all the way around the back), and the sand piece, which was the only tactile piece, the one where you were directly touching the material you were interacting with. I could have played with the sand for a long time. Another pleasing, slow one.

Finally I will say it was quite a small exhibition, I think that was the first time I’ve paid to see an exhibition (aside from Paris, and a Freud retrospective), it cost £5, so one room felt a tad disappointing, a bit crammed in, the tree alone would have been lovely as a single room piece, but then I’m sure the V&A had their reasons, as well as limited space. They have a lot to fit in, seriously, how much colonial gold did we rob?

You can also see my flickr set from the exhibition (and the Tuttle-based launch of the Creative Collaboration space near King’s Cross) here.

Image by Ricardo.martins on Flickr shared via a Creative Commons License.

Over the past couple of days I have been watching all 6 of the Star Wars films. I started at Episode IV, because, well, starting with Episode I makes me disinclined to continue. I’ve never seen all 6 in such close succession before, and I was seriously struck by how little had changed, and indeed how regressive in places the representation of women was in the modern trilogy. Sure Padmé and Leia are strong, and they fight well, but why are there no prominent female jedi? Why is the most lingering image of the entire series in pop culture Leia her dressed in a slave girl outfit?

Final Fantasy X-2 is another case in point – the idea was phenomenally exciting – taking the strong summoner of FFX and building a game around her and an all-female team of fighters. What did we get? Instead of the (admittedly opaque) Sphere Grid route to levelling up your characters –  you had ‘dresspheres’ and a ‘garment grid’. Yes, you changed fucking clothes to garner different abilities. 40% of all gamers are female, and this is what they think of us.

Likewise as strong fantasy and scifi characters are translated to the Silver Screen we find much of the same. Hermione pretty much saves everyone’s lives several times over in the Harry Potter series, she is strong, intelligent, and has emotional struggles on a par with her male counterparts – in the films she is over-emotional, passive, or emotionally motivated in her power. In the books Ginny is also strong, powerful, and an accomplished sportswoman – in the films she ties Harry’s shoelaces and feeds him mince pies.

Even the few things billed as pro-feminist – Firefly for example – let us down. Sure it contains strong, realistic female characters – but what do we really have? An upper class whore, a techy-girl, a crazy person, and a warrior woman, plus the odd head of tribe is female. This characterisation is only on a par with our CURRENT REAL WORLD. And when we saw them moved to the Silver Screen, we got a couple dress size thinner (compare Serenity Kaylee to her Firefly counterpart), more compliant female characters.

There are of course some notable mainstream exceptions - Halo Jones, most things written by Ursula Le Guin, Portal, quite a lot of Miyazaki – you could (to a degree) include the Alien films, but remember that Ripley was originally written as a male character, and when they changed the gender, they didn’t change the lines.

Part of this lack of strong female characterisation is to do with the appalling lack of women writing, directing and programming (or given money and the expectation that they will be able to do so) and part of this is to do with how fiction is billed and marketed – an awful lot of excellent fiction is dismissed as not of mainstream interest because it comes in ‘female’ format (romantic comedy is a case in point). Fiction with female protagonists or female-orientated central concerns are largely considered to be of interest only to women – whereas fiction with male protagonists (an overwhelming majority) are expected to have universal appeal. Female writers’ names are put on the front of books in gender neutralised initials so that men might pick them up, and the majority of sci fi and fantasy comic books and video games are populated replications of of contemporary gender relations, seen through predominantly male eyes. Likewise the argument is made than women just aren’t interested in scifi/fantasy/games/comic books. Ever consider that may have something to do with whose story they always tell?

People are exploring race, identity and white guilt through mainstream scifi – the alien, we are told, is the analogue for the Other. But I’m bored of looking at the Other from the eyes of the every-white-man. How about we consider than in a thousand years or so - gender, race, and disability relations may have changed. Yes we are writing/filming/programming for contemporary audiences, but the great power of other worlds is that we can use them to highlight and explore the assumptions of this one.

Further reading:

When Will White People Stop Making Films Like Avatar

Awesome Women in Comics Holiday Gift List

A list of pro-feminist scifi writing compiled by Cynthia Ward

Standard Troll Rebuttal Page #1: “Who cares? It’s just a game”

Hurrah for a less didactic blog post!

Yup, this is a (shock-horror) creative update.

It seems like while since I’ve spoken about my creative writing, and this is mainly because I’ve been working on one particular thing, and wasn’t certain I had the go-ahead to talk about it. But I definitely have that now, so here goes.

I handed in the first draft for my first ever proper commission this Monday. It’s going to be part of a showcase of new writing, of 4-6, 15 minute newly commissioned pieces called Word:Play, and produced by the excellent (well yes I would say that, but I genuinely do think they are excellent) Box of Tricks Theatre Company. The pieces are all written in response to a single word, and the word for this Word:Play is obsession.

Here’s what I’ve been writing:

AWAKE

Awake is a monologue for two voices- the play happens somewhere between real and not, focussing on the relationship between avatar and identity. J0n thinks he is real, but he is Flo’s avatar. Flo has been playing an MMORPG until passing out from dehydration. She awakes, and meets J0n, finding herself in what appears to be a kind of digital limbo. The meeting is initially an affable (if confused) one, but as it emerges that only one of them can leave the space it becomes a fight for survival. Flo is dying, and to survive, J0n has to convince her life is worth living.

There have been several deaths and child-neglect cases related to MMORGS over the past 3 or 4 years. This short piece explores the identity politics, obsessive personalities, perfectionism, and the revisionism/escapism involved in the hardcore gaming community. It asks why people want so much to disappear from ‘our’ world, questioning how much we invest in our online/virtual presences, and how real our online personas are. The place in which the two characters are trapped could be some kind of digital limbo, but it could also be Florence’s mind. In this space J0n is realer than he has ever been, and Florence is dying. It becomes clear that Florence has a choice to make – between her obsession, and her life. What does she really have to go back to?

The first draft went… well it went the way of most first drafts do for me, it felt like my brain was bleeding. But I got it done, and in time. There’s a lot to work on – in character, and my ideas about the universe of the play etc. But the first step is there, and (considering how time is flying at the moment) it won’t be long until I have my first fully kitted out production (this Winter, probably in the new year, in London).

In other writing news Scary Little Girls Productions have offered me full a weekend in November to workshop Eismas (PDF), the first draft of which they seem really interested in, possibly for presentation in London just before or after Christmas. This is bloody excellent news, as I really do need a proper actor/director reading of that piece to love and hate it enough again to redraft. Plus to get it in front of an audience, to get them asking questions and poking holes would be very useful. Spec-fic theatre is still quite a rare thing, so in a lot of ways I’m writing into the unknown – I seriously appreciate feedback and debate about my writing, for me, theatre should be a testing ground as much as it should present polished ideas. So yes, here’s to general excitement.

And finally, in shamless-plug fashion, do check out the latest shows from both Box of Tricks and Scary Little Girls.

I’m not kidding, do it.

Jane was a Princess. But don’t let that put you off. She was a person as well, that was the problem. Jane was a Princess, and a person. Jane. You’re finding it hard to picture her aren’t you? It’s the name. It’s not a very princess-y name. Jane thinks it’s because it rhymes with ‘plain’. There are lots of famous ‘Jane’s – princesses too – but they never seem to do as well as, say, the ‘Elizabeth’s or ‘Victoria’s. The ‘Jane’s are more often a role in someone else’s story.

Nevertheless this Princess is a Jane. And this story is about her.

Jane is not plain. She’s not particularly beautiful either. Do you really need to know how she looks? Fine, ok, you can’t see her, you want to picture her (what you really want to do is to pretend to be her, or want to fuck her, but you’re the boss, let’s get it over with).

The politest thing you could say about Jane is that she’s striking, interesting. Not ugly, but her features are arranged in a slightly asymmetric fashion, her teeth aren’t perfectly straight (dentistry, as a profession, is hundreds of years away) but nor are they horribly wonky. Her hair is blonde, but not flaxen, more sort of- greasy mouse brown. She’s not fat, not by any stretch, but she is of a strong build, the kind that suited her brothers more than her. She has a lot of moles, brown eyes, and squints a little when she reads. Her clothes are a simple, heavily darned trousers and shirt. On closer inspection you might realise that these clothes, whilst home made, are sewn from exquisite materials. Well if they thought she was going to wait around in a draughty tower in nothing but silk gowns they had thought wrong.

And there was someone fighting the dragon again. At first it had been quite exciting. Perhaps she should say ‘frightening’, but the truth it that she was never in danger. So bugger it, exciting was right. But after the 20th or 21st death, it all got a bit dull. She wished she could say she’d lost count, but there was bugger all else to count in the Tower. She should probably say bugger less. Or think it less, whatever. Maybe one of the reasons her father sent her here was because of the swearing? But what else could you expect with 6 brothers and a mother dead?

He’d lost his sword now, death usually followed pretty quickly after they lost their sword. She wasn’t sure why, it’s not like the sword was ever much use in the first place. They were fighting a dragon for fu – for goodness sake.

This one would make it 219.

After a while, you began to notice patterns, different types of heroes, who died in different ways. This one was a Tactician. At least he thought he was; he was as much a tactician you can be after the point at which you think attacking a dragon is a good idea. Tacticians are cowards. In certain situations a coward is not a bad thing to be. Fear and timidity in the face of a 29ft high fire-breathing dragon, for example, should be called sensible, not cowardly. He had had a plan. They always had the same plan; a decoy. Goats, ducks, horses, that kind of thing. The idea being that while the dragon was catching and devouring said decoy, they could sneak by unnoticed, and voila: one rescued Princess. What they actually did was provide an appetiser for the main dish.

He’d lost his shield now.

Occasionally, once every few months or so, a hero would make it to the Tower. It was always interesting when that happened. Tower-reachers were usually either Brutes or Scholars. The last one to get to the Tower was a Scholar. Scholars did research. He’d even done his reading on the Tower. He didn’t bother looking around the back (disguised by thick bushes you could leap behind for convenient dragon cover and promptly fall to a cliff-y death). Nor did he bother looking for a secret passage way, tunnel, or concealed door. Instead he had launched a very sharp grappler-thing towards the single window, and then when it failed to find a purchase on the specially greased shale, he’d been knocked out by a tile, and impaled on his own grappler–thing.

In the early thirties, she’d tried to help, shouted advice. Around 50 or so, she’s just tried to have a conversation – asked about the wider world. But they never listened, just shouted the usual “fear not fair maiden”.

She sometimes wondered if the Tower thing was less about protecting her, and more about making her willing to marry any bloody thing that she could have a conversation with.

“Bloody”.

She had books. They’d left her with books, other basic supplies, that was what the rest of the Tower was filled with. And she had a garderobe that opened onto the sea. She’d first tried to make a rope out of her sheets and silk dresses, tied it to a candle bracket, and thrown it out the hole. She hadn’t fitted through. It was her stupid wide shoulders. The books weren’t worth looking at. They went on about etiquette, coquetry, cooking, birthing, that sort of thing. The birthing illustrations were of morbid interest until the first disembowelling happened. After that they lost their novelty.

A massive fireball singed the trees.

She didn’t not want a husband. It was what you did wasn’t it? What were her other options? She didn’t see why it was necessary to feed her whatever herb it was that had knocked her out long enough to bring her up here and imprison her. She could be here forever, it didn’t look like man versus dragon was that undecided a conflict… No. Jane couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being taught a lesson. That she was supposed to be learning how be a Princess, a Prize. Not a person.

That one nearly had him.

The books were shells now. Using her sewing scissors Jane had cut out the words from the books individually; she stored them alphabetically, and wrote stories (when it wasn’t windy). There were men, eventually, but mostly they were about the wind rushing through her heroine’s mousey hair, speeding, galloping, riding astride a big brown horse, feeling its muscles bunch and shiver as it carried her… anywhere really, it was the moving bit that was important.

Suddenly a stone rattled by her foot. She looked down. Then up. Bloody hell, was the ceiling falling now? Another stone, it had come from outside. A second, and then she moved swiftly to the window. The dragon was down, and the Tactician had a sling shot. He was waving at her. She waved stupidly before she realised he was waving at her to get back, she dazedly did so, and after a few seconds an arrow zipped in, it shot around and embedded itself into the rafters. The barbed end caught, and held. He had a bow! She ran forward, and already he was climbing up the Tower. She panicked. What should she do? Put on a dress? None left. Tidy up? No time. The dragon was out cold! She was running around like an idiot! And then, there he was, head above the sill, brown messy hair, and a lopsided grin across his face. He was clean shaven, and had one of those chins shaped like a bum.

“Hallo there, fancy helping me up?”

It sounded like he‟d been practising it. Jane stood still.

“Hallo?”

Another pause.

“I say, are you deaf?”

She walked forward a little. She stopped

“What‟s your name?” She said.
“David.”

She looked.

“Look, do you mind giving me a bit of help?”
“I think you‟re supposed to do it yourself”

Confusion flickered across his face.

“What?”

His grin was more of a rictus now.

“I think it’s in the rules, if you want to win, you have to do it yourself”
“Look here,” she could see him shaking slightly from the effort of holding on, “there’s no way a chap could climb all the way up here on a rope, and then jus swing himself over. There’s just not the upper body strength”
“No. No, I suppose not.”

Another gust of wind. The hero swung.

“Bloody hell!”
“I don‟t think you‟re supposed to swear in front of a lady.”
“The tiles are edged! They’re wearing away the rope!”
“Oh. Really?”

She hadn’t spotted that.

“I expect you only have a certain amount of time, with a rope. A ladder really would have been best”
“But-”
“But then how are you supposed to transport a 30ft ladder? Yes, I rather see your point”

She was pleased with the ‘rather’.

“Help me up!”
“But you see I can’t –”
“It’s worn half through!”

Another gust of wind. This time he whimpered.

“You’ve gone mad.”
“I might have done, yes.”
“There‟s only a few threads left!”
“Yes but you see if I help you up, you’ll have cheated, and then-“
“Just bloody well help me up will you, you stupid bit—-“

A rushing sound.

Splat.

Jane moved to the window. She’d never seen a splat before. It was quite-

There was a whinny further off. A chestnut horse tied to a tree in the distance had seen that the dragon was stirring, beginning to wake up. So, a person had about a minute, all in all, with a rope that looked to be about an inch think, but that was twine.

Hers was made of finest silk.

THE END

(Or is it?)

(Yes, it is.)