An image from the working one of the Twitterbug workshop days.

Recently I’ve been wondering about the sticking power of Twitter. The people I have my eye on who tend to turn before the tide does have been getting itchy feet about it, and whispers about the second dotcom bubble are now even reaching the mainstream media. It’s fair to wonder ‘what happens next’ to companies like Twitter valued as high as they are whilst still making a loss – do they turn to ads, with premium ad-free accounts? Do they make their money out of apps (too much competition)? Or will they just become bloated, too big for conversation (Myspace, and now facebook’s problem)? But… migrating from Twitter? It feels like an surprisingly emotional thing to be thinking about. Twitter has played such a large role in my finally feeling part of an arts and politically active community as well as providing the opportunity to meet and work with some wonderful people, and to make some wonderful friends.

It means a lot to me that limping my bike home to an empty house, shaking slightly, after being hit by a car, I can tweet my shock, and be.. well, cared about (however fleetingly) by above a 50 people. But then I remember that it’s the people, not the medium, that matters. If we all move to what Diaspora or Beluga might turn into – or something else that doesn’t exist yet – the medium may change, but I don’t think the web will stop being social, stop weaving our lives together. I’ll still see the snapshots of @joethedough‘s baby boy growing up confusedly in silly hats, hear about the regular ‘offstage’ characters like @SlunglowAlan‘s cheese-pilfering lodgers, and care about @Andyvglnt’s earnest battle with anxiety and depression mixed with the best new punk and hardcore recommendations this side of the Atlantic.

These thoughts about Twitter, or the form of communication and interception that it has brought to my (our) lives have been bubbling at the surface of my mind particularly because over the past two weeks I’ve been working on a theatre/twitter investigation in Manchester. Catherine Edwards and North West Playwrights brought together three writer/performers, Alex Kelly from Third Angel as a (loosely termed) director, and myself as a tech-ish art specialist to look at the possibilities and challenges of creating ‘theatre’ (performance/drama) on twitter. Or through twitter, perhaps, as it ends IRL, with a performance at DAT Fest in Stoke next weekend under the name of ‘Twitterbug‘.

It’s interesting how questions bubble back up, Such Tweet Sorrow seems a long time ago now, but in January I was encouraged to start a discussion about it at D&D, the notes from which provoked a really good conversation with Toby Barnes at Mudlark about the chance to talk about the process/problems/successes of the piece, and it was apparently my blog post on STS which lead to my being contacted about this project. At the same time @DanielBye (whose words this post is titled with) has been wondering in an excellent article about storytelling on Twitter, and @DanRebellato, he, and Pilot are also going to be looking at this (though I suspect from a very different angle) question this year.

I realise my involvement, especially after my posts on Such Tweet Sorrow last year, brings a certain amount of ‘money where your mouth is’ with it, but the project was thankfully constructed very much like an experiment, a 3 week workshop into the question of theatre (performance/drama) on the web, and how/if it can weave into real life. The challenge was not to create something perfect, but to discover through creation.

So, what have we found so far? Typically from a workshop environment, a whole lot of new questions. The three writer/performers we’ve been working with had never been on Twitter before two weeks ago, and this has brought a really interesting perspective to my, Alex and Catherine’s assumptions about Twitter, Audience, translating narrative from fabric to thread, as well as the project as a whole. I don’t want to draw any conclusions yet, but I’d very much like to offer up some of the questions and notes that we’ve come across, before in a later post also publishing some form of evaluation. So, here we go:

following an idea @ammonite tweeted me – texture, the texture of design/performance/text/direction in theatre – how much texture is there to a tweet? Our previous knowledge of someone’s over all narrative (job/partner/opinions/tastes), their ‘voice’, their immediate concerns, how they express them, the links behind their profile…?

following on from the D&D conversation about STS and @DanielBye‘s comment about real-world residues. When theatre, when play? How could we weave this pleasingly with things people can find/experience IRL?

it shouldn’t just be Twitter – Twitter is only one shade of the whole palette (we’ve since had characters on Mumsnet, youtube, tumblr, posterous, posting pictures, sounds, videos, links)

what are the ethical problems associated with not explicitly announcing characters as characters on these platforms? Does the value of interrogating authenticity, analogues and avatars make this ok?

the difference between direct and oblique interaction from audiences – some will dig deeper, but you have to tell the stories on both levels

‘show don’t tell’ still applies – a good tweet is rarely a description, but an evocation.

storytelling is different here – the

what makes a tweet rich? This makes me think of the ‘kigu’ – evocative season word traditionally used in a haiku. What are good ‘kigu’ for a tweet? The senses?

how much do we plan the story? And how is that delivered to the writer/performers?

Who is our audience? What is the invitation to follow?

how much harder is to separate the ‘real’ writer/performers from their characters when they have to thread so thoroughly through a life?

is audience satisfaction provided by a sense of resolution? How can narrative that’s more collage than Aristotelean resolve?

if this is to develop into a performance event – is it a character development process that results in a monologue, or something that infiltrates real life more gently, more performatively?

Is twitter about receiving someone’s story – or the stories they encounter?

Time constraints forced our hand on a few decisions – it’s likely that the performance will end in a simple piece of writing from each writer/performer. Other choices (like not wanting to ‘announce’ the project) have been made likewise difficult by the 3-week timeframe – if you’re playing with the form in any way naturalistically, you can’t condense – move from action scene to action scene. The story and character development has moved around ideas of travel, ritual and loneliness. The writer/performers have played hashtag games, been tasked to follow and ask questions, and have found their way to making decisions about their characters.  The characters went wholly ‘live’ on Valentines day, and have different reasons (some which haven’t emerged yet) for heading to Stoke next weekend. They’ve never ‘met’ IRL. And new provocations and exercises have and are being communicated to the writer/performers daily. The characters change from their interactions, and so will the eventual destination.

You can follow the three characters on Twitter at @honey_henry @_evka_ and @zombiejarrod. Or follow only one, or just check out my list. Or maybe go along to DATfest if you live near Stoke.

Personally so far the project has highlighted for me a real sense of the lack of a medium that yet tells us about the collage that our lives are in a satisfying way. Duncan Speakman’s As if it Were the Last Time, and Third Angel’s What I Heard About the World have come closest to it for me, I think. And I have a feeling that something’s happening over at weareforests. There’s a lot more to say about this fascinating process but I think this is enough for now. I’d love to hear your thoughts, do comment.

Finally, the project has also had me thinking about my own use of Twitter. It had never occurred to me to look at @robohannah as a construct before (I mean I know she is, but she was a momentary joke that has turned gradually into something – I never intended to make what she is now) until she was brought up by Alex as a character within a character. I’m quite fascinated now by what she says about me – the jokes I tell through her, and the loneliness that’s come to characterise how she speaks. I remember joking to @patrickashe that ‘It’s not an invisible friend if I have an audience’, but what am I telling them about me? Perhaps that living in a flat on your own can sometimes be a bit lonely.

It’s interesting, isn’t it?

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?

Image shared on Flickr via a creative commons license by Stephan Geyer.

This may start off sounding like criticism, but it isn’t, more like a lack of an applicable critical language.

At the point I started writing this blog post, in my eyes #suchtweet had lost a lot of its artistic and realistic credibility – the characters were tweeting at a party, about secret things, to each other, about each other, knowing that everyone can see them. There was earlier, hideous, product placement (more later), and the language had turned from the irritatingly truncated to an odd kind of a poesy, apart from Juliet, who got even more screechy

It was really unrealistic.

But so’s Hollyoaks, lots of people watch that.

There’s a danger my criticism becomes irrelevant, and that’s the point at which it’s not about language skill, understanding of the form, theatre or performance. It’s just a story everyone knows, threading into people’s lives.

Such Tweet Sorrow is no longer about the quality or nature of storytelling (art), this is about the power of familiar stories and love.

People love, love. They love the idea that they might give up so much for something so beautiful. They love the idea of love at first sight, and that someone as simple, or normal as they might be fated for someone. And they love to see this in a place they visit, an intimate and constructed space that they go to each day – it’s more inside them (I believe that as we reconstruct ourselves in these online spaces we build others into us), their lives, than film or theatre ever is.

We go through our lives feeling not enough, half of what we should be, the stories shilled by marketing, capitalism and the gaps left by the loss of what the post-modernists termed grand narratives (religion, class, the state) make sure of that. To want to believe in completion is understandable.

Maybe that’s what Romeo and Juliet should be about.

Is there a point at which realism isn’t relevant? Could #suchtweet be considered a piece of expressionism? The way people often act or talk on stage is heightened, why does #suchtweet have to imitate life? Or do the majority of Twitter users use Twitter like a text messaging service – do they tweet about the people they pull, knowing their family see each tweet? Perhaps they do. None of the 600 or so I follow, but by the fact their chosen by one person, not many, they can’t be seen as a representative bunch.

There are still some points on which I feel wholly vindicated in criticising #suchtweet, the lack of response and engagement with anything apart from positive critique is a shame, especially considering their interactive intentions. The biggest want has been for a forum, a place where discussion about the project can happen – look at the engagement with my previous blog post for example – if you involve people in the experiment so deeply, I think it’s right to involve them in the evaluation.

The manner of tweeting before the party scene and morning after had got a lot better – @Jess_Nurse had made considerable improvement in the subtlety of her delivery (I liked this example particularly). I enjoyed the mask trying-on session via tweetphoto, and although @Romeo_Mo’s sudden switch from playa to emo jarred with his previous behaviour, it did feel like a response to some of the criticism, and so forgiveable.

The product placement, however, is not.

Because of how intimate the experience is, because of the way the experiment sets itself up, it is shameful, dangerous, offensive that they would insert advertising into that space. When people have opened up. When people have made themselves vulnerable in two ways – in the way we do when we reconstruct our selves in online spaces, and in the way we suspend our disbelief and trust these actors as real people – to place advertising there, breaks trust.

I’ve taken the #suchtweet characters out of my feed now. I have listed them, and to be honest I think that would have been the best approach from the start. Whether or not it’s chosen to be so, #suchtweet is not for me, or most of the arts folk I’ve spoken to so far. That doesn’t make it bad, art is not a synonym for ‘good’, I do however think it could have been more artistically managed, and still have drawn its current audience, and more.

Should I still be looking at it critically? The fact that the piece is in association with theatre companies tells me ‘yes’, the content and reactions from the fan base ‘no’. What do you think?

To see my previous thoughts on Such Tweet Sorrow, click here.

After talking to @Documentally, and seeing the subtitling talk at Shift Happens (more on that in the next post), I have been thinking about doing some podcasts of my writing. As well as making it more accessible to visually impaired people, and a lot easier for people who are dyslexic (or just plain like people reading to them) it will give a window, hopefully, into how my writing sounds in my head. I think it’s always interesting to hear the author read their own work, and it helps inform future reading too. It would be lovely to hear what you think about them, and if you think it’s a nice/useful idea or not. I don’t think I’ll record all of my posts, but probably the creative pieces, and maybe the odd editorial style piece. Comment and let me know what you think would be useful!

Intro

Sand

Poppies

That Place

And finally, if you want to see these pieces in good old black and white, see this post.

Thanks for reading/listening.

Hx

I

There are days I long for a lungful of cool, sea air. The sharp jolt of salt as you breathe in and wind that whips your hair in and out of your eyes. Tucking strays behind your ears and just about resisting the urge to run along the flat sand with your arms outstretched pretending that just for a hard, breathless minute, that’s all there is. I breathe in, close my eyes and screw my feet into the sand and realise, suddenly, that I’m waiting for a hand to take mine. Much bigger it is, and when I open my eyes I’ll look up, and the smile, the smile will fall down like a waterfall, like a furled banner. The head – small in the same way the hand is big. A laugh, loud, deep, carried away by the wind like the seaweed is. Far away. Like everything, except the hand – warm, and the air – cool, thick with salt.

There are days when I long for that.

II

I turned past the corner. The corner of the road. I turned past the corner of the road where I run. I turned past the corner, where they’ve just resurfaced, where the big, thick grit makes you feel unstable, I turned into the lane, and I stopped. They’d gone. There were none of them. For days, days I’d run. I’d run and the first day I ran I turned this corner where the grit stings your knees and I stopped. They were so red. And there were hundreds of them. So red that I forgot to breathe in, so red that I felt like I was squinting. The kind of red you can’t even imagine. And there were hundreds of them, like a carpet, but not, so much less mundane, like a shout, like someone shouting out and it being stolen by the wind, distorted – but brighter than that – like a ray of sun seen from below the surface of a river, warming, but you can’t feel the heat. They look fragile, poppies, moving in the wind, but every day there were more, they bent low, but never broke. I took a break. Two days and I didn’t go out. Today I turned into the lane and stopped. Nothing but a few dead heads. Gross. Black. A darkness to them, something almost sick. The field was green. It felt grey. I started to run again, the grit bouncing at my feet.

They were gone.

III

I touch my neck. I rest my thumb at my throat and my hand along my collar bone. It just fits. My skin feels warm, slightly rough, I can feel blemishes and my fingers brush the fabric of my vest top. I trace the collar bone towards my throat, to the point at which I can feel it end, feel the beginning of the left. If I concentrate, hold my breath, I can feel my heart beating, as though from a long way off. I miss the smell, you know? Not one person in particular, but I miss the smell – of another. I miss that place. That place where if you lie next to someone when they lay out their arm you can put your head right in the space between their shoulder and their neck. It just fits. And if you listen hard, if you hold your breath, you can hear their heart beat against their chest and you can breathe in. Breathe in that combination of hair and sweat and washing powder and hot breath and a splash of water and distant shampoo, deodorant, laughter, like a cat’s tongue, and pepper, and sticky summer air. You breathe it in. Hold it. I don’t miss anyone, not anyone in particular, but that bit- that bit between someone’s head and neck, and the smell, the smell of another, their heart beating in their chest.

I miss it.

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