Hannah Nicklin

Rain Reminds Reflections

Behold! The video of The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You. It’s also on the updated site which contains some choice quotes from participants too.

I thought it would be good to reflect on the process of putting together #rainreminds in a slightly structured manner, as it could be a useful case study in successfully putting together and marketing an event, almost solely online, in a very short amount of time (two weeks). So here we go, headings and everything:

The provocation:

‘We have 100 umbrellas, and a finishing slot in the (pervasive gaming and interactive arts) Hazard MMX festival. We want to do something like a flashmob, we need good pictures.’

This is what I was given to begin with from Larkin’ About and the Green Room, Manchester. The requirements were something impactful in the city, interactive, that involved group action, and good photo opportunities. Having just completed http://walkwith.tumblr.com , the opportunity to work simultaneously with a number of participants was a good next step, so I suggested a soundwalk for up to 100 people. Duncan Speakman’s subtlemobs are the closest to what I was thinking of. The umbrellas led me to ideas and significance of rain that I’d been developing with Walk With Me – the idea of how we used to need rain to make things grow led me also to the idea of spaces like Picadilly Gardens, and how we inhabit these transient spaces differently when young. Then I thought of kissing in the rain, and how it’s quite a ‘young’ relationship thing to do. (as one of the stories I went on to collect put it: “As we get older we tend to get a bit more pragmatic. Instead of lingering on wet pavements, enjoying a romantic embrace, we are more likely to head for the warm and the dry, where we can get on with the more urgent act of fucking.”) So I went and started making.

The process – making and marketing.

I started out by having these as two headings, but really, for the most part, they were one and the same. The very first sniff of the piece in public, was also me testing out my ideas. It all began with a small twtpoll, which discovered that nearly 60% of people (50 answered) had kissed someone in the pouring rain.

From finding this I decided to try and collect some of these stories, so I set up a tumblr site that allowed anyone to submit to, named or anonymously, stories to be shared under a creative commons license. In approaching a piece done by many I wanted my piece to reflect different kinds of experiences. You can see (and still submit to) the collected stories at http://rainonymy.tumblr.com. This is where I first found the title of the piece, people were able to naturally follow up ‘yes I have kissed someone in the rain’ provoking a memory, by then writing down, and the ideas of kissing in the rain, and story telling were tweeted and blogged far and wide. Continue reading…

The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You

Base image shared on Flickr via a (remix) Creative Commons License by AnitaKHart. Shameless Helvetica added by me.

So, if you’ve been following me on Twitter over the past week or so you will have seen that I have been a) collecting stories and b) seeding the #rainreminds hashtag. What’s it all about? Well, I’m delighted to announce that I have a piece of work in the Hazard Festival, next Saturday at 5pm.

The dedicated mini-site can be found at http://rainreminds.tumblr.com/ where there are links to the location and facebook event, and a nice big old Share Button. Please do!

The piece will be somewhere between stealth performance, soundwalk, and flashmob, will involve up to 100 umbrellas, and will take place in the middle of Manchester. Full instructions, and an mp3 to download and bring with you will be released 24 hours prior to the event, so if you’re interested, do sign up to the Facebook event so I can send a nice reminder out when I release it.

The hashtag for the event is #rainreminds, and over the past week or so I’ve been collecting stories, voices, and sounds from people all over the internet. These will either be used directly in, or help to inspire the 10 minute long piece, which I will be writing up until Tuesday, recording and editing until Thursday, and then releasing at 5pm on Friday with accompanying instructions in advance of Saturday.

In the meantime you can have a read of (or add to) some of the awesome stories coming into http://rainonmy.tumblr.com – and if you want to be credited make sure you leave your name in the *body* of the submission (if you missed that in the submission guidelines and you do want crediting, drop me an email or @ on twitter). Also, follow the  #rainreminds hashtag for trials, tribulations, and exclamations in the writing/recording journey.

So, see you in Manchester, and spread the word.

Hurrah!

Identity 2.0

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.

Continue reading…