I am making something with Nikki Pugh called ‘Dust’. It is a response to a manifesto that claims we will make things with you, not for you. This is one of the ways it’s with. You can read about where the project is at right now over here. If you can offer me a story, it will be made into a Dust Mote. Things that people will find and keep. The stories will also feed into and inform the longer-form narrative fragments in the work. Head over here for full context.

And because this is a two way thing, here’s a couple I will submit:

Object 1: A porcelain badge, square with rounded corners, the transfer of a rabbit with a balloon on the front.

This object broke. It was the last thing in my daily life that came from the boy whose hair smelled like raku firings. It fell off my bag in St. Pancras about 3 years ago and shattered. I still have the largest fragment.

Object 2: A small plush rat.

[no picture]

Bought because it looked lonely. Bought just before something went completely, bafflingly wrong. Now hidden.

…

I need some less emo objects, huh?

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.

Devoted and Disgruntled Report – Theatre and Video Games

Devoted and Disgruntled Report – STS

Me mid-June, with my freshly broken arm and super-attractive cast protector.

Mandatory end-of-year reflective blog post ENGAGE.

So, yep, here we are. And what the heck could you want more than my reflections on My Life in Art 2010 Edition? Exactly. This is going to be meandering and will probably miss things out, but is a rough account of art wot I have done, and art wot I enjoyed this 2010…

So, apparently I’ve actually done quite a bit of art stuff this year, despite the full-time PhD (and I managed to deliver two papers this year without having anything thrown at me, or getting thrown out) plus a broken arm in June… which still hurts actually. Half a year more and it should stop. Anyway, art!

In March I had my first full proper-play production at Theatre503 with Box of Tricks Theatre’s Word:Play – Awake was a short 15 minute conversation between a dying gamer and her avatar. It was an interesting experience, but I don’t really rate it as a piece of writing, I think I’d found a story but not really the right form; so I next moved from the stage to the street… In May I released my first experiment in sound-based pervasive work – Walk With Me, a 10 minute soundwalk for one to be done anywhere in the rain. I got some lovely feedback, handwritten notes, posted found items, and twitpics and photo albums from people who went on the walk. I then got to develop to 30 minutes worth of sound-walking for The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You in July, which although admittedly breathed it’s first breath out of Walk With Me, was this time built out of memories collected from people online. It was commissioned by the Green Room as part of the Hazard Festival, and I fell slightly in love with Manchester as well as learning a lot about working with a group audience, not just a single person. APPARENTLY YOU CAN’T HERD THEM. Who knew. Then Fierce‘s Interrobang allowed me to push my practice beyond the soundwalk (which I didn’t want to get stuck in as a form) into a 4 minute piece of live art called ‘Home’… OK it still used recorded sound. And was pretty damn authored. But it was a step, and I learnt a lot more about live art as a form. A brief art/academia mashup occurred for the TaPRA conference with A Soundwalk without Organs - a soundwalk done as part of a paper delivered which described the contemporary academic conference as completely useless in representing either academic thought or arts practice. FUN. Then it got to Autumn, and I got to make a soundwalk with a piece of entirely new music from the brilliant Lantern Music, Nightwalk York happened as part of the Take Over and Illuminating York Festivals in October/November. Finally towards the end of November Hibernate! a game for Larkin’ About took to the streets of Manchester, and I was at least able to push my practice a little bit further in terms of pervasive stuff…

I also attended and liveblogged Mayfest for Forest Fringe and Inbetween Time for New Work Network, did my first 2 guest lectures in January, and followed with a few speaking events, culminating in Shift Happens in July. I’ve got a lot better at speaking/teaching since the shaky beginning of this year, and hope I get the opportunity to do more of it in 2011.

This year coming I’d also like the opportunity to collaborate more with OTHER PEOPLE. I really don’t see enough of them other people types. Although I suppose it’s harder to fit in if there’s more than just me to cater for, I do often wish I had a collaborator to bounce ideas off, too often end up bouncing my head off a wall instead. Sometimes I think I’d like to be a part of some kind of company. But it’s all a long while off. 2012 (all going to plan) is when I’ll be PhD-ed up and looking for some kind of game-plan.

And what about other people’s work? Well here are some of my favourite things, where possible in twos (for no real reason at all).

Music – This year was tinged with a Scottish rockish feel, Frightened Rabbit captured me for the Summer, and We Were Promised Jetpacks came in time for Winter to ease me into the darker days. I got to see Frightened Rabbit live, but WWPJ haven’t ventured south yet from what I can see. Hope they will soon, because Scotland is expensive to get to.

Film – I saw Moon in January – seriously amazed this didn’t get ALL OF THE OSCARS. And the exquisite Bright Star is well worth a watch – I don’t care if you ‘don’t like films with bonnets and dresses in’, watch it. It’s a wonderful piece of writing/acting/direction.

Theatre – Although not a personal favourite, it was an absolute joy to introduce someone to theatre with Kneehigh’s Red Shoes – a friend who I discovered had never even seen a panto had their MIND BLOWN by what theatre could be. Highlights (more than two) otherwise divided between Yorkshire’s Unlimited, Third Angel and Red Ladder stage shows, and Bristol’s Duncan Speakman, Mayfest, and Inbetween Time festivals which woke me up to what more theatre and performance could be. London gets a look in for the one piece I could afford to get to (it was free and on a Sunday) – Hide and Seek’s adventures in and around the National. And then to Birmingham for The Author, which resulted in my FIRST PROPER QUOTE IN THE GUARDIAN. It made my parents forgive me for getting quoted in the Telegraph.

Apps/Games I finally forked out for World of Goo – and there’s an Android app called Spaghetti and Marshmallows which channels it a little bit which is worth a go if you can’t access iOS4 – I like them physical puzzlers. Papa Sangre OMG buy it now, and the Board Game Remix Kit, which is going to form the basis of basically the COOLEST DINNER PARTY YOU EVER HEARD OF early next year, are all worth the small amount of money you’ll pay for them.

Comics I woke up to comics care of the iPad my mum kindly bought me with some inheritance money – I could cart whole series across the many train journeys I take monthly; bliss. I kill Giants and Preacher are the two I’d pick out if I had to.

Book Serious? I haven’t read anything without pictures for pleasure for… since the PhD started. I try, and then I fall asleep. Incidentally I’m currently encountering the same problem with PhD books so it’s nothing personal (or genre-ific?)

And a resolution? Well last year’s to eat less meat got turned into 360 day a year vegetarianism, so I have high hopes for 2011′s SORT OUT YOUR MONEY.

Have a lovely 2011 all, thanks for reading the blog. Here’s to exciting new projects *raises glass*

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/12/2011-a-year-in-art-mine-and-other-peoples/feed/ 0 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/11/that-in-between-time/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/11/that-in-between-time/#comments Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:13:22 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=1984

Search Party – photo by me at the Forest Fringe Microfest in Mayfest 2010, links to flickr.

I am finally able to let you all know proper details about the very exciting piece of work I heard I got last Monday. I’m going to be working this week, from Wednesday through to Sunday with the New Work Network as a ‘creative correspondent’ at In Between Time. In Between Time is a festival of live art – contemporary art and performance, often intimate or focussed on the audience/body* – happening in venues all over the city of Bristol. Artists involved that I’ve blogged about on here before are Search Party, Duncan Speakman, Action Hero, Tim Etchells, Blast Theory and there’s a raft of other exciting artists and new work that I’ve not yet had a chance to see, so basically this job is somewhere around Best Thing Ever.

What actually is a ‘creative correspondent’? Well mostly that was up to me, the New Work Network had a very open proposal system, the proposal I got accepted under (and the one that I’ve since fleshed out) placed a lot of emphasis on acknowledging my presence in covering the material through social media – and as thus the importance of the other voices that I might report or enable through my coverage. Because of this I will also be sharing as much as the content (audio/video/images/text) as possible (allowing for artists to opt out) via a CC remix license – meaning that anyone can use the content in their own creative and critical reactions. Likewise I’ll be making sure the interviews I grab are with festival goers as much as organisers and artists – reflecting all the conversations around the festival, trying to level the playing field in terms of critical response (there will be no star ratings, horrible reductive things that they are).

If you want to follow the material I’m going to be pushing highlights to my personal account, but to keep people from feeling overloaded I’m going to be sticking to the New Work Network Twitter account for the majority of material – so if you think you’re definitely interested, follow @NewWorkNetwork, or if you want to get a taste for things first, follow @hannahnicklin or check out the site (when it’s up) to see if anything catches your eye. And please, do play with the material I put out there – whether it’s data (I’m going to try and geo-tag pretty much everything I can) or media – any creative or critical reactions are not just welcome, but vital to complete the voice of the correspondence. There will be a submission page on the site when it’s ready, and I’ll remind y’all about it when the site is up.

For people not at the festival, the site will be where most of the content goes up, so you can follow there, and I’m going to be putting it together tomorrow. All going well with domain pointing (the one bit I don’t have control over, so hoping it’s been sorted) it should be found at www.IBTlive.newworknetwork.info

For those who are going – contact me @hannahnicklin if you want to talk to me at any point, follow me on the map (I’ll hopefully have up), and keep an eye out for QR codes and pull off short urls which may guide you to little pieces of material across the city, tweet streams and video and images projected on cafe and venue walls, or bus stops and darkened streets…

The hashtag to follow is #IBTlive10, so I’ll hopefully see you there, online or IRL.

*actually, most artists I speak to don’t even really define live art in the same way, and most people not in the live art community that I speak to have never heard of it, so one of the questions throughout the coverage is likely to be ‘what is live art?’

Just to let you all know that I shall hopefully have my first ever proper game played at Larkin’ About‘s Winter games event. I’ve been coming at the world of pervasive games and contemporary performance from a largely writerly point of view so far, hence my affinity for the soundwalk form, I think, and although I love crafting soundwalks, I thought it would be good for me to have a go at something looser, and more game-y (ludic, I should say) and force myself out of control.

I thought something simple would be a good place to start, so it’s roughly a treasure hunt/capture the flag kind of cross, the rule set as it stands thus:

Hibernate!

For 8-20 players

Set up
Your normal habitat’s food supply is under threat because of a Summer of floods and damp weather, it’s getting cold and you need to prepare for winter, so you’ve had to venture into the city to find food…

Rules
- To be played within a small area of dark city-space.
- Up to four teams (3 will work best, I think) – the Door Mice, the Voles, the Shrews and the Weasels.
- Each team wears a coloured glo-stick in their team colour and gets a certain number of the same colour, unsnapped.
- The aim of the game is to collect pieces of ‘food’ back at the nest.
- Players can only carry one piece of food at one time.
- There are 2 sizes of food, blue and red, blue food is worth 2 food-points and requires two animals to carry it, they must link arms to pick it up.
- Players cannot communicate using anything other than the word ‘squeak’, but they can mark routes with their ‘scent’ – snapped glo-sticks.
- If a nest is unguarded, the food stored in it can be stolen.
- The winning team is the one with the most food within 10 minutes. OR The winner is the first team to a certain number of foodstuffs and all at the nest within the time limit.

Needed per iteration:
- Glow sticks of up to 4 colours
- ‘Food’ hidden around the space, not too grouped together. Painted ping pong balls are best.
- Something to signify a nest

So there you go. Simple, I know, and I think for the next one I’ll try and play with the form a bit, but just as Walk With Me was my first 10 minute test of the soundwalk form, so Hibernate! will hopefully be a simple test of game-like stuff.

I’m currently working with the Larkin’ folk to iron out a final rule set, and all being well it should get its first test on the 27th of November in Manchester. Exciting!

Here are the full details for the Larkin’ event:

Larkin’ in the Winter

Saturday 27th November, 6pm onwards

greenroom bar, 54-56 Whitworth Street West, Manchester, M1 5WW

FREE

The theme ‘Welcoming in the Winter’ aims to celebrate the charm and magic of our fine Northern city in the winter.  The programme includes Hide the Guy by local designer Matt Smith, a game where you must assist your fellow Catholics in hiding Guy Fawkes from King James’ Guards.  Also, make sure you check out http://7candlesmcr.tumblr.com/ in advance of the night for a heads-up on some of the gloomy locations you’ll need to illuminate in Vee Uye’s game 7:Candles:Mcr, which will play out simultaneously in the city centre and on Twitter.  Rumours are also circulating of the Spirits of Summer attempting to eliminate winter…get ready to protect the city in a secret game to be played at the end of the evening…

Wear all weather clothes!

And if you have any comments or suggestions, they’re very welcome.

And so another piece gets rolled over into the past tense. Nightwalk, York reached the end of its official life-span last Saturday with the close of the Illuminating York and Take Over Festivals. The offical site (http://nightwalkyork.tumblr.com/) has been amended and appended with some of the lovely feedback I got over twitter.

The picture above was taken by Katherine as she walked around the streets where it was happening. She took this picture of a couple who did the whole piece whilst holding hands.

It was a very odd feeling not to have been there while it was going on, but time was short, and the 5 1/2 hour round trips to York wearing so I didn’t make it up after the main testing/re-edit. Huge thanks to @Katherine_ann for being around to check people were OK, an wave those off as wanted it. She thinks she saw off roughly 100 people over the couple of days she was there, and other people were doing it in the days between the 27th and 30th as well, so all in all, a larger audience than I expected. There was growing coverage for it too – as before (with Rain Reminds) people didn’t really know what to expect, but after the first outing, word got out, people invited other people (I saw a surge in facebook invitees) and it eventually made it onto local radio and papers, as well as the Love York and Science City websites.

A brilliant reception, too, so much so the York tourist board have showed preliminary interest in a slightly modded one that will work for a bit longer, so perhaps Dark York may even become a fixture of the city. Like the moonstone books, where you could slip between the stones at night into a slightly different world.

I’ve left the download link up for any curious ears, certain parts of it wont work in situe now – the park where it begins will be shut, and references to bonfire night will stall a bit – but if you are interested in some the stories and sounds that could be found in Dark York, do have a listen. Headphones if you please. And go breathe in some cold Autumn air.

Thanks to Katherine for all her hard work, to the festivals for having me, and also to the brilliant Lantern Music for their musical contribution to the piece – a very happy first collaboration, here’s to many more.

Where next?

I hear whisperings over at @umbrellaproject, both of past soundwalks, and also something… bigger.

Pitter patter, pitter patter.

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/11/nightwalked/feed/ 0 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/10/pecha-kucha-coventry/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/10/pecha-kucha-coventry/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:01:01 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=1911 I am currently squirrelling away at a redraft of Nightwalk, York, so in the meantime and for your delectation; the video of my presentation at the Coventry Pecha Kucha Night – Theatre in the Age of the First Person.

For those of you on non-flash devices, try here.

Available on the Youtubes here.

The writing was (as usual) pretty hard until I clicked with a main through-line, something which is hard to find until you actually get writing (I find). So I kicked myself off by writing five stories about different kinds of dark and light; A story about mistaking planes for stars, a story about sitting on a bench under a tree in the streetlight with a stranger, a story of a power cut and light and dark from your childhood, a story about bonfires, and a story about walking at night and being able to breathe better. Then I set out finding out what connected them all. I think this has more clearly become the idea of reclaiming our dark cities – something which I’ve thought about a bit since Reclaim the Night, and the Vampires pervasive game that I played last year. So after testing for timing etc., I shall also tighten the connection up with some additional pieces of writing.

Working with Genuine Musicians this time has been a mix of total awesome and middling daunting. It was so good to have something entirely new and bespoke, but at the same time it’s so beautiful in places that I struggled to believe that I could do it justice. Hopefully I have. How will you find out? By adding yourself or inviting a nearby friend to the facebook event, and checking the website for more info. That’s how.

Finally, in upcoming shenanigans, I shall be speaking at a Pecha Kucha in Coventry this Tuesday on Theatre and the Age of the First Person (which I’m beginning to think should be called the Renaissance of the First Person). You can buy tickets and see who else is speaking here. I’m particularly intrigued by ‘safe sex with robots’. Good title.

Image shared by delgaudm on flickr via a creative commons license.

I’ve just returned from the TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) annual conference in Cardiff. I was there part of the Theatre and Philosophy Working Group, and delivered a joint paper with my supervisor Dan Watt. The first half of the session was a soundwalk I made which can be heard over here and the second half two papers that converged. This was my half of the paper. We wanted to provoke discussion on the growing irrelevancies of the ‘broadcasting’ conference form, in age that is more like a network, as well as its ability to interrogate performance. We didn’t aim to provide solutions, but offer a provocation. Following the main part of the conference the working group began to plan an interim event more like a symposium crashed together with game play, both performative and academic… Read on for more on the provocation

A Paper without Organs, or, Detours in Theatre and Thinking

‘We are in the era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered. We exist in a moment when the world is experiencing, I believe, something less like a great life that would develop through time than like a network that connects points and weaves its skin’ (Foucoult, The Essential Works II, 175) (West-Pavlov 2009, 18)

Christopher Sandberg (2004) […] calls for a different audience theory […] He asserts that in order to fully understand and appreciate a larp [live action role playing game], one must participate in it. This creates a sort of first person audience” (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 54)

Subtlemobs, Hide and Seek, and the urban environment

The performance event is changing, is melding, is mashing up with the new narrative strategies emerging from contemporary digital culture. It is moving into the urban environment, and through an embodied audience. The age of the first person is coming; gaming culture, and the ludic heritage of our childhoods are merging with performative, pedagogical practices and forming the pervasive game.

[…] pervasive games are not new human activities. […] Play becomes pervasive only in a modern society that erects boundaries to be pervaded by such games. (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 257)

Pervasive games can be defined as play expanded out of traditional performative or ludic space in one or all of three ways; spatially (it moves through everyday space), temporally (it is interacted with throughout everyday time) or socially (it is played with/around the public).

Contemporary life has brought us “the proliferation of spaces whose function seems only to be to facilitate our ‘passing through’” (Buchanan and Lambert 2005, 3-4). Pervasive games oppose this by moving into the streets, inhabiting them

“The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language”  (McDonough 2004, 290)

Hide&Seek is the foremost pervasive gaming company in the UK. Their processes are collective, anyone can design a game, anyone can edit, their events are free to attend, touring ‘Sandpits’ are used to trial – ‘beta-test’ – and improve games, and regular large events and festivals are held where a diverse range of game designers run the most successful.

These games are playful explorations of constructing and re-constructing our selves, powerfully détourn-ing our relationships with the spaces and people around us. They do so in a ubiquitous fashion that the Situationists, those hackers of urban space, would have recognised as revolutionary.

Alex Fleetwood of Hide&Seek describes their works as:

A way of getting people to break that unwritten social law of don’t interact with your fellow man, just walk along the city, and be an automaton in your own space (Hide&seek 2007)

The game Scoop! arranges three teams into ‘genres’ of journalists; tabloid, broadsheet, and gossip magazine. Armed with small video cameras, each team heads out to film several stories. They get points for stories, certain props, and bonus points if they are able to film other teams. This simple ludic structure belies a thicker connection with the media as narrative construct, and genre outlook.

Vampires is a game to be played at night. There are 3 secret vampires with an array of ‘bite’ cards, 20 villagers, and ‘stake’ and ‘holy water’ cards hidden around a city area. The villagers’ task is to find 15 stake cards, and return them to a ‘safe place’ before the time is up. Villagers who are bitten are handed ‘bite’ cards, and if a villager suspects someone they can throw a torn up holy water card in a participant’s face. The game is frightening to play, you suspect everyone, it re-reveals the fear of walking around city space at night.

These games “transform the way we understand space.” (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 78), but also allow us to recognise the construct of what has gone before, participants – and the spaces in which they play – are unbalanced.

[…] a deliberate act of unbalancing, an unworkable conjunction that ‘forges alliances… according to the circumstances’ (Deleuze 1997b: 256). (Watt 2009, 94)

This is alos the lived-play that the situationsts called for, no longer holed up in sanctioned ‘art space’; this is art, lived.

The role of the “public”, if not passive at least a walk-on, must ever diminish, while the share of those who cannot be called actors but, in a new meaning of the term, “livers,” will increase. (Debord 2004, 47)

Pervasive gaming de-territorialises being by placing the subject in immersive or ludic situations and inhabiting our urban unspace. Pervasive games are the realm in which Deleuze’s

[…] machine of minor literature can give way to a playful environment where thought and words become movement (Watt 2009, 100)

The Subtlemob is another, more traditionally narrative-driven pervasive form. Developed by Duncan Speakman, the Subtlemob takes the mass congregation and playful reclamation of the flashmob[1] and turns into a kind of first person performance; inhabiting story.

[…] the new space, like new machines, can only be represented in motion (Buchanan, Space in the Age of Non-Place 2005, 19)

As if it Were the Last Time is a Subtlemob for two. Participants congregate in a designated street, and at specified time play an mp3. Instructions, sounds, and stories inhabit them as they drift around the space. The narrative is not Aristotlean, rather more like a collage. You are asked to find places that feel natural to you, where you feel safe or uncomfortable, to look at the tops of building and in the faces of passersby; to change direction in return for eye contact, and to enact a small moment of intimacy. The piece ends with a dance, suddenly a street that was seemingly contained just two conspirators is full of laughing, dancing people.

Speakman’s first-person audience presents a deterritorialisation of the self.

[…] the process whereby the very basis of one’s identity, […] is eroded, washed away like the bank of a river swollen by floodwater – immersion. (Buchanan, Space in the Age of Non-Place 2005, 23)

At the same time as video games are becoming a dominant entertainment form, social media sees brand, identity, and play becoming re-constructed, integral; a kind of digital prosthesis. The Subtlemob uses immersion to construct a piece of performance out of the shards of our selves. Briefly, you are wholly in a place you would normally pass through, fragmented.

Audience Centrism and Coney

These processes are happening in more conventional theatre-spaces too. As in A Small Town Anywhere by The Agency of Coney.

Coney itself plays like a game of secret society, with members taking codenames in chapters […] all over the world. […] This secret society is led by RABBIT[2]. Anyone who is game can join. (Coney n.d.)

A Small Town Anywhere, performed in 2009, was devised over two years with Battersea Arts Centre as part of their ‘Not for Me, Not for You, but for Us’ festival.

The show has its roots in a French film called Le Corbeau (The Raven) about a mysterious poison-pen writer plaguing a nameless French village. Made by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1943, it was a covert critique of Nazi-occupied France, in which countless people were denouncing their neighbours to the authorities by letter. (Gardner 2009)

The piece for roughly 30 people is set in a small, ordinary town represented by an space in the BAC theatre. Participants go about their assumed daily lives until the postal service (a series of pigeon holes populated by messages handed to the postman/woman each day) reveals that a suspicious character, ‘Raven’, seems to know too much of the townspeople’s secrets. These secrets, and the townspeople’s characters are worked out in advance. The task of the piece is to discover and cast out the nefarious ‘Raven’. Accusations are made, and at the end, a trial is held; the person found guilty banished.

[…] because there is no audience in a traditional sense, all social anxiety […] quickly evaporates. I play it as if it’s real – and that’s exactly how it feels. For two hours, I lose myself in the show. (ibid)

The placing of the participant at the heart of the world-constituting process embodies the ease with which worlds are created, and crucially, destroyed. This is a profoundly pedagogical and political act, indeed, as Andy Field says:

Politics is as much about form as it is about content. It is a way of doing things. Interpersonal relationships, the structure of our communities, our reading of and relationship to the place we inhabit. How we understand our being in the world. (Field, Playing Games 2010)

Through the disequilibrium produced by the first-person audience, the experience of theatre itself is minorized.

Games and art

‘We are reminding ourselves of what, unexperienced and unthought, underlies our familiar and therefore outworn notion of truth […]’ (PLT: 52) (Clark 2002, 22)

The mashup of play and art found at the heart of pervasive gaming and interactive performance offers the tools with which we can de- and reconstruct our space and selves.

[…] the art work is not just something that comes into the open, next to other things, it changes the Open in which it appears. (Clark 2002, 44)

In a way, the inscription of these stories upon the bodies of their participants are a form of lived philosophy, that which Heidegger’s strained language, and Deleuze’s painful schizo yearnings failed to achieve. It is truly about movement, the playing, and not the final destination. ‘Passage through, not direction towards’ (Watt 2009, 94)

As the ‘postdramatic performance event manifests itself in increasingly diverse and localised forms’[3], one must question the ability of academia, as it is currently constructed, to interrogate, understand, or even represent it.

The process of the academy and the process of making performance

The theatre of the future does not achieve itself. It is a movement. It is a mode of being that is in process. It is characterised most notably as having no place in which to dwell because it no longer finds its home in the theatre. (Watt 2009, 93)

Academia needs to acknowledge the growing irrelevancy of its modes and methods of presentation, both in the context of a hyper-connected, levelling and wiki-culture world, and in the context of performance which is returning to play, to the language of dialogue.

Theatre is live, handmade – reactive, ephemeral, messy. It is at its best when it shows its workings, when it acknowledges the processes that went into making it: the conversations, the long walks, the ideas, the wrong turns, the moments of improbable luck. It’s when this happens that theatre becomes not just art, not just entertainment, but a dialogue (Field, Forest Fringe Diary: Doing Theatre, Bristol Fashion 2009)

This process is also true of academic thought; to acknowledge only the destination is to fail.

But that’s OK.

Each failure is a masterpiece, a branch of the rhizome. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 38-39) (Watt 2009, 98)

We simply need to find ourselves another way.

There is a form of conference emerging from the digital world – the unconference. The unconference is about dialogue, there are no speakers, only provocations. Groups of attendees will discuss, share, move to different tables, join different discussions. Attendees become participants; the monologue, a dialogue.

The process has its shortcomings, discussions repeat themselves, and often contain less rigour and depth. They are not necessarily our solution, but they are a recognition that the conference form, as it stands, is not suited to the truth of our processes, or the worlds which they now attempt to explore.

[…] as games continue to grow larger and more important, they will [… force] us to rethink the categories of creator, audience, and work that currently structure our thinking. Instead of becoming a new globally dominant form of message sending and receiving, they will shift our focus away from the idea of broadcasting […] to a new way of thinking about meaning–creation that is more like a network, like a conversation from which meanings emerge. (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 248)

Works Cited

Buchanan, Ian. “Space in the Age of Non-Place.” In Deleuze and Space, by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Buchanan, Ian, and Gregg Lambert. Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Clark, Timothy. Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge, 2002.

Coney. The Society. http://youhavefoundconey.net/secretsociety.html (accessed September 3, 2010).

Debord, Guy. “Report in the Construction of Situations.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist Internatinal, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Field, Andy. Forest Fringe Diary: Doing Theatre, Bristol Fashion. 27 August 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/27/forest-fringe-diary-bristol (accessed September 3, 2010).

Field, Andy. Playing Games. 20 February 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/playing-games/ (accessed March 16, 2010).

Gardner, Lyn. Join in the Murder Game and Battersea Arts Centre. 19 October 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/oct/19/murder-game-battersea-arts-centre (accessed September 3, 2010).

Hide&seek. “Hide and Seek documentary.” YouTube. Edited by Mike Tamman. Alex Fleetwood. 25 11 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMz7WA01aC4&feature=player_embedded (accessed 5 3, 2010).

McDonough, Tom. “Situationist Space.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Montola, Markus, Kaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. Pervasive Games. Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009.

Trueman, Matt. Review: A Small Town Anywhere, Battersea Arts Centre. 27 October 2009. http://carouseloffantasies.blogspot.com/2009/10/review-small-town-anywhere-battersea.html (accessed September 3, 2010).

Watt, Daniel. “Performing, Strolling, Thinking: From Minor Literature to Theatre of the Future .” In Deleuze and Performance, edited by Laura Cull, 91-101. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

West-Pavlov, Russell. Space in Theory, Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. New York: Rodopi, 2009.

Creative commons tracks used and works cited in the soundwalk:

‘once a living sea’ by cellodreams, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/cellodreams/once-a-living-sea

‘bell tolls’ by cellodreams, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/cellodreams/bell-tolls

‘It Felt Weird’ by Valiska, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/valiska/it-felt-weird

Artaud, Antonin (1975) To Have Done with the Judgement of God, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Norman Glass, Sparrow 34, July 1975, (no pagination).

Bataille, Georges (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Beckett, Samuel (1979) The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Picador: London.

Deleuze, Gilles (1997a) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Athlone Press: London.

Deleuze, Gilles (1997b) ‘One Less Manifesto’ in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime. The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought. Ed. Timothy Murray. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 239-258.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press: New York.

Heidegger, Martin (1993) ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell, London: Routledge, pp. 347-363.

[1] The mass congregation of people without warning, united in some form of action. The roots of it as political device can be traced back to the absurd actions of the Orange Alternative Happenings in 1980s Communist Poland, the form is typically now more mundane, and is being heavily colonised by the commercial world.

[2] Rabbit here could be seen as a direct nod to the term coined by game designers describing the beginning of a game as an invitation to fall down Alice’s rabbit hole Markus Montola, Kaakko Stenros and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games (Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009)..

[3] As per the abstract for this paper.