Hannah Nicklin

2010: A Year in Art (Mine and Other People’s)

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… Continue reading…

Shift Happens 2010

Image of my gormless face taken by and shared with the permission of @documentally

The beginning of my week was spent at Shift Happens 2010, where I had the very awesome and slightly scary opportunity of giving a 10 minute talk on where I think theatre and digital tech are going. A brilliant couple of days, with inspiration abound, and some really lovely little pieces of performance woven in. I’m still not really up to long bouts of typing yet (the cast comes off in T-minus 12 days), so have embedded a couple of things here to give you a taste of what I took to the event, mostly in flash though, apologies for that.

The first a slideshare version of my talk – with me actually talking (apologies for the pops in the audio) through my ideas on it, and the second is a phlog done by a local community radio station talking to me and Babba Israel from Contact Theatre in Manchester. I’ve also put on Contact’s weekly video blog, the second half of which covers Shift Happens, which should at least give those of you on iPhones a sense of it. You can also download a pdf of the talk here, and for links to other presentations and sources mentioned, check out this very useful post by Matthew Linley.

It will be interesting to see where the next Shift goes. There was much less dissent this year, which although at least means the arts industry is catching up, perhaps means we now need to be pushing further, aiming to (as Andy Field had it)

“dream stupid, impossibly grand visions of what the future might look like”.

Do we now need an arts and tech conference which is more than just entry level? And that also challenge the conventions of a conference? I’m doing a joint paper with my supervisor for the TaPRA 2010 Conference which seeks to interrogate the failings of the top-down conference form in properly communicating the wholeness of performance and academic thought. To move the arts/tech world on do we need to find something that falls somewhere between festival, workshop, conference and digital and performative playground? What do you think?

Continue reading…

Alt/Shift

I’ve just returned home from the launch of Pilot Theatre‘s Shift Happens, the UK’s version of TED (arts, tech, and learning). This year’s version is called ‘Alt/Shift’. The conference will be taking part on the 5th and 6th of July this year and as last year they have some really exciting speakers lined up, and, also, my good self. I was asked to speak at this years shift following the Bums on Seats post I wrote after the last one, and hope to do the rest of the (incredible) line up justice. Shift Happens does brilliant work in highlighting some of the most innovative stuff that’s going on in the UK’s tech/arts/learning scene, the kind of collaborations and mash ups we should be shouting about, and showing people that it isn’t hard to get to.

I’ll have some more sustained thoughts up soon about my two talks at Nottingham Trent and Leeds Met, as following the nearing deadline for AWAKE, my diary is finally beginning to settle down. I had thought February would be entirely free, but I’ve just been invited to take part in the National Youth Theatre’s ‘Techno Stories‘ project, which aims to address climate change awareness through tech/theatre crossover, it sounds like a brilliant, exciting project, and everything I believe in, too – it just means a few more weekends ’til I get some time off, and checking that I can afford all the London based to-ing and fro-ing.

Finally, let me leave you with the best taste of what Alt/Shift is all about with some audioboos I did with the people running, supporting, and speaking at it.

Shift

Shift.

Just a quick post before the beginning of a very hectic but exciting week, as it’s most likely I wont have a second to blog until at least Sunday. This is what I’m going to be getting up to:

Monday and Tuesday I will be attending/working at Shift Happens 2.0, Pilot Theatre’s conference about digital media in the arts. I’ll be there as a sort of Twitter ‘specialist’, as well as in my capacity as a burgeoning PhD student, soaking up as much as I can in the run up to the beginning of my Theatre and Technology research. The event looks extremely exciting, particularly looking forward to hearing more from Hide and Seek, the live streaming of Catcher In Their Eye, and the New playgrounds… Places and spaces, real and virtual panel. You can follow the conference with the hashtags #shifthappens and #shift2 I think.

Wednesday will be spent sightseeing in York (I haven’t been there since I was very young, Jorvik Viking Centre, anyone?) and then coming back to Lincoln in time for a showing of The Age of Stupid at the Drill Hall. I may also buy a big hat. I quite want a bit hat.

Thursday will be my first dedicated day working on the online communication strategy for TWP, and will be the day I set out all of my plans, hopefully informed by the Shift conference

Friday I am temping for some money to cover my activities on…

Saturday! 4 hours on 5 trains leaving at 5am to go to Greenpeace’s Mili-band, which is aiming to “bring together over a thousand people from across the country to create a human band around Kingsnorth power station to show our opposition to new dirty coal plants.” There’s the protest itself, as well as a fete, and a chance to meet up with all the green folk I’ve been following on Twitter, which should be good. This is my first attempt at following through on my previous decision to start actively demonstrating, rather than passively participating in advocating the political and social change that I believe in. It should hopefully be a nice gentle introduction before Climate Camp at the end of August. If I buy a big hat, I will try wearing it here.

And then Sunday, I may be visiting my brother in Leeds, or I may be readying myself for a full week of 8.30-5 temping with Interserve (for those who follow me on Twitter, it’s the place of #thewoodlouse) which is so dull that they actually advise you to bring a book. Might actually afford me a decent chance to get some writing done I suppose.

So yes, that is my week, all of which is apparently going to take place on the hottest week in the UK for a very long time. I shall try and catch up with everything and blog about Shift, and the Mili-band thing in a weeks time. In the meantime, you can always follow me on Twitter. I have also just sorted myself a Tumblr on which you will find links and other things of interest from the internets, and a Flickr account, on which I’ve put a few of my nicer photos, and on which I shall definitely put up anything decent that I take over the next week or so.

Thanks for reading.