Exciting thing! Andy Field and I are up to stuff again, returning to the Arts Council England’s (ACE) State of the Arts Conference this year, much more integrally than how we were part of last year’s; this time we’ve been able to help shape the way, where, and with whom the conversations happen. Live blog! Artists bursaries! Actual conversations on themes! Some very exciting and challenging live bloggers feeding in and back everything said by everyone! All in all it looks like a massive leap for ACE, in a brilliant and totally important direction. A bit below from mine and Andy’s statement of intent:

“Before, during and after State of the Arts 2012, we will be hosting this online space as an important new facet of the conference.

We want this to be a place for anyone with an interest in the arts to share their thoughts and ideas. A carnival of voices discussing anything and everything about the state of the arts in 2012. In particular we hope that this site might allow people who can’t make it to Manchester for the day of the conference to have a really meaningful impact upon the event.”

Read more on our intent over here, see who all our livebloggers are here, and start submitting your thoughts on the main themes of the conference (along the top of the page) on the submit page.

To get you all started we’d love to start a little ‘art is’ meme – I found a really lovely mine of ‘art is’ images on flickr which I’ve been using to title each opening blog post that’s up there now, and we’d love to know what your answer is to that question is (positive, negative, or indifferent), so, how to join in:

• Find an image that for you says something about what art is and why it is important.
• It can be a picture, or a picture of an event, or a diagram. It could be something you find on the net (though preferably creative commons), something you take a photograph of, or even something you draw yourself. It doesn’t really matter.
• Send it to us as an image post on the submit page
• Tell other people to do the same.*

*plagiarising Andy a bit with these instructions. Sorry Andy, it’s late and I’ve been staring at the website way too long.

THAT’S INTERACTION, THAT IS.

Digital hat is an experiment in revolutionising how we discover and pay for theatre.

I am a punk fan. Other stuff too, but mostly punk, hardcore, screamo. Guitars, shouting, that kind of thing. I was 14 when Napster was released. My musical maturity was shaped by sharing; it was also shaped by the staring at of progress bars, and never needing to pay.

I was 25 when I started always paying for music.

Because over 2 years or so my whole relationship to music and its worth has changed. For one thing it has become a relationship, social media has, in a big way, connected me to musicians and the work that they do much more fully. For another, the ability to trial music, listen to it on spotify or youtube, means I know what I’m buying, and that friends also share what they like, in podcasts, blog posts, tweets, and playlists. And a final thing; pay what you think it’s worth. Not ‘pay what you want’, I think it’s an important distinction, because I probably (leaving aside the relationship with an artist) want to pay as little as I can, but as soon as it’s framed with the notion of ‘worth’, suddenly I want to pay as much as I can. Bandcamp and social media changed my relationship to musicians, and the music they produce. The trust that ‘pay what you think it’s worth’ puts in me, makes me want to respond favourably. And actually, how artificial is a price point anyway? An album may only be worth £4 to me, it might be worth £20. Don’t you want my money either way? Often I’ll buy an album for a fiver and go and give back more afterwards. How much is the song you danced to at your wedding worth? How about the album that saved your life?

I feel part of a community, one that the web helps me find, and support. And I want to support it.

Over the past two years my relationship to how I discover and pay for new music has been revolutionised. I may not pay much more on average, but I know that it’s going directly to an artist, and I also know that I’m buying an awful lot more. Plus, more awesome music! WINNING.

In the checkout area, how often do we see theatres linking to similar work in other venues?

And while we’re at it, when have you ever used an e-checkout system on a venue’s site that was even slightly bearable?

How often have non-theatre going friends expressed a general interest, but just not known a) where to start or b) if it wasn’t just a bit too expensive?

How often have you carried a piece with you for weeks, months afterwards? How much do you think that’s worth?

I think that there is a bandcamp for theatre. Not bandcamp exactly. Not Spotify, or Amazon, not twitter, not just a recommendation site, a place to buy stuff, not a review site. Though it may look a little like all these things, it may not necessarily be just an online or web based system, it could borrow a lot from physical things like Oyster cards or loyalty systems. But a way of regulating, sharing, exchanging, standardising, offering, equalising, and making easy the act of finding, going to, and paying for theatre.

Seth Honnor and I are going to r+d this. We want to look at the data generated from ticket sales – the sharing of that data in a way that the theatre-goer is completely in control of, and benefits from (rather than just the ‘untick mailing list’ box). We want to look at changing the experience of paying for theatre, work on a scalable model that could be used by any size venue, that had room for recommendations, sharing, simple video or audio trails, and that are used by many venues. Imagine only needing to remember one password for every theatre checkout system in the UK. Imagine syncing tickets with your smartphone, so you don’t need to have it delivered, or pick it up. Imagine subscribing to the arts events calendars of friends, or certain venues. Imagine a system that allows you to put a deposit on a ticket, but doesn’t take the money until after you pay, after which you are able to pay what you think it was worth. Throw your money in the hat; that’s why ‘digital hat’.

That’s where we want to start thinking. digitalhat.co.uk/ Let us know if you want in, what you would want from it, or if you think it already exists. We’ll let you know soonish about our next steps. Early days, but exciting ones, I hope.

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?

This is a very quick post on thoughts bubbling around my mind following the amazing #thepassion last weekend – a three day secular reconstructed tale of the Passion, told by over 2000 performers/participants, that wove its way through the community and spaces of Port Talbot in Wales. I didn’t set out to – I didn’t even know about it before that weekend, but it seeped into my twitter feed not through agressive ‘amplification’ driven by any kind of ‘strategy’ (scare quotes ‘r’ us), but by the sheer force of people desperate to share. Desperate to share what, by all reports, was a life-changing and affirming piece of theatre. People tweeting, or posting on the Guardian’s review of it talked about the healing of a community, the putting to rest of bad dreams and memories, that it was ‘spectacular’, ‘breath-taking’, that it re-connected them with ‘the awe of humanity’ (comments here).

Truly radical theatre, I might term it.

If I had the time, this would be a proper blog post. As it is, it’s the fragments, images, quotes, ideas, that might have gone into something I could have spent some thought on. Maybe I’ll come back and fill in the gaps at some point.

“We live at a time when people increasingly express the feeling that the world outside our windows is a dangerous and fragmented place. Once upon a time people walked through the city and it gave them a chance to name places and make contact with each other. [...] humans need to mark their lives against real space and other people. When they cease to walk, the real spaces become less plausible then than the centralized reality of the media and are increasingly witnessed as a passing blur from a car window.” – Graeme Miller quoted in a piece by Carl Lavery on Linked

three hands, all helping him
(image posted with the kind permission of @angsy)

“Playfulness, disruption, gifts left for strangers, the sharing of visions, intelligent flash-mobbing, provocations at the tipping points of cities, making a scene so the city performs itself, misguided tours, wireless on-line technology – combining phone, movie, digital design, camera, editing desk and ipod – sending routes, signs and stories in waves across spreading networks of uncontrollable walking, maps of atmospheres and basins of attraction, and festivals celebrating the reflections in windows and the glints in pedestrians’ eyes – [...] extraordinary changes will begin with disruptions in the ordinary.” – A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture Wrights and Sites

It was a triumph of optimism. And make no mistake,

“Optimism is a political act. Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful – cynicism is obedience.” Excerpt from this post by Alex Steffen

And finally, the images, the ideas, resonated with the image linked below, of a moment in the Stokescroft ‘riot’ – where a collection of community-minded squatters in Bristol were extremely heavy-handedly evicted. An amazing photo.

This photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathantaphouse/5643052154/in/photostream/

(not reproduced here because it’s not CC)

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.

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?

Another fantastically busy week has been and gone, I’m saving one half of it to talk to you about next week, but I think if you follow me down any particular path of the interwebz, you will have noticed that on Thursday I helped convene the ‘Flash Conference‘ at the heart of the ACE/RSA State of the Arts Conference. The Flash Conference was conceived of by myself, Andy Field, and Laura McDermott out of a reaction our awareness of the general dissatisfaction with last year’s format, with some of the problems of scale often faced by such a large event (i.e., missing any address to the smaller scale), and finally, from my point of view at least, with the language and the questions that the conference was shaped around. That last point is perhaps a little impolitic to say (nor very clearly said, my brain is mush this weekend) but the shift into, for example (what turned out to be entirely rudderless) conversations about art and the Big Society rang rather uncomfortable with me, personally. Partly because of my own politics, but also because it felt like a program that pandered to government, not one that brought all to the same table for what could have been a more valuable conversation.

I’m being a little careful with my language here (‘careful’ for me, anyway), and that’s because, entirely to the conference organisers’ credit, when we approached them with our idea to run a companion conference in a nearby pub they actually invited us into the conference itself. Though, as Lyn Gardner put it we were slightly “banished upstairs” – the fact that we were there at all was brilliant, not because we ourselves wanted to talk to the top table types, but because it enabled us to bring so many other voices to that top table – people who couldn’t afford the travel or the ticket price; artists, students, performers and makers for whom the conference really did not feel like a welcome place; or single parents without childcare. I hope that the great deal of interaction that we enabled showed the organisers, and indeed any organisers of any event, quite how much people are dying to have a two-way conversation rather than a one-way panel-driven selection of monologues.

Over 4 days the flashconference.co.uk site had 1273 individual visits from 27 countries, 52 videos, images, texts and sounds were submitted to the blog, 1827 tweets were exchanged, with the majority of that activity falling on the day of the conference. We were inundated not just with contributions, but also thanks, for allowing people who had felt excluded to sound in on the debate. Certainly this was not a perfect format, but it was hopefully a spark, a small static shock. Our industry deserves such large-scale spaces for discussion, but they will only begin to be truly discursive when they speak to the whole of the arts ecosystem, and from a place in not above the world that we all live in.

I co-wrote a paper delivered last year at the annual Theatre and Performance Research Association conference. This paper was essentially on how conferences are, well, completely useless at truthfully representing either thought, discourse, or artistic practice. My section began with a quote from Foucoult:

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)

The best art is collaborative, built in its simplest expression, out of dialogue between the world and the artist. Gatherings to discuss our industry need to acknowledge both this and the shift from media consumption to interaction, from marketing to communication being driven by the de-centralising effects of the digital world. We are woven together, you can’t examine a whole of a piece of fabric by only examining four pulled-out threads.

Next year’s conference has been announced as happening outside of London, moving it away from London is a good start, but I also hope that they think more about how they form their questions and how and with whom they discuss them. How would I do that? More artists, a sliding scale of ticket prices, greater responsivity, open manifesto sessions, a room full of remote contributions, art installations as reactions, and a selection of themes and concerns picked by both the organisers, and the wider arts community. Allowing the Flash Conference to exist in the wider conference space was a brilliant step in a positive direction, here’s to more of them.

You can view all of the provocations delivered on the day in this Youtube playlist, or on the flashconference site. You can also look through the archive to see all the contributions put forward by many others, and view the slides which we built through out the day of highlights from tweets and submissions. Thanks to Andy and Laura for wanting to work with me, the RSA and ACE for inviting us in, the excellent provocateurs, and all of the wonderful discussions and contributions put forward by people who couldn’t be more than tele-present.

(incidentally, I’m working my way through transcribing and captioning all of the videos, on 6/14 at the moment, if anyone could help me out with the trancription and/or captioning of a video, let me know.)

Hurrah! I can finally reveal one of the exciting things I’ve been frustratingly opaque about on Twitter for the past week or so. This Thursday alongside Andy Field and Laura McDermott I shall be convening a Flash Conference as part of the ACE/RSA State of the Arts conference. Here’s a taste of what that means:

The Flash Conference is an imaginative new project designed to create brief but electrifying bursts of thinking and conversation amidst the main State of the Arts programme. Harnessing the spontaneity and collective energy of a flash mob, we hope to bring people together to create a flood of brief but provocative responses to the following questions.

How can art of all kinds play a more meaningful role in mass protest and popular resistance?

What makes a good home for art (and for artists), and how can we ensure there are more of them?

In an environment in which success is too often only measured by perpetual growth, how do we ensure that small remains beautiful?

(How) Can art make more people’s lives better?

Whilst recognising the absolute importance of large scale events like State of the Arts, we also wanted to acknowledge the complex ecology of our sector, an in a space that much more resembles the way we communicate and collaborate in the contemporary world. Hence our conception of the Flash Conference, and, much credit to ACE and the RSA, their inclusion of it in the main conference programme. The Flash Conference (from flashmob) will centre around the above four question, we aim to create a buzz of provocation and debate in the body of the conference, and online, to in fact create a space for dialogue between the two for all those voices who might not have access to the opportunity to speak at, or even attend State of the Arts.

And because of this, we need you. If you have something to say in response to the above statements, now is the time to say it. If you’re on Twitter, you can use and follow the #SOTAflash hashtag, and anybody with an internet connection can access http://flashconference.co.uk where you can simply go to ‘submit’ and post any text, image, audio, or video (audio and video will have to be hosted elsewhere – i.e. Youtube or Audioboo) of anything you have to say. There’s also lots more information about our plans, and 3-4 potential people per question that we’re inviting to offer a one-minute response to get people’s ideas flowing.

We’re going to endeavour to post these provocations, if not live-streamed, minutes after they’re given, and we also intend to continually feed back online content into the room, and vice versa. And there’s absolutely no time limit on submissions, if you have something to say, a statement of intent, your own one minute manifesto in relation to one of the above questions, an image, a video, please do post it. Simply head over to flashconference.co.uk/submit and follow the instructions. Or if you’re coming to the conference, head up to the Thames Room where you’ll find a bank of laptops for you to post your on-the-day reactions, and three large screens following the #SOTAflash hashtag, and displaying content submitted by others.

Laura, Andy and I are really excited about the potential of this in opening up a trad conference format, so please, if you do have something to say about the state of the arts, follow the hashtag and the site, and do contribute.

(The Flash Conference was conceived by Andy Field, Hannah Nicklin and Laura McDermott in association with Arts Council England and the RSA.)

Devoted and Disgruntled Report – Theatre and Video Games

Devoted and Disgruntled Report – STS

I’m a bit ill this week, so am instead posting a conversation I had on Twitter that if I’d had the energy for anything extra, would probably have turned into a blog post. I’ve also put the definition of Theatre that I’m working on for the PhD above. It’s in progress, what do you think?