These are three short pieces which appear in the half hour soundwalk I’m working on for the joint paper I’m currently working on. There’s a bit more information on the intent of the piece here. The sound work is currently finding itself structured around little snippets of story, all with the idea of looking at things as they are, without the way that expectation dulls them. As some philosophers might say, ‘un-covering’.

A story about thinking

You sit for days getting angrier and angrier at yourself. You speak sharply to your loved ones over the phone, you rearrange days with more and more unlikely workloads and cancel days off. You stop replying to emails, you fall asleep reading books and dream fitfully of not being able to speak. You feel like your eyes are swimming in vinegar and sand. And then, suddenly, you crack. You pull on you shoes, and a battered old coat, and you go for a walk.

A story about walking

You realise that you have not breathed fresh air for days. The air feels cool in your lungs. Reminds you of the first scent of winter on cold Autumn dawns. A fine mist of rain falls on your forehead, like the spray of the sea. You walk, and you realise that you have had your jaw clenched. You drift, and you notice the leaves beginning to litter the ground. You walk, and it is the movement that is important, the being-there, in context. Your forehead unwrinkles, and you close your eyes. Your mind is blissfully clear, no longer scrunched up as if un-vigilant, an important piece of knowledge could fall out your ears. You find yourself at home, walk through the door, you turn off the internet, and write 3000 words. It took a week, but also, half a day. Time skitters by. You call your loved ones and apologise.

A story about thought

There are people we send out, like scouts, into the darkness. They cannot see where they are going, they stub their toes, and walk into walls, but eventually, they know enough to construct a map. These people sometimes meet up, to discuss what they have found, and hopefully make the maps fuller; but instead of talking of the mistakes they made, and thet hings they felt on their way, they talk of the strength of their lines, and the certainty of the lettering on their drawings.

See above (or click here) for images taken of The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You by my lovely friend Rowena Scott, and see:

http://twitter.com/thederminator/status/18781755974 http://twitter.com/danpyt/status/18778361379 http://twitter.com/fribbletheatre/status/18777877251 http://hannahnicklin.posterous.com/some-awesome-rainreminds-feedback-to-round-of

for some interesting reflection and nice things said about it, although there are critical things to say about it too (and nice polite people are less likely to direct those responses at you). I’d call it 65% successful, which I reckon is not too bad for the first test of a piece that so directly involves an audience. Blog post and video to follow, as well as other posts long overdue, over this coming week or two.

The cast (touch wood) should come off my arm on Tuesday, so I will be trying to use it more to get back in the swing of typing. I have my first year progress panel this Friday, a kind of mock (and much nicer) viva that means I can move onto my second PhD year, so some of them might come after that, but either way I intend to begin to get caught up on write-y things again.

You have been warned.

http://walkwith.tumblr.com

Just squeaking in a blog post at the last moment to keep to my ‘at least 4 a month’ quota. Lots has happened this month, Mayfest took up a great deal of it, then I completed 10,000 words of PhD chapter 1 and other material for my first year progress board, including all of the fore-planning (I actually have the next two and a bit years planned out, which is an unusual combination of reassuring and scary). I’ve also released a first foray into soundwalk style storytelling to the general public, and agreed to and submitted an abstract for a joint paper on the inefficiencies of the academic conference in representing performative thoughts for a TaPRA conference in September… That’s written better in the actual abstract. So a busy month, though I really do intend to do a run down of my experiences at Mayfest sometime soon, promise.

The image above is from the soundwalk I’ve released, check it out at http://walkwith.tumblr.com – all it requires is an mp3 player, 10 minutes, and some rain. I would really appreciate any feedback you have – either in text/audio/image/video form via the site, Twitter, or even posting me handwritten/collected things (as some people have). It’s my first experiment in the form, and at the moment is a bit like a monologue-with-interactive-bits than something that might be called truly interactive or player-as-protagonist driven. I shall have to get working with the second-person referential, I think. I’ve also got plans to play with binaural audio – to develop a real 3D feeling with the headphones. You can hear some really good examples of where that can lead at Papa Sangre’s house, the audio storytelling is there described as a ‘video game without video’. Make sure you wear headphones when listening. I’m getting some mic’d up ear buds and a cheap minidisc player (from Twitter, the lovely @daveisanidiot) to experiment with that. My brother (trained sound engineer if you’re hiring/have intern work/want someone to hold a boom mic whilst BREAKING WOOD) is also going to help out, so more technical stuff and higher quality hopefully forthcoming.

These experiments are all eventually leading towards the ideas I have for the currently quite cryptic Umbrella Project (no zombies involved), which I’m trying to secure some funding before lift-off. If you know of any funds, grants, or tech/web/music support-in-kind that might be out there and interested in being involved in a country-wide pervasive storytelling experiment, let me know. You can follow the Umbrella Project on Twitter here, and if you have £8,000 (I have a fully costed and sensible budget and everything) you wanted to throw at me, please do!

Finally, as June arrives and July seems much closer than it did in May, I’m beginning to think about what I might talk about at Shift Happens on the 5th and 6th. Shift Happens is an industry (as opposed to academic) conference about arts, learning and digital technology, and there are some really big speakers from places like 4ip, The Guardian, and the National Theatre also up there, so I’m trying to work out how I can best fit in. I suspect I’m there as a passionate loud-mouth and blogger before I am an academic, but I do feel like the dialogue needs to move on from ‘you should be using/interested in tech’, ‘but it’s scary/time consuming/too hard/not monetarily justifiable’. Perhaps a focus on the harder times that are upcoming with regards to the Tory-Lib Dem arts cuts. I’ll have a think about that. And if you think I have a particular clear message that I’ve hitherto missed, do let me know, very welcome!

Merry Bank Holiday Weekend. And if any of you are off to the Rough Beats Festival next weekend, find me and say ‘hi’. I may even say ‘hi’ back.

Proposal for a 10 minute paper at

DEALING WITH THE DIGITAL

TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium

10 – 5.30, 20th March 2010, Bedford Square, London

The Player as Political.

The video game ethic of player-as-protagonist is beginning to influence mainstream non-digital approaches to narrative. In theatre this is seen in the emerging popularity of interactive forms pioneered by companies such as Blast Theory, and current being popularised by Pervasive Gaming companies such as Hide and Seek and the mp3 or locative technology driven soundwalks of Duncan Speakman and Subtlemob.  This paper examines the root of the current drive towards total and pervasive performative immersion, and how we can tackle the traditional problems of immersion that are suffered by video games and other escapist narratives – a loss of political power, objectivity and community experience – within a theatrical context. This paper investigates the ethical implications of suspending the weight of disbelief in one person, and suggests that in hyperlocal performance, and a new world of fractured, multi-facet identities, gentler tactics are necessary, and locative and site-responsive aspects are the best way of preserving the political power of theatre within an individualist context.

Hannah Nicklin

Hannah Nicklin is a first year PhD student at Loughborough University. Her research interests include questions of theatre and digital technology, with a particular focus on selfhood and storytelling in a digital age. She has spoken at Nottingham Trent and Leeds Met universities on new narrative forms and social media for theatre companies, drawing on her work with Foursight Theatre and Theatre Writing Partnership. She maintains a blog at hannahnicklin.com, pieces of which have been reproduced by the Telegraph, Subtext Magazine, and the Arts Council, and she will be speaking at the Shift Happens UK arts, learning and tech conference in Summer 2010. Hannah is also a playwright, her most recent work Awake – the story of a gamer meeting her avatar - will be performed at Theatre503 this March.

click for source

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century (McDonough 2004, 10)

Another key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves in shows like Coney’s Small Town Anywhere, increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

From 1957-69 a new radical reading of the commodification of western capitalist society emerged. The situationists, born out of the fiery nihilism of the Dadaists and the irreverent playfulness of the Surrealists cast their gaze over society and saw:

That the alienation which in the nineteenth century was rooted in production had, in the twentieth century, become rooted in consumption. Consumption had come to define happiness and to suppress all other possibilities of freedom and selfhood. […] Everyone was first and foremost a member of an economy based on commodities” (McDonough 2004, 3)

The situationists identified a transition from the Marxist state of alienation, to a once-removed state of spectacular illusion. This ‘spectacle’ transformed every inch of our lives into an empty capitalist dream, maintained through the mutation of desires into needs. However the situationists believed that the image of society as it is was still intact behind the spectacle, and so they set about attempting to break the illusion.

“Just as the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy” –out of Marx’s dictum that philosophy, having interpreted the world, must set about changing it – now one had to look to the demands of art (McDonough 2004, 11)

The situationists saw art as the solution – an art practised by every member of society, an art that ceased to be art and became a continually revised way of seeing.  The situationists (though they didn’t credit it) were summoning the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ aspect of art:

Phenomenologists like to pick objects up with their minds, so to speak, and turn them around, examining them from all sides. This cannot be accomplished by viewing them frontally as they are embedded in the rest of the experiential world – hence bracketing (Roach 1992, 354)

This bracketing aspect – or epoché – that art provides is at the root of its ability to reveal the spectacle.

Art was at the root of the situationists’ calls for reclamation of public space and leisure time, they intended to use it to deconstruct the spectacular way of seeing, and reconstruct playful new ways of being. The tools which the situationists put forward were the détournement and the dérive. The détournement worked within the spectacle to highlight and ridicule the way it presented itself, this was a radical (though playful) reclamation of news footage, advertising, as well as the ridiculing of stars, celebrity and subversion of print material from popular culture.

The situationists also promoted a kind of unitary urbanism, they wanted each individual to augment their own environment; to take it and twist it, to reveal spaces as space, and not a means-to-an-end, a journey to work, the supermarket, a transaction in time. They wanted to reclaim architecture and urban space by subverting its use and design, and to also rediscover it as a place in its own right. They proposed this be done through the dérive. Reclaiming being-oriented rather than commodity-oriented experiencing of space.

The Situationists burned brightly and rapidly. They were radical, didactic, and sought revolution – a revolution built on the reclamation of our individual selves from the spectacle of capitalist society. They recognised that the political function of the arts is to provide people with a vision of the way the world is constructed, and they offered tools to rebuild it in our image. Their ideas reached their culmination with the events of May 1968, but

If the situationist idea of general contestation was realized in May 1968, the idea also realized its limits. The theory of the exemplary act […] may have gone as far as such a theory or such an act can go.” (McDonough 2004, 18)

However their tools are still useful to us. With the advent of the 21^st century we find ourselves in a new “‘era of the spectacle’ where the site of power has shifted from the exterior screens of simulation to the interior body of the material subject.” (Causey 2006, 179) We are now living in an era of embeddedness.

Technologized cultural systems resist simulating signs of the real to mask the real and instead practice a technique of embeddedness […] which draws attention to a reconstructed material truth and ocular proof that seeks to coerce through a type of shock and awe. The strategy of simulation and spectacle has been extended and fundamentally altered. The linked performances of terror, war, propaganda and consumerism have not fully abandoned the strategies of illusory simulation, but have instead complicated their operation with an image regime and the bodily presence of a material embeddedness. (Causey 2006, 151)

The example drawn by Causey contrasts the illusion of Gulf War I – of cut together clips, narrators, and news packages – to the rolling embedded coverage of Gulf War II. ‘This is happening now’, the spectacle says, ‘there is no room for editing or cutting, we use embedded reporters, there is no room for simulation; this is reality’. In this age of celebrity and self-deluding X factor hopefuls, we no longer only find our desires maintained as needs, we find our dreams regulated too. This corruption of the data-flow of contemporary life extends beyond ‘reality TV’ to 24-hour rolling news, the advent of the ‘real-time’ and ‘social’ web. We are led to believe that the data we receive is live, uncut, and true. Through these tools the spectacle embeds itself in our lives. And in our Technoculture capitalism has a new currency: information. Facebook, Google, Youtube, we are now data packages, not only are we consumers, but we are consumed. It is the ‘interior body of the material subject’ where the battle for subjectivity must now be fought, in our selves.

A heavy task indeed, and a harder one as the remnants of reality are fundamentally altered rather than hidden by the spectacle. But we have a fight-back on our hands. The advent of the social-political online world, the wiki, and the prevalence of online gaming, also points towards a trend in narrative consumption and rebellion – this is the player as protagonist, everyone as editor, this is a gasp, a cry, a demand for the opportunity for us to eschew our bit-parts in the spectacle. To take control, to remake our selves, our surroundings, our ways of seeing.

This is the movement from audience to participant.

A new way of being is starting to emerge, it is imperative to bring the arts to that world to report from it. (Thompson 2009)

The situationists, I suggest, have provided us with the tools to deal with the spectacle, and phenomenology the way of seeing how we are embedded.

Phenomenology was the first movement to focus on the specific conditions of human embeddedness in an environment, and to make visible the phenomenon of the environment itself.  (Moran 2002, 5)

Phenomenology emphasises “world-constituting consciousness” (Moran 2002, 22) – an understanding of world-constituting processes is important in order to examine all aspects of the spectacular world. Art is the realm of the double – of re-representation. Nowhere has this been truer than of the theatre. But it is also true, now, of a new world: the virtual.

In virtual worlds, technology is widely allowing us to reclaim the reporting of our world, to take control over data, our information. Online spaces must be reclaimed, prevented from being colonised. It may currently be a place where our data is bought and sold, but it is also a place where we can take control, trade data on our own terms.

The online world is deeply involved in new trends of narrative and world-constituting. We see echoes in the avatar/online game, of theatre’s actor/play, and on discussion and image boards – we find the void, anonymity. Anonymity is fuelling subversive attempts to opt out of the organisation of myth, to bomb the spectacle. Just as the Angry Brigade of the 60s and 70s

Cultivated an image of a large, diffuse, and unidentifiable collection of dissenters: ‘The AB is the man or woman sitting next to you. They have guns in their pockets and anger in their minds.’

Now we are too many to know each other […]‘THEY COULD NOT JAIL US FOR WE DID NOT EXIST’ (Plant 1992, 126-7)

We now see online spaces such as 4chan and /b/ giving rise to phenomena such as Anonymous, DDoS attacks and defacement of the websites of celebrities, political targets, the Church of Scientology.  They are digital terrorists.

[Anonymous is] the first internet-based superconsciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they’re a group? Because they’re travelling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely. (Landers 2008)

Other attempts to break out of the embedded spectacle include Orange Alternative style playful recuperation – subvertising, flashmobs, cultural memes and viral videos. However in the fast paced world of technology, capitalism and the establishment promptly absorb these forms. The flashmob and viral video have been taken on by advertising, and when social networks are used by political subversives, they are quickly infiltrated by virtual Agent Provocateurs – as was seen in the #IranElection Twitter fuelled riots of 2009.

Only Anonymous have resisted recuperation by the spectacle. They are dangerous, racist, misogynistic, righteous and unpredictable by turn. They are all things, they are anyone, they are nothing and they are no one. They embody that of virtual worlds which is made in the void; they do not exist, their potential is everywhere. And as yet they have resisted that which the Angry Brigade succumbed to, the AB could not be caught, but they were labelled ‘terror’. The void with which the AB threatened Italian society was turned into a useful bogeyman for the spectacle:

The spectacle of terrorism provides a socially cohesive common enemy, legitimised needs for vigilance, security, and new forms of police repression, and encourages the opinion that even the faultiest of democracies is superior to the reign of terror. (Plant 1992, 128)

The web and the online ethic also continues to be colonised by the capitalist spectacle. The groups of people on a night out, frozen in wide smiles and pouts, shuddering ever so-slightly as they wait for the flash to go off. ‘It didn’t happen if there aren’t photos of it on Facebook’. They are cultivating digital versions of themselves. Personal data, buying habits, images, memories, thoughts and feelings are entrusted to huge multinational companies and – much more than the goods we make, our money, our time – they trade in pieces of our selves.

So while situationists offer the tools, and phenomenology the way of seeing, it is in theatre that we find world-constituting in its purest expression, and theatre in which we need to find new forms to tackle the spectacle’s colonisation of the self. As the spectacle in our society warps the raw data of contemporary being, theatre too, struggles to maintain its political power. As the corruption runs deeper and deeper, all of the virtual and theatre worlds are compromised and their revolutionary potential smothered.

To preserve their revolutionary potential, these worlds need each other.

Theatre has always been in the business of world-constituting. It could bracket the spectacle and show you a new illusion. And now, with the advent of the player-as-protagonist ethic of online worlds, theatre can bracket the modern spectacle and embed you in other realities.

In the last century the situationists called for the

Invention of a new species of games. The most general aim must be to broaden the nonmediocre portion of life, to reduce its empty moments as much as possible. […] The situationist game stands out from the standard conception of the game by the radical negation of the ludic features of competition and of its separation from the stream of life. (Debord 2004, 45)

This is exactly what Pervasive Games do. Pervasive Gaming is a fluid term for location (often) urban-based games. The Pervasive Gaming collective Hide&Seek describe their work as “social games and playful experiences” (Hide&Seek 2010). They are somewhere between computer games, and the games you used to play as a child, they have also worked with pioneering theatre companies such as Punchdrunk on what they term ‘Multiplatform Immersive Theatre Experiences’ or MITE – using virtual and real worlds, and exploring narrative in the spaces between them.

In this study I am widening the definition of ‘Pervasive Gaming’ to include all performance strategies that involve augmenting personal or environmental reality from a player-as-protagonist perspective.

The playful games of Hide&Seek use a wiki-ethic to create, and run their games and events. Using the web as a place to assemble their ideas, anyone can edit and invent new games for the collective, propose and run new events, and all of the work is available under a free-to-use Creative Commons licence. Likewise they run ‘sandpit’ events – which take a similar approach to beta testing in the world of software development. The games played by Hide&Seek are never played for prizes, and take place in large groups across urban spaces. Every player is an associate artist.

In a classless society, it might be said, there will be no more painters, only situationists who, among other things, make paintings (Debord 2004, 48)

Though the majority of the games are simple and light hearted they represent a détournement of urban space, a reclamation of play and an application of player-as-protagonist ethics.

The player-as-protagonist borrows from the actor of theatre and the avatar of online worlds, allowing the user to play with aspects of the double and the void – being and nothingness – our selves as constructs. The player-as-protagonist brings us back to a truer sense of self, through absence.

Absences – of meaning, participation, reality, and identity – can constitute useful tactics in the struggle to unmask the social and economic relations of contemporary capitalist society. (Plant 1992, 181)

Theatre is death, nothing, life, everything. It is the creation of a world in front of our very eyes.  New theatrical forms like Pervasive Gaming are using digital ethics to take this way of seeing to the subject.

The ego does not believe in the possibility of its death. The unconscious thinks it is immortal. The uncanny experience of the double is death made material, unavoidable, present. (Causey 2006, 18)

To examine life as it is constituted you also need to understand death. Technology, avatars, the spaces theatre traverses between being and suspension of disbelief; there we find death, and also life. 0, 1, 0, 1, every second.

Though these Pervasive Games and events often involve recorded or other technology, which can disengage you from “the power of the double and of illusion, and thereby of the spectre of the corporeal body (death).”(Causey 2006, 98), this is countered by the danger of placing you as the avatar in the world-constituting process. You are sole creator.

Pervasive Games pick us up from our embedded state and allow us to look at ourselves from different angles. They take devices that are often designed to separate us from reality; iPods, GPS units, smart phones, and they use them to bring us into closer contact with the world. Some of the most interesting aspects of Pervasive Gaming is exemplified by the Subtlemob. Based on the idea of secret gatherings of people that the flashmob popularised, but bringing people together quietly, and conspiratorially to walk the narrative of a story.

As if it Were the Last Time was a free a sound walk-come-performance devised by Duncan Speakman and in association with Subtlemob. It took place on a small number of streets near Covent Garden. It was a (performance? Experience? Neither of these words do) for two people. Two days before the event, participants were provided with a map, an mp3, and told to set it going at 6pm.

For each and every person who took part, the experience was theirs. Entirely. And not, in staged theatre, as each audience member receiving the piece from a different perspective. This was each participant doing. The movements, the characters, the gestures, and the touch of someone’s hand on a shoulder, were all completely yours. Of your making.

Conventional suspension of disbelief – the time and credence that you pay into conventional, staged performance – pales into comparison to the weight of belief that you pour into this kind of experience. Traditional theatre is by no means irrelevant, the video game didn’t kill the cinema, theatre is powerful, but this is a form that is powerful in new and important ways. A piece of staged theatre is a rip in the space-time continuum, it is a hundred different hours, poured into one, it is a hundred held breaths, a hundred moments of people turning one thing, into another. As if it Were the Last Time was one whole moment, it was the heat of one breath, it was noticing how the ripples of rain in a puddle shake the light of shop fronts in time to a piece of music. It was stories, yours, of others, and your reflection in the window. It was one voice, lost, and your own, quiet.

You were embedded in a new world instead of conspiring with another.

Time comes to us first and foremost as an individual lifetime. (Fortier 2002, 41)

The phenomenological way of seeing pays great attention to time. Life is not Aristotelian, we need new temporal strategies in our storytelling if we are to constitute the wholeness of worlds. In As if it Were the Last Time the narrative was fractured, the one solid piece of information you were given was that the piece was in memory of another. However instead of talking about the person lost, it asked you to find yourself there as if it were your last half hour.  It was the story of a person seeing the world as they’d never see it again, you heard thoughts that occurred to them as they saw the same things you did, the memories prompted. The narrative built like a collage, like a barrage of images and sounds and ideas that didn’t fit, and then you realised they were building a whole person. And it hurt. And it was wonderful. You felt like you were falling off a building. Or maybe ‘you’ didn’t, maybe only I did.

This was a piece truly about the thickness of experience. It went all the way around the back. It also talked about ‘drifting’, asked you to dérive–find places that made you feel certain ways.

There were moments when it faltered, when things didn’t fit with what you were hearing, but you were seeking, willing them to get back on track, because this was you – your belief at risk. This wasn’t an actor fluffing their lines, it was you, as an avatar of the narrative.

[An avatar is] a machine that is attached to the psychology of its user. From within that machine the driver can peek out, squinting through alien eyes, and find a new world. And, oddly, the driver can also look into himself, as if gazing into his navel, and find a new landscape inside as well (Meadows 2008, 8)

I wrote on my blog after returning from the experience:

“Those thirty minutes were the most vivid, most high contrast of my week. It was true augmented reality, and I want to take my friends and loved ones back to share it. It hurts that I can’t. But that’s kind of what being is, isn’t it?”

‘A work of art born on the stage lives only for a moment, and no matter how beautiful it may be it cannot be commanded to stay with us’ (Fortier 2002, 49)

Works Cited

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Auslander, Philip. Liveness, Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin. London: Fontana Press, 1992.

Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture, from simulation to Embeddedness. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.

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

Debord, Guy. “The Great Sleep and its Clients.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Debord, Guy. “The Situationist and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Dusek, Val. Philosophy of Technology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006.

Fortier, Mark. Theory/Theatre. London: Routledge, 2002.

Haydon, Andrew. The year in theatre: trends of 2009. December 30, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/dec/30/theatre-trends-2009 (accessed January 1, 2010).

Hide&Seek. Hide and Seek – Projects. January 6, 2010. http://hideandseekfest.co.uk/projects (accessed January 6, 2010).

Husserl, E. “Introduction to the Logical Investigations.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Husserl, Edmund. “Consciousness as Intentional Experience.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Landers, Chris. Serious Business: Anonymous Takes on Scientology. March 2, 2008. http://www.citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=15543 (accessed July 3, 2008).

“Editorial Notes: Priority Communication.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

McDonough, Tom. “Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art.” In Guy Deb ord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

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

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

Meadows, Mark Stephen. I, Avatar, the Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. Berkley, CA: New Riders, 2008.

Moran, Dermot. “Introduction.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture, the Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge, 1992.

Reinach, Adolf. “Concerning Phenomenology.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Roach, Joseph R. “Introduction to Phenomenology and Hermeneutics .” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G Reinelt and Joseph R Roach. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Scheler, Max. “The Being of the Person.” In The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. New York: Routledge, 2002.

States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, On the Phenomenology of Theater. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

States, Bert O. “The Phenomenological Attitude.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G Reinelt and Joseph R Roach. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Subtlemob. Subtlemob. http://subtlemob.com (accessed 10 06, 2009).

Thompson, Bill. Speech at the Shift Happens 2.0 Arts and Technology Conference. (June 30, 2009).

Tsakos, Natasha. “Natasha Tsakos’ Multimedia Theatrical Adventure.” TED Talks. http://www.ted.com/talks/natasha_tsakos_multimedia_theatrical_adventure.html (accessed October 6, 2009).

Various. “Extracts from Letters to the Situationist International.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

—. Pervasive Game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervasive_game (accessed January 6, 2010).

The Situationists, Phenomenology and Pervasive Gaming: New Narrative Strategies. by Hannah Nicklin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from hannah_nicklin AT hotmail.com.

I struck a deal with my PhD supervisor today. After being told in no uncertain terms that I was never to publish any of my thoughts or work for free on the internet in my induction, I had a small altercation with person running it – because my work is so closely tied to examining open processes and wiki ethics in the arts, and my personal politics are more of the idealistic, free and open for all persuasion – I thought it was important to keep my research open, or otherwise risk horrible hypocrisy.

However, the fact remains is that the university is paying for me to generate original research on their behalf, it’s not useful for me to be a liability, and I do value the opportunity to get paid to do something I love and care about with as many fibres of my being that aren’t already taken up with friends, family, and political activism. So I thought finding a nice, sensible, but still open middle ground was a good idea.

Here’s what we worked out:

• - I’m fine to carry on blogging and posting quotes, thoughts, breakthroughs, snippets, points of interest the whole way through.

• - I’m also fine to blog large chunks of my first year which is mainly exploratory – and so much not the deep, critical and original thinking of the final 2 years. (I will soon be popping up a blog post of my first 1/3 of this year’s work).

• - When it does get to that thicker stage of thinking then it’s useful to release extracts, talking points, struggles and particular sticking points, anything up to about 800 words is fine.

• - Then I make the decision of whether I want to play the game of academia (write a book), try and redefine the rules (work on making ebooks and web-published, open stuff just as important as writing a book), or go in an entirely different direction (and just release the material as is and run off into the sunset with my arms flailing)

So that’s where we are. I think that’s pretty fair to the uni, myself, and my principles, and much further on than the ‘say nothing to no one’ approach demanded at my induction. But what do you think? Do you think that’s too much? Too little? Do you even care? Well, you read this far so I imagine you do a bit. Or you’re really bored. Go and do something useful. Or comment.

“We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch.”

It’s looking like this January it going to be an extremely busy one, some really exciting happenings; a redraft of the commission for Box Of Tricks, the chance to get some 3000 words or so down towards my study, I’m looking at producing a five minute soundwalk performance for Loughborough and Leicester, and I’m also visiting Leeds Met on the 19th and Nottingham Trent on the 13th to talk about narrative and audience interactivity in a digital age. I’d also like to get Eismas redrafted for an Ice and Fire competition deadline due around the end of the month, and take a wander down to London for the V&A Digital Design Sensations exhibition.

An exciting schedule that should produce some (hopefully equally) interesting content for the blog, and all my other feeds. As well as lots of new people, places and ideas for my head!

I’m currently working on http://hannahscontent.co.uk (idea came via @rasga on Twitter) as a space to collate and archive my digital footprint. So that might be an interesting place to keep an eye on, and may allow me to eventually clean up hannahnicklin.com a bit… Hopefully I’ll find the best and prettiest way of bringing everything in there, let’s see.

And finally, with all of the wonderful and exciting things filling my wild monkey mind at the moment, I just wanted to share with you something that is making my creative and academic writing immeasurably more pleasurable and doable: OmmWriter. A simple, quiet space for you to write on your computer, it’s like opening a door to an alternate world, your own private Narnia (without all the pained Christian overtones and scary snow queens). Watch the video, and give it a go. Simple and effective. Now all I need is to find a way to develop a playwriting template that mashes with it…

Graduation

So graduation was pretty standard, and don’t worry, I did all of my commenting on how dull and full of pomp it was on Twitter. A lot of my comments might have seemed a little snarky – and for the most part I don’t apologise for that; my BA graduation was at least free of swords and sceptres, and nor did we have to stand for the national anthem (not that I did), though both included a good deal of ‘how awesome are we?!?!’ speeches (which is to be expected) and continuous clapping (which is fine). But I have to say that I felt very little sense of accomplishment with this event, and so thought I’d take a bit of time to reflect on my experience of being on the (properly prestigious) University of Birmingham Playwriting Studies course.

I was accepted without issue on to the UofB playwriting Mphil, but after a stressful and ‘you have to jump through hoops but we won’t tell you where they are’ failed funding application to the AHRC, it really was touch and go whether I was going to be able to fund my place on. In the end it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up, and the interest I was getting in my writing made it seem like the right time to be doing it, so me and my mum both took out loans so I could afford it. To be honest the lingering debt (works out at about £150 a month for me, which on a freelance/temp wage really does sting) is, I think, the one things that’s making the experience a little painful. I’m really really bored of being poor.

On the course you don’t really feel like you’re a part of the University, you are on a disparate campus, required to be there only 2 days a week, nor do you feel particularly connected to the department. On a logistical side of things you’re frequently bombarded with training you’re supposed to attend about research, unfortunately the ‘Mphil(b) research masters’ title means that you can’t avoid it, though it is almost entirely completely useless RE the course’s actual content.

But I really didn’t mind any of that.

The course was structured into two main strands – one was a series of essays and portfolios of short creative work, which you had to pass on, but that didn’t count towards any final mark, and the other was the writing and development of a full-length play, and an accompanying 6000 word analysis of the process of writing it. This thesis play is really the main project of the year you spend studying.

What you do get, is a group of 14 or so people, from all over the world (Amsterdam, Sweeden, Chicago, Tamworth) who are all proven, and passionate about writing for theatre. The youngest in my year was 21, the oldest late 50s. There was such a wealth of experience and styles, of different backgrounds and approaches. And they travel every tribulation with you. There was one point after the first draft deadline over Christmas, we all came back looking more than a little shell shocked. I (half) joked about my very real thoughts of ‘I totally can’t do this, I’ll just give up, I can totally give up, it has to be easier to give up than write this bloody thing’ and suddenly everyone was talking quite seriously about how they’d felt exactly the same thing, that they’d been on the point of phoning the uni, or had cried on the phone to their partner, or had been working out how much of the January fee payment they’d have to try and get back… But we were also there, still standing. It was wonderful to have human proof that it doesn’t just feel so insurmountably impossible for you. It doesn’t just feel like fingernails over the blackboard of your mind for you. It doesn’t just make you feel like you want to scream, and throw something, and cry, and that every key fall is just dulling your use of the English language into a deeper, more meaningless nonsense.

This is just what it feels like to be a writer.

On this course I also learnt how to do proper redrafts, before what I thought we redrafts, were just tweaks and shuffles. A proper redraft is a ‘new document’ in word. It’s a whole new play, written about the same story.

And the writers. The playwrights, screenwriters and industry professionals who came to speak to us, Dennis Kelly, David Eldridge, Dan Rebellato, Douglas Maxwell, David Nicholls, David Edgar, radio producers from the BBC, directors from the Birmingham REP. They all came and talked, and answered all of our tremulous questions. We learnt that everyone hates writing for TV, even those who do it. That a good printer is of more use to a writer than a good computer. That writing books is fun, and that adapting them for the screen isn’t. That TV and movie writing pays a lot but everyone but Paul Abbott and Russell T Davies only do it so they can afford to write for the stage. That you should never lie down in press photographs. Douglas Maxwell actually brought a file in full of rejection letters, about a hundred of them, and told us about the whole cabinet he has of them at home. Dan Rebellato talked about getting Michael Palin to play a character in his radio play, and how he somehow balances an academic career with one as a playwright (insane idea that it – oh, wait). Dennis Kelly talked about coming into playwriting comparatively later in life, while David Eldridge swore softly about becoming a so-called overnight success. These writers were all quietly kind, answered all of our questions, were realistically encouraging, and without exception, very very funny. Story telling is something that leaks into your conversation too. There was no ‘how do you do this’ answer that came from their talks – because you can’t map creativity for anyone but yourself – but the two things they all emphasised and embodied were resilience and a sense of humour.

I would have liked to have seen more writers who weren’t white-male, but I do know that’s (sadly) a real minority of writers.

Then there’s Steve Waters. Steve was the course convener, he oversaw it all, and was our constant contact. As well as being a very accomplished and successful (quietly political) playwright, Steve is an immensely generous, thoughtful, passionate man. He saw the value in each story, in each style, he encouraged and questioned, rather than criticised. He was firm when he needed to be, and sympathetic when your voice was quavering with the weight of it all. I don’t mean this to sound scyophantic, but that course is built or broken on the back of the convener. And we were very lucky that Steve was that.

And then I wrote a play.

Set in the Future. About a group of people playing the largest online game (MMORPG) ever. And their meeting the founder of the online world, and a famous, renegade hacker. Who gives them the option of destroying the world, but you’re never sure which one. But instead they tear themselves apart. A play that took in different realities- people playing avatars of different ages, sexes and ethnicities. A play about people who live and die in virtual worlds, and what it is about this one which pushes them out.

It was very, very hard.

And I’m still not sure I got it.

I set myself a massive challenge. But more than anything, the Playwriting masters gave me the undivided time, and the tools with which to tackle it.

If you’re interested, you can read my thesis play Being Someone Else here

I think I could have progressed to where I am now in about 5 years of hard, part-time graft. I would have probably stuck at it. I don’t tend to let myself fail if I can avoid it. But what the masters gave me was a fast-track. Of course I have everything still to learn, and everything left to lose,in my pursuit of a writing career. But that year escalated my learning, built me a wider support network, and more than anything showed me that to write, is to hurt, and to write, is to laugh and carry on regardless.

To return to my opening project – of wanting to examine why I don’t feel as though I have achieved much – I think it’s because the course wasn’t meant to do that, it isn’t on the course you achieve, but (I suppose like in all university learning) your are given the tools with which to do so. But the end of this particular course also marks the point at which you are – more than before – on your own again. Which is perhaps why it feels a little sad, which is perhaps why I feel a little bereft. And perhaps why I was also itching to get out of there, why I found it a tad irrelevant, because I want to get started, I want to be heard, I want to be staged…

And sooner than all that, I must to bed, as in 4 hours I’m leaving for Paris!

Bonne Nuit, and watch this space.

xx

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/07/graduation/feed/ 1 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/05/thank-you/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/05/thank-you/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 17:40:00 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=78

Every year or so- at a point of moving forward or moving on, I have an urge to do a self-portrait- I guess kind of record the moment, and to assess. Right now definitely does feel like a moment to record. I have the wonderful, wonderful opportunity of being funded to study a PhD at Loughborough University. I like Loughborough, as a place it’s nice enough, but more importantly when there I am surrounded by friends, I also love Leicester, in general as a city, and also now it has an exciting new theatrical venue, The Curve. Loughborough is near enough to the countryside (and I do need countryside) but Leicester is only 10 minutes away, London an hour and a bit. The proposal I will be working on is one combining my two great loves: theatre, and technology. I will have the chance to combine them both in creative writing – with a chance to look at our new world, our new ways of loving, laughing, communicating – and within ideas of applied theatre – using a combination of the arts and technology to reach out to the disadvantaged and disenfranchised. I have the chance to really make a difference to the world around me; I have time to tell the stories that I think are important, that I think people should hear, and facilitate opportunities for others tell theirs.

I hadn’t even allowed myself to hope this might happen, and yet it has. And I’m truly thankful for it – not to any cosmic power – but to my friends and family, for supporting me every step of the way. I’m grateful to my family, for never telling me I couldn’t do something, for taking out loans so that I could afford my masters, for always telling me how proud they were of me and for reminding me to take a break occasionally. For friends; putting up with me in my slightly reclusive bouts of ridiculous work ethic, and for being there when I needed to let go and just dance in heat and light and loud music, for telling me constantly that they, at least, had no doubt, and also to new friends, for congratulations via twitter and facebook – to all of you, thank you. This piece of news wasn’t complete until I was able to tell you all, to laugh with you, to talk with excitement, to hear and read your congratulations. So thank you. And now: on! I wonder what you think of the drawing? I think I look a lot more grown up there than I feel. (And my hair goes curly like that when I don’t straighten it). ]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/05/thank-you/feed/ 0 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/05/just-a-quick-note-to-say/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/05/just-a-quick-note-to-say/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 13:23:00 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=77 I got the PhD studentship – there was only one going for the whole of humanities, £13000ish a year plus fees paid at Loughborough Uni, start in October!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!

Everyone should be this happy :-)