Arts – Page 65 – Hannah Nicklin

Think about 10 years time, the real digital future, not this analogue/digital crossover, if you do, that future will come faster, better. @billt at Shift Happens 2.0

There are plenty of really exciting ways of using existing social media and tech-based tools that are beginning to be explored by the arts. We have the National Theatre’s live streaming events, The BBC Prom’s use of Audioboo, C&T’s Living Newspaper, and smaller companies making use of the collaborative and immediate aspect of social media to open up their offices and creative processes.

But part of what I’m going to be pushing for in my work with the arts sector is finding and developing the next tools, becoming a part of the community that innovates and tests the future, as well as the one that works with the present aspects of tech in our lives.

Tech is particularly good at working with data, the whole world trades in it, visualising data and mashing up two or more data sets to makes something more powerful and accessible is an incredibly exciting prospect. The world now is full of information, just lying around, visualisations and mashups make it work, make it more powerful than the sum of its parts. I also believe the arts are built on information, signals, triggers, scents, subtleties, there are so many layers. And in the same way as facts, they’re driven by questions, but more than facts, the arts dramatise those questions, turning points. Who is this character? What memories, smells, encounters is she built of? Consider the moment of the intricate choice between a highlight or a deeper dark on a painting, or the textures you could feel when you first heard the stirrings of a new song.

Imagine an AR app developed by someone like the National Portrait Gallery that allowed you to see under the layers of paint, to peel back the process, or see other works painted over, or corrected. Imagine using that app to trigger audio clips with facts and context for the work, or reactions that other people like you have recorded whilst standing there.

We can build new ways of exploring and creating art.

I was recently pointed in the direction of Debategraph by @abi281. Debategraph is a web-based, creative commons project which provides an interactive way of mapping wiki debates. I’ve embedded it here for you to play with, which is much easier than my trying to explain it, click, explore, hover, drag, see what you think. For those who want to know every in and out check out the ‘about’ on the debategraph website.

Why am I looking at debate graph?

I would love to see something like this developed for use by arts organisations, if you were to take this bare-bones structure, bring it onto a large touch display, and crucially, allow the addition of video, images and audio, you have a very very powerful tool for representing the artistic process, character development, the context of a play, or the building of a piece of art.

This could be installed in large multi person interactive multi-touch screen displays, similar to the NT ‘Big Wall‘, but created within a wiki environment, a creative commons model that could be released into the wild, that people could truly interract with. An installation in which people could build new routes, not travel one of several pre-planned ones; drag and zooming, exploring creative questions, contexts, characters through native video/image/audio embeds. Better still we could use the model to collaborate, to create a huge, sprawling, reactive and interactive piece of audio/visual wiki art in which you could still follow curated paths, or which you could explore yourself, have it on screens that surround you, covering the walls of a whole room, tailoring your own personal theatre, or working with others to build a specific, live and individual experience.

Where would you start? Do you know people who would be interested in working on projects like this, do you think it’s worth working on, or do you think it invades the ineffability of art? Basically: discuss.

I thought I should do a quick follow up entry to the Flipping the Script live-stream issues. In case you didn’t see, insufficient planning/equipment meant that the exciting streamed new reading didn’t actually work until the last 20 minutes, and at that point was running very poor video, and appalling audio quality.

I found this really disappointing for many reasons, but most particularly because as my role as a freelance online comms bod for Theatre Writing Partnership, I’d really been pushing the event, and felt we’d been let down, and worse, had let others down, when it turned into such of a shambles.

This was my (ranty) reaction as I left the mini event we’d set up at the TWP offices:

It turns out they had been trying to use a webcam over a shared wifi connection to run it, and according to a friend who had logged on earlier, had only tested it an hour previously. Although admittedly the reaction audiobooed above is very ranty, the whole experience has reminded me of the importance of emphasising the need to make the tech part of a project, rather than adding it on at the last minute or treating it as a gimmick.

Of course I’m sure Talawa/The Young Vic aren’t going to jump at my height-of-anger offer of interference (why would they), but I was pleased to see that Talawa did respond to the comments in the chat-area of the livestream:

I would like to thank you and at the same time apologise sincerely for the loss of our streaming feed yesterday. Unfortunately, we were relying on WiFi and once the studio doors were closed the signal went with it. We subsequently established a permanent cable link but it was late in the reading. We are grateful for your comments and the very lively exchanges. We learned quite a lot from you and are now ready to hit the ground running with a boosted up, infinitely more reliable, and multi-camera streaming on 8th October. So please join again, or email your comments and/or introduce yourself to me christopher@talawa.com.

I’m really glad that the first knockback hasn’t phased them, and hopefully the 8th of October will provide the brilliant experiment in online new-writing dissemination that the 8th of September failed to deliver. This has been a reminder on my part not to make assumptions about companies’ knowledge or tech-capabilities (for better or for worse), and by far the most positive thing about the experience is that they have revised their approach, and are trying again. Kudos.

Also, on a personal note, my subsequent rant in the mini-gathering at the office about the need to integrate and investigate technology in theatre got me another invite to talk at a conference! That makes three in total, before I’ve even officially started my work. Though always surprised to find people think my rants are of exterior value, it’s thrilling to see that other people are thinking about these things too, and makes me really excited about the prospect of my research. Good stuff.

Tag: Arts

Flipping the Script Follow-up