Social Media – Page 20 – Hannah Nicklin

All images © Christian Payne.

Over the summer I have been working with Theatre Writing Partnership as a freelance online communications officer, looking at social media and other possible approaches to the digital world/s in their work.

TWP have a really special place in my heart, they were the first company who ever took an interest in my writing, and way back in 2005 gave me my first ever production. Because of that I have really relished the opportunity to give back to them by helping them cultivate a digital footprint and focus their new digital angle to coincide with the company’s re-launch. They have been wonderfully receptive to all my over-enthusiastic tech-rants, and my work with them culminated this weekend, with the two day City Adventure/City Staged event. So I thought I’d just take a few minutes to throw down some reflections and some of the gorgeous documentation that came out of the project.

What was it all?

The first day was a city-wide adventure – a kind of treasure-hunt with clues and tasks that produced images, sounds and creative writing in the morning, and then a coming together of participants to produce scripts and monologues in the afternoon. The second day brought a director and 4 actors to the material, producing a performance and presentation that evening: A City Staged.

Here’s Documentally talking to Kate Chapman about the first day: A City Adventure.

A City Adventure/Staged was born out of Stan’s Cafe’s idea of ‘risk days’. Basically TWP and SC got together and set out on the two day project, knowing very little about the content of the finished product. Likewise participants showed up on the day, never having met their partners, and having received mysterious, not-to-be-opened envelopes. It was a bold and unusual experiment in theatre writing which was really exciting to be a part of.

On the first day I was working alongside the excellent Christian Payne (Documentally), not amplifying the event as two observers, but traversing the adventure in exactly the same way as the rest of the participants, (only grabbing audio, video, text and images along the way too). This, I think, is a really good example of how theatre can use social media, we weren’t amplifying an event, as much as we were amplifying the experience, something that seemed to garner a decent reaction from the twittersphere.

Here’s a quick taste of video turning points in the Adventure…

There was something in recording the experience, too, that the participants really seemed to latch on to, I got many of them asking for where all the material would be posted. There was a wholeness of experience involved in the work – they walked it, they wrote it, and then they watched others bring life to what they’d written, all within the space of 48 hours – they weren’t a traditional audience any more, and in a small way the digital content seemed to allow them an opportunity to reflect on their experiences, and to hold on to them a bit longer.

Here we have Documentally interviewing several of them, just back from the morning’s adventure.

As a half formed thought/aside: although IRL the trad audience didn’t exist any more –you could argue that the people following and engaging with the online content, watching characters, framed, performing a found narrative – you could argue that they were performing the trad audience role, just in a media-snacking style format.

The material that the City Adventure participants produced was on the Saturday wrought into shape by TWP’s Artistic Director Kate Chapman, and a team of four actors. Here’s a couple of short interviews with actors Gary and Rochi, just before and after the performance, talking a little about the process involved, and how it felt to meld the material into shape:

There was a real sense that structuring the piece – something you might think to be a problem with 18 different writers involved – was surprisingly simple, and in fact that what emerged was place – site – the city of Derby breathed through it all, leading a way. In the same way, the ability to geo-tag (particularly) the digital media we took meant that our journey, too, was scored through the city. There’s something really fascinating there about site-specific work with a digital arm (echoed in the Playwriting for the iPod Generation workshop, which focussed on digital storytelling tied to actual space, more later!) which I think is going to bear a lot more investigation from me as I begin to launch into my PhD…

The final City Staged presentation took the form of a collection of images and sounds recorded throughout the day, and a staged reading of the theatre-writing. Here’s a quick four minute excerpt from the piece I took with my iPhone, it catches the move between a collage of image and sound into the performance of the writing:

There are loads more images, video and audio on TWP’s Posterous. The audioboos recorded throughout the two days are the best way to follow the tasks and process in detail, (the form of geo-tagged audio, complete with picture, turned out to be the best way of tracking such a location-specific event) you can find them under the tag cityadventure (I could embed a playlist, but there’s probably enough embed-loveage going on here already)

You can also find the audioboos mapped, and listen to them without leaving the map view, here. (Massive thanks to code-ninja @buddhamagnet for the mapping facility – something which I think is the most exciting piece of content from the day, if only we could have geo-tagged/mapped all of our content! [another thing to work on])

I think I’ll finish an interview with Jayne, one of the City Adventure participants reflecting on the feeling of seeing her writing staged, and a slideshow of some of the images taken by Documentally . It really was a extraordinary couple of days, massive thanks to Documentally for all his hard work, and congrats to the TWP team, for a wonderful launch to their new programme.

PhD starts properly tomorrow! Can’t wait to get my hand on some big ideas… books ho!

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.