tech – Page 30 – Hannah Nicklin

“Following the critically-acclaimed sell-out success of Word:Play 2, Box of Tricks has commissioned six new playwrights to write a fifteen-minute play inspired by a single word; for this cycle, the word “obsession”.

We’ve assembled some of the hottest emerging talent to rise to this unique creative challenge: six playwrights, who between them have already won a clutch of awards and accolades; including the Kings Cross Award, Best New Writing at the Lost Festival, winner of the Off Cut Festival, the Old Vic New Voices’ 24 Hour Plays and US/UK Exchange and the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme.”

This is just a quick push on a new 15 minute play I have on at Theatre503 as part of Box of Tricks Theatre‘s Word:Play new writing showcase. The evening will be made up of 6 new plays all stemming from the same word: Obsession. The evening will be running from the 30th March-3rd of April and details on how to grab tickets can be found on the Word:Play3 page.

My piece is called Awake, and traces the liminal experience of an MMORPG gamer who passes out whilst gaming. To mention any more is probably giving the game away, but it basically explores being and nothingness in a virtual context. I hope. I mean the fullest expression in the form of a third and final draft will be happening this weekend. I’m sure it’ll be awesome. I’m certain all the other pieces will be (for more info on the other pieces check out the Word:Play3 page again).

For more info on the evening, do follow @bottc and the hashtag #wordplay3 – if you go and see it let us know what you think via the hashtag too. I should hopefully get to some of the rehearsals, so I may even throw together a teaser trail for my piece, who knows.

You can watch in yummy 720p from my new Canon Ixus 100is, ^_^

Last Friday I went to the Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A Museum. The video picks out the pieces that interested me most, and the ones that I thought were the most successful – I’ll let the video do the describing for me, other than that, I just wanted to note main observations I came away with:

1) At what point does tech become art? The answer to that is probably something facetious, like ‘when it’s put in a gallery’, or ‘when an artist is involved in making it’, but I did feel a lot of the beginning pieces (not filmed) felt more like screensavers/music visualisations, than pieces of art. Why can’t a screen saver be a piece of art? No reason, I suppose that’s my own prejudices talking – I’m used to seeing that style of thing as ubiquitous ‘filler’ material, not the focal point. It was, I think, the reasons behind or the data informing the code which did make it art. In the same way paint is just paint until you let information express through it. Something to think on, certainly.

2) Unintuitive interaction is worse than no interaction. A lot of the stuff in that room just didn’t work well enough. Take the rotating singing head (after the rotating words in the video) it was interesting to choose what angle, inside or out, that you viewed a sculpture (very phenomenological) but as a regular touch screen user I was incredibly disappointed when I couldn’t pinch zoom, change the movement with the speed of my gesture, rotate, etc. Likewise there were delays or misses in a lot of the projected interactivity. I’m sure there was an awful lot of clever tech behind it all, but it wasn’t clever enough. Interactivity might just be an all or nothing thing – if something invites me to interact with it live, in a natural space, I will always be disappointed if it doesn’t react in a natural way to my gestures.

3) The best, most intuitive, pleasing and playful pieces were all intimately connected to the natural world; the projected leaves of the tree that fell, and that you could kick around the floor, the dandelion, the little prehistoric sea creatures that grew when you uncovered the a space from the sand, that multiplied, and evolved the longer they were exposed to the air. This goes forwards from the previous point – intuitive is important. We see ourselves, our worlds in art. Art is a way of reflecting on seeing and being, the enthusiasm for the combination of nature and tech, is encouraging for my continuing investigation of the collision of the bodied and the virtual space. It also hooked up with a sentence I read on the coach home:

“Judging by the importance of nature themes in digital installation art, many artists also seek compensation in computer simulations for the disappearance of natural environments. We hope to recapture through technology the pristine world that technological culture took away for us” – Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan.

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