Twitter – Page 3 – Hannah Nicklin

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‘. Continue reading Real Life Residues

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. Continue reading So, that was #SOTAflash