Update – Page 14 – Hannah Nicklin

Search Party – photo by me at the Forest Fringe Microfest in Mayfest 2010, links to flickr.

I am finally able to let you all know proper details about the very exciting piece of work I heard I got last Monday. I’m going to be working this week, from Wednesday through to Sunday with the New Work Network as a ‘creative correspondent’ at In Between Time. In Between Time is a festival of live art – contemporary art and performance, often intimate or focussed on the audience/body* – happening in venues all over the city of Bristol. Artists involved that I’ve blogged about on here before are Search Party, Duncan Speakman, Action Hero, Tim Etchells, Blast Theory and there’s a raft of other exciting artists and new work that I’ve not yet had a chance to see, so basically this job is somewhere around Best Thing Ever.

What actually is a ‘creative correspondent’? Well mostly that was up to me, the New Work Network had a very open proposal system, the proposal I got accepted under (and the one that I’ve since fleshed out) placed a lot of emphasis on acknowledging my presence in covering the material through social media – and as thus the importance of the other voices that I might report or enable through my coverage. Because of this I will also be sharing as much as the content (audio/video/images/text) as possible (allowing for artists to opt out) via a CC remix license – meaning that anyone can use the content in their own creative and critical reactions. Likewise I’ll be making sure the interviews I grab are with festival goers as much as organisers and artists – reflecting all the conversations around the festival, trying to level the playing field in terms of critical response (there will be no star ratings, horrible reductive things that they are).

If you want to follow the material I’m going to be pushing highlights to my personal account, but to keep people from feeling overloaded I’m going to be sticking to the New Work Network Twitter account for the majority of material – so if you think you’re definitely interested, follow @NewWorkNetwork, or if you want to get a taste for things first, follow @hannahnicklin or check out the site (when it’s up) to see if anything catches your eye. And please, do play with the material I put out there – whether it’s data (I’m going to try and geo-tag pretty much everything I can) or media – any creative or critical reactions are not just welcome, but vital to complete the voice of the correspondence. There will be a submission page on the site when it’s ready, and I’ll remind y’all about it when the site is up.

For people not at the festival, the site will be where most of the content goes up, so you can follow there, and I’m going to be putting it together tomorrow. All going well with domain pointing (the one bit I don’t have control over, so hoping it’s been sorted) it should be found at www.IBTlive.newworknetwork.info

For those who are going – contact me @hannahnicklin if you want to talk to me at any point, follow me on the map (I’ll hopefully have up), and keep an eye out for QR codes and pull off short urls which may guide you to little pieces of material across the city, tweet streams and video and images projected on cafe and venue walls, or bus stops and darkened streets…

The hashtag to follow is #IBTlive10, so I’ll hopefully see you there, online or IRL.

*actually, most artists I speak to don’t even really define live art in the same way, and most people not in the live art community that I speak to have never heard of it, so one of the questions throughout the coverage is likely to be ‘what is live art?’

Image shared by Smithsonian’s National Zoo on Flickr via a Creative Commons License.

Just to let you all know that I shall hopefully have my first ever proper game played at Larkin’ About‘s Winter games event. I’ve been coming at the world of pervasive games and contemporary performance from a largely writerly point of view so far, hence my affinity for the soundwalk form, I think, and although I love crafting soundwalks, I thought it would be good for me to have a go at something looser, and more game-y (ludic, I should say) and force myself out of control.

I thought something simple would be a good place to start, so it’s roughly a treasure hunt/capture the flag kind of cross, the rule set as it stands thus:

Hibernate!

For 8-20 players

Set up
Your normal habitat’s food supply is under threat because of a Summer of floods and damp weather, it’s getting cold and you need to prepare for winter, so you’ve had to venture into the city to find food…

Rules
– To be played within a small area of dark city-space.
– Up to four teams (3 will work best, I think) – the Door Mice, the Voles, the Shrews and the Weasels.
– Each team wears a coloured glo-stick in their team colour and gets a certain number of the same colour, unsnapped.
– The aim of the game is to collect pieces of ‘food’ back at the nest.
– Players can only carry one piece of food at one time.
– There are 2 sizes of food, blue and red, blue food is worth 2 food-points and requires two animals to carry it, they must link arms to pick it up.
– Players cannot communicate using anything other than the word ‘squeak’, but they can mark routes with their ‘scent’ – snapped glo-sticks.
– If a nest is unguarded, the food stored in it can be stolen.
– The winning team is the one with the most food within 10 minutes. OR The winner is the first team to a certain number of foodstuffs and all at the nest within the time limit.

Needed per iteration:
– Glow sticks of up to 4 colours
– ‘Food’ hidden around the space, not too grouped together. Painted ping pong balls are best.
– Something to signify a nest

So there you go. Simple, I know, and I think for the next one I’ll try and play with the form a bit, but just as Walk With Me was my first 10 minute test of the soundwalk form, so Hibernate! will hopefully be a simple test of game-like stuff.

I’m currently working with the Larkin’ folk to iron out a final rule set, and all being well it should get its first test on the 27th of November in Manchester. Exciting! Continue reading Hibernate!