videobrains

It’s been a while! It was 3 months ago I last posted an update on here, largely due to a lot of the work I’ve been doing having it’s own dedicated online presences.

Since last writing, I’ve finished the community storytelling project Your Home From Here in Lincolnshire, which resulted in a gently interactive sound piece for the village green in North Hykeham. Accompanied by some lovely sound work by Daniel J. Harvey, you can have a bit of a listen, and read some workshop participant’s stories and poems over at yourhomefromhere.com

I’m now 3 months into my residency at Videobrains, which is taking up a lot of my time and money, but is also super great and challenging in all the right ways. Helpfully, Rock Paper Shotgun picked up the talks for a series of features, the first 3 of 6 you can read below, and also, if you’re interested in anything to do with psychogeography and games, there’s still plenty of time to help support the work over on my Patreon. In the meantime:

Read about Jake Elliott, the scale of the US, and the landscape of our late capitalist lives: here.
Read about Holly Gramazio, being an incomer an play in the city: here.
Read about Kerry Turner, the European and American Gothic, Disneyland Paris, and Malham Cove in Yorkshire: here.

I’ve also almost finished work on Equations for a Moving Body. And I COMPLETED A FULL or ‘IRON’ DISTANCE TRIATHLON. It was hard, but I was equal to it. That’s a cool feeling. You can see a lot of the process/thinking/writing/research for that show on the subdomain ironman.hannahnicklin.com — and there’ll be a premiere in Leeds/Sheffield end of October – look out for me announcing it on Twitter. Hopefully we’ll get an Autumn 2016 tour together out of that.

I’m continuing to work with UEL on socially engaged performance and interactive practices, this Autumn running a series of 4 sessions working on a new piece of community participative art with the Applied Theatre BA. I’ve also done a bit of guest lecturing/mentoring for the Game Design course at UAL, and for performance/theatre MAs over at the university in Chichester.

Oh! And there’s a book out on DIY theatre with a contribution from me on what we mean when we talk about interaction, you can buy that right now for £15 on Unbound – there are some great contributors.

I’ve performed/spoken at the V&A radical games Late Pushing Buttons, and in 2 days will present as part of Now Play This a new piece of writing born out of the Games We Have Known and Loved story collecting game (tickets still available!).

And really excitingly, I’ve just begun a brand new commission working with the Social Housing Arts Network working alongside Poplar HARCA on a new piece of community storytelling that will hopefully result in a brand new game-type-thing. Initial thoughts are to use Twine to map the stories of the estate, but of course the work will respond to the community, so I’m looking forward to finding out what they have to tell me.

Finally, I’ve release a limited run of 50 of a brand new little zine collecting some of my poetry, following Songs For Breaking Britain I’ve been writing a lot more, you can buy it over here for only £3 +p&p, with a bit of cover art from a life drawing class I went to.

Phew!

I don’t have much money or time, but boy when I write it all down like that I don’t think I could describe a better way of going through life. Cool. Onwards!

TL;DR: go here.

Exciting announcement! Jake Tucker, on the strength of a few people’s recommendations (which is awesome) has invited me to be VideoBrains‘ new resident speaker. For those of you who don’t know, VideoBrains is a (currently) London-based monthly night of talks around games. There’s a different theme each month, this month’s was All’s Fair In Love and Games (about love, sex, and games) and next month’s is Non Player Characters (and however the speakers are going to respond to the theme of NPCs)

But as it’s not just a one off talk, but 6 months as resident speaker, I have the opportunity to try out something a bit inventive. So I’m picking a theme of my own! Starting in June I’m going to do a monthly series of talks on the psychogeography of games.

If you’ve not come across it before, psychogeography (which my autocorrect has learnt 3 different spellings of, well done me.) is a really chewy word for how our environments make us feel; how they effect us. I’m interested in how where we come from affects what we make – so what I’m going to do is spend time with great people who make games walking in a place that is where they live, work, or is otherwise important to them.

Each month I’ll make a new performance/talk/thing in response to that experience. Each month’s thing will respond entirely to the experience of walking with game designers.

Examples of people I have spoken to about doing the thing:

Ed Key (Proteus): a walk through the Lake District where he lives and walks, talking about his relationship to the fell landscape, his ideas on rewilding, and the affect nature has in and on his work.
George Buckenham (@v21 – Cubes, Wild Rumpus, Mutazione): George grew up in far West London – near Richmond. He now lives in East London (Stepney). He and I will walk from where he lives now, to where he grew up, without once referencing a map. We won’t stop until we’ve made it.

Each one will be different. Each thing I make will be different.

There will be 3 men and 3 women (I have 6 people in mind, just haven’t had all the conversations yet) 2 of whom are based outside the UK, 2 in London, and two in Not London.

And the results will take in p much all of my practice, I might make interactive sound based performance for a crowd, I might do a new piece of storytelling or spoken word inspired by our conversations, it might just be a photo tour of where we went and what we saw.

If you’re interested in the sound of this, you can help, too. I’ve set up a Patreon – which is sort of monthly subscription crowdfunding – you can cancel at any time, but if you choose to put $5 or so my way each month, it’ll go towards supporting me do a really cool thing, which is going to take up a bit more time than an average talk (4-5 days a month I reckon). Plus if you do choose to back me in making this thing then you’ll get all of the inside knowledge – who I’m walking with, all of the source material and thoughts that those who see the videos of the final pieces won’t see, and there are a couple of cool rewards, plus a zine I’ll make of the 6 pieces that you can get at the end of this year/beginning of the next.

So yeah, read more about that on Patreon and look out for me at VideoBrains from June!

Tag: videobrains

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