Writing – Page 20 – Hannah Nicklin

Base image shared on Flickr via a (remix) Creative Commons License by AnitaKHart. Shameless Helvetica added by me.

So, if you’ve been following me on Twitter over the past week or so you will have seen that I have been a) collecting stories and b) seeding the #rainreminds hashtag. What’s it all about? Well, I’m delighted to announce that I have a piece of work in the Hazard Festival, next Saturday at 5pm.

The dedicated mini-site can be found at http://rainreminds.tumblr.com/ where there are links to the location and facebook event, and a nice big old Share Button. Please do!

The piece will be somewhere between stealth performance, soundwalk, and flashmob, will involve up to 100 umbrellas, and will take place in the middle of Manchester. Full instructions, and an mp3 to download and bring with you will be released 24 hours prior to the event, so if you’re interested, do sign up to the Facebook event so I can send a nice reminder out when I release it.

The hashtag for the event is #rainreminds, and over the past week or so I’ve been collecting stories, voices, and sounds from people all over the internet. These will either be used directly in, or help to inspire the 10 minute long piece, which I will be writing up until Tuesday, recording and editing until Thursday, and then releasing at 5pm on Friday with accompanying instructions in advance of Saturday.

In the meantime you can have a read of (or add to) some of the awesome stories coming into http://rainonmy.tumblr.com – and if you want to be credited make sure you leave your name in the *body* of the submission (if you missed that in the submission guidelines and you do want crediting, drop me an email or @ on twitter). Also, follow the #rainreminds hashtag for trials, tribulations, and exclamations in the writing/recording journey.

So, see you in Manchester, and spread the word.

Hurrah!

In lieu of a working writing arm, I’m taking to a few different strategies to make sure I can keep working, one of which has been recording my voice. I’ve been using this as a way to keep more fluid notes than I can with dictation, and the same has gone for my creative as well as academic thinking. In some new experimenting with a creative piece that (just today) found a name – Nightwalks – I’ve been taking my normal note-taking-before-forming-full-creative-ideas onto audioboo. At first I was a little frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t shape and edit before the words flew out into the big wide world (as I can on a piece of paper), until I allowed myself to see the meanderings, ums, and corrections as just like papered crossings outs, footnotes and refinement. It feels refreshingly bare to lay out my thinking in such an open way, and very in fitting with how I think tech and art can work together – opening up processes, hopefully in a vaguely interesting ‘DVD extras’ kind of way.

You can catch all of my recorded meanderings on audioboo under the tag ‘nightwalks‘ or play them on the boobase map, below – you can zoom and drag to move as you normally would on googlemaps, and click on the flags to open the option to play the audio. The thoughts and feelings therein will soon be morphing into an idea for recording… so, as they so anachronistically say: stay tuned.