zine – Hannah Nicklin

An image of me talking at Videobrains, hannah nicklin, videobrains, games, performance, writing

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!

: horrifically obsolete media format

Although I do sometimes post about music on here (my traditional Music Wot I Liked This Year post is coming soon, fear (not)), I’ve not really put stuff on here very often, I recommend lots on more stream-based platforms, but it just didn’t seem like the right place for it here. And anyway, who am I to talk about something that I don’t/can’t make? How could I possibly have an informed opinion on it? Or so my thoughts ran, until recently, the past year or so I’ve been really really getting into music, way deeper than before. A combination of bandcamp, as both discovery mechanism and pwyc pricing, and buying a RECORD PLAYER (I also got my ‘I’m a dick who covets obselete formats’ card at the same time) has meant a different, deeper, and much more varied listening. I started following zines, going to way more gigs, and then when the brilliant UK emo folk at Zine & Not Heard put out a call for reviewers, I nervously shuffled forward. One of those thing I do, sometimes. Don’t know why. ‘Yeah I’ll jump off a 5m diving board for the first time in front of a photographer from a local newspaper‘, ‘yeah I’ll put on a semi-regular night of performance and compere, market, promote, tech and fund it‘, that kind of thing.

However I was really properly nervous about writing about music, for several reasons: I am confidently able to say I am ZERO musical and because I don’t make, I don’t feel like I can listen ‘properly’ and use all the right language to describe stuff; because this level of music ‘scene’ is around about ‘stamp collector’ or ‘birder’ levels of intricate specialist knowledge and I have little memory for names of stuff (I describe all albums/books as ‘you know, it’s petrol blue and it’s got that big sort of slightly dystopian skyscraper thing on the front sort of like the future from the early 00s’*); and finally, because I am a girl, and as XKCD illustrates when you do stuff ‘not typical girl’ and are seen to fail, you are evidence of the lack of capability of ALL GIRLS. Who wants to bear that?

But then I tend to try and do the things that scare me. That’s what makes fear useful, I think, being able to identify what’s at stake, and if it’s worth sticking it out.

So I did start writing for Zine & Not Heard. I’ve done four reviews so far, for Innards, the new We Were Skeletons, Carson Well’s Wonderkid, and the forthcoming EP from Moose Blood. And I found a way of doing it. A way of using words (that I do know how to use) to talk about the stuff I don’t. I dunno if people can tell it feels different for me… I particularly really struggle with the FFO bit – not remembering names thing kills me there. And I worry I don’t know enough other bands to be less than predictable in that bit… but then I had a mini epiphany, and I decided to think about it in the way I learnt to think about academia – sure I don’t know all the books you’ve read, but I know all the ones I have, and it’s likely you’ve not read all of them too – this begins to get interesting, begins to be a culture, an art when we bring them together. And when I stopped worrying about that, and started to listen to the music to write about in a way that was from me, I started to really really enjoy it. It’s a properly rewarding way of listening, like from a different direction than I’m used to. Like a way, in fact, I think I’m used to looking at a piece of theatre, suddenly the music felt much more visual, I saw patterns, I heard words, I saw the layers pull out in front of me. I probably miss lots. I probably dwell on the lyrics too much. I’ve got lots to learn (always, always) and it does make me anxious, but in a really rewarding kind of way. So that’s a thing that I’m doing at the moment.

So, yeah, if you’re interesting in reading what I write over there, head here. But read the other stuff too. They’re all good.

*points for naming the album. The first band I saw live, in fact.

Tag: zine

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