This is an edited version of a talk I gave to a cohort of artists from in and around Derby. Some established, some emerging – all keen to engage with new modes of digital art making.
StoryFutures/Presents (talk)
The stories we tell using online and digital tools are as much an interrogation of the place we choose to tell them in, as they are of the characters in the stories themselves. Even as we use these tools in our day to day life, we find the narratives that fit into platforms are, through choices made in their design, a subset of those which could find their place there. As storytellers in a connected world, it is our duty to also reveal how technology influences the telling, how the shape of the infrastructure can drive the story and choose who can take part.
Summer in the City
Back in 2014 Quarantine made the first iteration of Summer in a warehouse near Islington Mill. A group of people from many walks of life walked into a rehearsal room, shared food, thoughts and quite a bit of themselves.
Take me to the Theatre
I’m writing this is in part a response to Matt Trueman’s recent post on Bad Theatre, although his article has really just catalysed this post about a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about for a while. An argument against Bad Theatre appears to be the terrible things it does to its audiences, both in potentia and in the auditorium. Things that will put…
House of wonder
… or what would you give for magic? There wasn’t much in the way of theatre in Frimley. It’s a small town, smooshing into it’s neighbours to make a kind of suburban sprawl that grants every Englishman a small and homogenous castle. I know my dad was a fan of Shakespeare, I know that because of the…
Northern Powerhouse
There’s been talk. The politicians from the capital have started their pre-election, regional tour. Nick Clegg – in a radical piece of recursion – instructed the Manchester creative-entrepreneur-set to ape Berlin and ‘use vacant buildings as a base for arty start-ups and collectives‘, which came as some surprise to author and DJ Dave Haslam who points out that the Berlin model had been,…
Stream Bitterness
We didn’t know the car needed petrol. We didn’t know that plants needed water. We didn’t know that children needed love. It’s Sunday now. The daily twitter stats have landed in my mailbox: 270 tweets, 24 new followers, around the same new followings, 69 retweets & 195 tweets favourited. It must be the day after a Forced…
Simple text is rarely so.
“Don’t anthropomorphise computers, they don’t like it” (Anonymous – sometimes attributed to Terry Pratchett) I started a text message on my iPhone. The iPhone had been recently updated to IOS8. As part of that Apple overhaul there is a new predictive text system. Three choices of words are presented above the keyboard to assist in…
A button I can’t unpress
(So I’m mainly writing this to me and about me and about filling the gaps between articulation, memory and bias.) To sorta/kinda remember what on earth I thought about it and the noise around it, before it becomes a vague word-cloud memory and home to something with…
On Fairness
“Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies” In a Thatcherite Britain, heavy with the ideological antipathy towards support for culture or anything non-vocational, a company I worked with made a successful application for arts subsidy. Big cheers all round. At the time it felt like a massive windfall, even though it wasn’t enough…