tim wright: digital writer

BlakeWalking and the Makerbot

One of the main things that made me want to join Fiddian Warman’s Makerbot group is the address where the group gathers on Lower Marsh in Lambeth. It’s just a stone’s throw away from where William Blake and his wife started their own peculiar printing revolution in Hercules Road. What better place to think about how to add a 3D printed element to my own work?

Here’s the first disastrous output from my first session with Fiddian and others on Monday. It’s meant to be a letter A:

Here, though, is the second attempt (not really mine, btw, but created by Fiddian based on my 'holding forth'):

This looks much more exciting. Imagine if I could produce a full alphabet of letters. I could end up printing a physical alpahabet that could be used for... printing!

Imagine if I could produce a set of letters and blocks in Blake’s original handwriting. We could create a set of 3D models that would allow anyone to block print their own hokey versions of Blake’s illuminated texts. We could all become makers of our own Blake books!

Now I’ve been somewhat obsessed with Blake for some time now and, in particular, in a time in his life (specifically 1794) when he was living and walking around North Lambeth dreaming up & making The [First] Book of Urizen and also Songs of Experience.

These are both extraordinary things to be making at any time, but what was going on in Blake’s life (and in his mind) to want to produce them right there and then?

I’m *still* researching & developing a geolocated audiowalk that guides people around this area whilst telling an imagined story about Blake and his wife attempting to make a living from ‘illuminated print’ - and also unlocking a new recitation of the Song of Urizen accompanied by (and inspired by?) sounds of both then and now.

Fairly regularly I like to walk the route of my Blakewalk and capture sounds that might be useful for the final production. For example, here’s the sounds of trains going overhead in the tunnel on Carlisle Lane:

Carlisle Lane by moongolfer

I’m imagining mixing these sounds with imagined sounds from 1794 as well as with music from that time such as this:

Marc Minkowski – Symphony drumroll in E flat major, hob. I:103 - Adagio - Allegro con spirito

Or this:

Frances Kelly – Musical Relicks of the Welsh Bards

It feels right too, though, to think that by walking this route, channelling Blake’s work and almost divining a story out of the ground upon which those feet must have walked (in ancient time etc), it might also be possible to make or print a little something. And Fiddian’s Makerbot is in just the right place to do that. Perhaps each person who takes the walk and listens to the audio is also triggering the Makerbot to pop out one extra letter or printing block, so that over time, the more people who walk, the more blocks there are from which to print new Blakean works on paper.

Ok, so I’ve got a long way to go and a lot to learn (downloading autocad 1-2-3D as we speak). But huzzah for Fiddian and his forward thinking idea of sharing a Makerbot and building up a community of Makers. I’m already looking forward to the next session.

P.S. check out the Makers Guild site and, in particular, forthcoming events at the V&A.

Playing MoonGolf with Jon Spooner: Hole #4 (St Albans) & Hole#5 (Capetown)

I had a lovely time last week speccing out and 'playing' MoonGolfHole #4 in St Albans with Jon Spooner: 

Jon is one of life's natural moongolfers as this video proves:

It turns out that the route we took maps onto the moon quite well, so that's one more hole sorted for when we finally get out on the lunar course:

Jon, by the way, is probably nearer the dream of getting into space than I am, damn him. And thanks to the organisation he belongs to - UNSA - it looks like he's going be taking a lot more people with him than I will.

At the moment, Jon is attending the International Astronautical Congress in CapeTown (yes, that's how serious he is) and it turns out he's keen to spec out MoonGolfHole #5 while he's there! Obviously, I have given him my full support, and even sorted him out with a letter of recommendation, just in case anyone out there doesn't quite take him seriously.

Download To Jon Spooner

Below is the proposed layout of the hole which Jon is hoping to play tomorrow (Thurs 6th Oct) at 2pm local time. If you're at the conference, do try and make it. And remember - DON'T LEAVE SPACE TO THE PROFESSIONALS.

"Preparing for life and leisure on the moon whilst being stuck here on earth is a tricky and sometimes odd business. But the MoonGolf mission is all about playing & preparing for something seemingly silly & impossible.

I sense you are someone who understands the importance of silliness and impossible dreams. All great space travellers (and invaders) understand this too, I think!

For these reasons, I am very happy to endorse the creation of MoonGolfHole #5 (CapeTown). I have studied the map of the terrain very closely and have drawn out my recommendations for a teeing-off point, a ‘green’ and a ‘hole’. Quite how many strokes it will take you to complete this hole is for you and your fellow players to discover.

Remember, it is very important that you recruit as many fellow players as you can, and that you use your time together to walk the course, sharing with each other as you go your dreams and ambitions, your thoughts about how we all might play our way into the future.

Please do record as much of your conversations as possible, map the hole and send me any ‘findings’ that come out of your game in terms of how to keep the amateur spirit of play alive: the amateur spirit that will eventually fire me (and maybe you) to the moon!"

Making Stories Out Of Squiggles

At some point during his talk at Field Studies, Tim Ingold drew a squiggle on a whiteboard:

It looked a bit like this: 

He was talking about perception – in particular how we see and hear the world around us – and with this squiggle he was trying to show (I think) how anthropologists, in particular, have had a problem over the years about how to record accurately the experience of living within a community and comprehending its culture. (Someone else who attended this talk will almost certainly be able to report this better than I can.)

Tim repeatedly wanted to make the point that life, as it is lived, keeps going forward in a constant flow, so that any attempt to ‘record’ our experience of life in some ways always takes us out of that flow and forces us to look (and hear) backwards, and then ‘replay’ an experience.

So Tim’s squiggle was an attempt to show how an anthropologist might live in the flow of other people’s lives for a while, but would then loop back over that experience to where the journey had begun and would then replay it to the point where the journey stopped. Tim seemed to be claiming from this that all endings are imposed and somehow a falsification of actual experience. Is this right?

I got slightly obsessed with this squiggle - as you can already tell – and perhaps stopped paying close attention to Tim’s complicated but compelling arguments about how sound has been treated differently to sight over the centuries by intellectuals and cultural historians (most basically by talking about ‘sight & sound’ rather than ‘light & sound’ or ‘sight & hearing’.)

What interested me was how this squiggle might also be used to think about how writers take experiences and make stories out of them - imposing beginnings, middles and ends on chunks of life that are in reality just one continuous (meaningless? storyless?) flow.

I am starting to imagine a story structure that matches the squiggle.

(1) We start at the end, a scene or an event that somehow needs ‘explaining’.  

(2) We move forward in real time for a short while but with a slightly heightened perspective of the storyworld.

(3) Now we start heading back, already reviewing the end point of the story, but with some kind of overview rather than being ‘in the room’.

(4) I start to pick out significant moments from the past, significant in how they might relate to the end, without actually clearly stating or even understanding their significance. We stay ‘above’ the action.

(5)  We hit a key scene in the past where the experience of the story is actually lived again by the writer, a point where the storyteller is part of the story, too involved in the scene to be ‘dispassionate’.

(6) The writer is now working ‘below’ the storyline’, looking for undercurrents, themes, psychologies that can explain what’s been going on, and then reaches a third key point in the story, the point where the story *really* began, the trigger point for everything that came after.

(7) And now we start to replay events from this trigger point, events already described to us but which  start to have a pattern and a meaning we hadn’t perceived before. Til then the story had just been a set of selected points in time we scrolled back through without seeing any pattern. Now we can consider a key point both from above and from within.

(8) Perhaps now an event we’d logged before whilst going back into the past has a new hue, a new meaning now that we approach it from the other direction and with new knowledge of events that preceded it.

(9) And as we zoom down to an ending, the point where in fact the writer started, we come to that point with a new understanding, with a pattern defined, with the sense of an ending. What started as a bare fact, an isolated incident has now been imbued with significance, emotion, symbolism, meaning.

Now I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all. It is though (for me) an interesting (but not the only) way to think about story. (The story it makes me think of most of all btw is The Good Soldier). I’m already wondering what happens if I change the axes so that squiggle works symmetrically (well, almost).

Does that change things? Who knows? But I am indebted anyway to Tim Ingold (and Field Studies) for at least getting me thinking again about something that is pretty fundamental to a storyteller’s art.

Field Studies: Learning To Listen

I spent most of last week attending the very excellent Field Studies summer school.

Ostensibly a course in sound appreciation & design for architects, the course actually attracted an excitingly diverse range of people: artists, musicians, journalists, engineers, anthropologists, producers, students, post-grads...  (and architects).

My main motivation for going back to school was the realisation that environmental noise, as well as ‘ambient’ and 'found' sounds,  have inevitably become a significant part of my recent outdoor projects.

The wind, for example, was my prime enemy during my walks in Scotland and Schleswig Holstein, screwing up many a Flipcam clip or Audioboo. The sounds of nature and of the street, though, have also become my friends during Blakewalks and whilst developing TheHaunter. I’ve felt for a while now that instead of trying either to screen out or roughly endure the sounds of drills, of cars, of  planes, of seagulls and crows, of weirs and the wind in the trees, I really should learn to embrace these sounds, capture them properly and use them effectively in the resulting work.

At the very least the quality of the recorded audio that I use in my projects has needed to improve (I guess working with audio pros at BBC Radio 4 for the last few years has finally shamed me).

At Field Studies I was lucky enough to be in a group led and mentored by Esther Venrooy, who insisted that we spend two whole days of our allotted four simply listening and trying to write down on paper what it was that we were hearing. Here's one of my efforts:

The final two days were then spent creating a piece of work based on the paper description of sounds in a space over time produced by someone else in the group. Here's the audio sketch I received (it looks a bit like a Dadaist poem, I think):

Download ShoeFit

And here's my attempt at a sound piece that presents some of the sounds described inthe first section of the sketch:

Maybe their shoes don't fit? by moongolfer

During final presentation I asked the audience to 'fill in the gaps' - to add the sounds from the poem that weren’t in the sound piece itself – using a combination of flash cards and an animated sequence to prompt people into making the appropriate noises of shuffling, dragging feet, bloops, a-choos etc. You can try it yourself if you like by ‘singing’ along to the movie:

This course really helped me to face up to the reality of how hard it is to describe sound or to 'capture' it. In particular, I don't think I really appreciated how sounds slips and slides in and then away over time, so that no two 5-sec sequences are the same. Just by playing this movie twice and adding your vocal sounds a different way or in a different order, you'll understand what I mean.

And that wasn't all that Field Studies provided. When we weren’t working on paper or rapidly prototyping ideas, we were enjoying thought-provoking lectures. (One by Tim Ingold author of 'Against soundscape' I think probably requires a separate post). And then there was the work and thoughts of the other students to process and enjoy (although I had to leave early on the last day so I really missed out in this regard.)

What was most striking about the course in the end was how little time we spent playing with kit or learning how to use microphones or noodling with audio software. This was a bit unsettling at first, but I think I was ultimately persuaded that the gadgetry and the tech were nothing to worry about (well not too much, I guess).

Instead, I came away with a range of different strategies for becoming a more effective listener or hearer (cue distant laughter from my wife) - and I now have a much stronger sense of how one might  document and map a sound space *before* one attempts to record it. In some cases, I now think that hearing, listening and some form of visual mapping may be the *only* thing you need to do and no actual audio recording is required.

Now that really is a curious outcome of a week-long education in sound.

You Shall Go To The Ball: Getting Them in Ones & Twos

I spent some time over the last couple of months helping to develop, script and deploy http://youshallgototheball.com, a storytelling game for people planning to watch the Royal Opera House’s production of Cinderella for free on BBC Big Screens around the UK on July 13th 2011.

This, I have to tell you, is not a massive audience to play to. There were probably only about 10,000(ish) people turning up on the night across 12 screens, most of them in Trafalgar Square  - and a very small percentage of those are interested in both opera, outdoor events *and* social media.

The goal then was not to grab a massive number of ‘hits’ or ‘likes’, but rather to build a storyworld which delivered  to active users simple ways of enhancing their enjoyment of their night out at the Big Screen Ball (taking pics, sharing comments, dressing up, roleplaying, winning comfy cushions).

The more we could then reflect back to the wider (more passive) audience signs of this core group having fun, the better. And then *everyone* could enjoy the animations on the Big Screen that were built up using some of the assets generated by the online audience.

In the end, what will stick with me most of all about this project is the smiley faces of these people holding up their ‘crown’ badges or their cushions, won by joining in a country-wide #crownhunt:

 

A lot of talented people working together just to produce one or two smiley faces might not seem like a great economic or artistic model to you. But for me, this is becoming a rather compelling model for this kind of work – an audience & a production team striving to conjure up a magic moment for just one person THAT ISN’T YOU.

I first cottoned on to this idea with the Kidmapped project, which was a lot of walking, filming, editing, blogging & audience participation that really culminated in one very poor quality image of two people – previously strangers – looking very chuffed with themselves after an unexpected sailing trip.

I’m not sure this measurement of success is going to persuade the ROH to have another go at this kind of work. You Shall Go To The Ball, though, was a very interesting experiment in how to extend a ROH production online in various playful, social ways. And it spurs me on to think of other projects that might grab audiences in ones & twos, rather than hundreds & thousands.

Oh - and, as usual, it was great  to work with a really talented bunch of people drawn from different disciplines: Rachel Coldicutt on development & scripts; JoyceDiDonato on voice-over; and the *mega*-talented animation team of Carol Soutar and Si Clark who responded so creatively & energetically to the user generated content  elicited from the audience (cf #tidying, #partyshoes etc).

Ebb & Flow (and Issues of ‘Quality’)

Some months back, I was hired by Kate Pullinger and Tony Newman to help out with their wonderful Ebb & Flow schools project.

Andy Campbell (the genius behind Dreaming Methods) has done a fantastic job of capturing the energy, wit and imagination with which the kids tackled their digital writing assignment. Inspired by a single trip down the River Orwell, they’ve come up with loads of different ways of telling a story digitally – from short films to newspaper layouts to geolocated content to hand-drawn pictures.

Inspired, in part by Ebb & Flow, I thought it would be salutary to take the sounds and images I’d garnered from a recent walk and try to shape these into some kind of audio slideshow:

All the sounds and images I gathered that day are available to you all online on Audioboo and Flickr. And I’ve also created a map that shows you where we walked:

View Great Expectations in a larger map

What you’ll notice is that I’ve described this as ‘fairly basic’ and, as with quite a lot of my development work of recent years, you’ll find I’ve tried to cover my professional arse by (sort of) apologising for the amateurishness of my approach and the poor ‘quality’ of the media I’m using & making.

What Ebb & Flow demonstrates to me, though, is that ‘quality’ is very definitely in the eye of the beholder. Some of the drawings, the composite images and texts that the children have produced for this project are what I would call ‘pretty rough’. But thanks to the care and professionalism of Andy, Kate and others, it’s still been possible to develop perfectly acceptable sequences of collaborative digital writing.

We need to find more ways to allow people with different levels of ability and varying skillsets to come together in this way, I say. And we need a new aesthetic also, I'd suggest - so that the slick, high res world of professional TV and film doesn't set a standard of production & broadcast that could make it quite difficult to develop meaningful & energetic grassroots audience participation in a narrative project such as this.

Komednikazi: kicking off a new story idea

One thing you must believe: Granny was never a war criminal.

I know it’s hard to think of her even as a soldier, isn’t it? That little old lady who used to come and look after you on Fridays, gave you sweets, cooked your tea, took you to the playground, painted with you, pond-dipped with you, put on your favourite DVDs and read you stories. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

But I have some photos somewhere of her in her uniform. I should dig them out for you. There’s some of her at the Palace even, receiving her medals. She looks amazing – so smart in an olive green jacket and trousers with blood-red piping and a cap with such a broad peak that you can’t really see her beautiful electric blue eyes. What am I saying? I’m pretty sure they’re black & white pics. You’ll have to believe me about the eyes.

Actually, come to think of it, there’re probably some colour photos on the web of her in action. In fact I know there are because I’ve Googled them. There she is standing on a hill outside Komednikazi, sitting in a jeep, surrounded by squaddies pointing authoritatively at the horizon, or poking out if a tank turret squinting through binoculars, or poring over a map as befuddled poshboy captains and lieutenants worry about what to do next, how to impress the general, how to behave in front of a military lady, what to think about a woman leaning over the table and allowing her tags to droop away from her smooth tanned neck...

She was a beautiful, beautiful woman your Granny underneath all that military garb. And her hair! You hardly ever saw her rich red hair – always scrunched into a helmet or a cap, but believe me it was thick and rich and full of deep swirls like a slow-poured Sicilian wine. And immaculate make-up always. Perfect lipstick, smooth foundation, mascara not too thick and the slightest hint of perfume so subtle that you might look round in search of blossom, thinking it was an aroma caught naturally on the breeze rather than something artificial.

That’s how I remember her anyway – sweet-smelling and immaculate. I suppose those filthy South American cigarettes and the stink of engine oil and tank fumes probably masked the perfume when she was younger. You’ll see when I show you the photographs. She’s holding a ciggy in every shot. Which is funny because I don’t remember her smoking - so at some stage she gave up. Maybe when you give up being a soldier you start to pay more attention to your health. Once the immediate danger passes of getting your legs blown off or taking a bullet to the head you’ve got time to ponder something slower and more insidious like the creep of cancer.

Sorry, darling, I’ve strayed into grown up territory already and really I wanted just to tell you a story, a little bit of family history so that you know where you come from, who you’re related to and why some people where you are might connect your name to things you’ve nothing to do with and which aren’t your fault.

Perhaps you’ve already heard people talk about Komednikazi even though it was years ago now. I sometimes think the books they write about it nowadays make it seem more like a fairy story – or perhaps a moral fable. And I suppose that’s how I might like it to be for you: a fairy story or a fable, like the ones Granny herself used to read to you on Fridays - except perhaps I’ll give you more of the guns and the fighting and the puzzles and the ‘levels’ you like to have in your PlayStation games.

Perhaps that’s where I should start. With a puzzle, the first level. And that way we’ll creep up on who Granny is, who she really is, and why you should never have to think ill of her, despite her name, despite her history, despite what other people have thought and written over the years about what happened at Komednikazi.

+++

So here is the first puzzle. For many it is the only puzzle. How did the City finally fall?

27/03/11 Moongolf Hole #3: join us for 'a good walk spoiled'

So I’m setting off on another golfonthemoon mission on Sunday 27/03/11. Do join us if you can. Yet again it has been organised by gonzogeographer extraordinaire Gordon Joly who is using this walk as an excuse to celebrate Gonzo Mean Time. We assemble at 1pm at North Greenwich Station.

My chief aim will be to map out Moon Golf Hole #3 here on earth. The results of our last walk were excellent. By mapping out our route, documenting our progress and gaining much insight from my fellow moongolfers along the way, I came up with Moon Golf Hole #2:

It reminded me very much Google’s map of Apollo 14’s famous moongolf expedition (note pin number 20):

And now see how well these two maps work together. Uncanny!:

For this Sunday I’m looking not only to create a third hole (and then find the right place on the moon where it fits), but also to meet new people who might be useful for my mission*.

As we walk and talk, I’m hoping to document our conversations, learn about others people’s lives here on earth and generally use the civic (and sometime privately-owned) space we're traversing as both a playground and a space research lab. As fellow Splacist and sometime moongolf collaborater Paul Conneally has described it in the past:

"The game of 'golf on the moon' involves a hole being set up somewhere, and a tee being set up somewhere some distance away with a particular significance - a place where ley lines converge, perhaps.  

The players tee off and then pick up their balls to walk back by whatever route takes their fancy to the hole location - along the way they are encouraged to talk to each other and engage with their surroundings - they too become looked at a little more than usual as they are carrying golf clubs.

When they reach the hole location they put their balls back on the ground and putt until they hole out. Everyone wins."

I would add that dressing up as an astronaut, wearing a GPS device for mapping our course and practising a few golf strokes along the way is (for me) also part of the game, but I appreciate I may be playing at a more advanced level than the rest of you. 

DON'T LEAVE SPACE TO THE PROFESSIONALS!

*In case you’re new to my lunar obsession, I should remind you that GolfontheMoon is a long term & resolutely amateur project of mine to get to the moon before I die without the aid of any corporate or government support (aka interference!).

When I finally get there (preferably with David Bowie as my wingman or caddie), I will do what human beings have always done with new wild frontier landscapes: I will create a golf course. The name of my project is Play Golf On the Moon! (with David Bowie). 

Obviously there are several stages to this rather complicated and deliberately ramshackle mission. 

For the moment, I am following NASA’s original plan for its Apollo astronauts; that is, to ‘pretend’ to be on the moon whilst actually goofing around on Earth. I'm also talking to people who can help Bowie and I live long enough to complete the mission. And we're always on the look out for rocket scientists who might build us an affordable mode of transport - preferably out of Lego and the other cheap play components I have at my disposal.

The Haunter

   Yes, I accompany him to places

   Only dreamers know,

   Where the shy hares show their faces,

   Where the night rooks go;

   Into old aisles where the past is all to him, 

   Close as his shade can do, 

   Always lacking the power to call to him,

   Near as I reach thereto!

Joe Flintham and I have been thinking about haunted objects for a while now. Or rather we both like the idea of somehow stuffing digital sounds, images & stories into old analogue bric-a brac.

Joe puts it well in this pdf about his experiment with a photo frame, a chest of drawers and a casket:

“I combine everyday things – furniture, knick-knacks, antiques – with sensors and microchips, and am able to take the movements and actions of people in spaces and the way they interact with objects to generate digital interactive narratives.”

Since then we’ve been getting more ambitious about how this combination of digital story and old-but-smart object could be applied ‘out in the field’ rather than confined to a controlled gallery space. We’re now thinking of the possibilities for taking a small ‘haunted’ box for a walk (yes, it’s walking again, sorry) and I think I may have found the perfect landscape to walk through.

View Where The Night Rooks Go in a larger map

This map shows not only the place where Thomas Hardy was born and where he died, but also the place where his heart is buried (albeit a heart inside a cat inside a biscuit tin, allegedly).

The haunting element is that Hardy wrote a great deal of poetry in 1912-13 just after the death of his first wife; they are poems full of remorse, regret, haunting memories set into landscape and a beautiful ghostly presence just out of reach (Hardy’s second wife must have been thrilled).

Why do you make me leave the house

And think for a breath it is you I see 

At the end of the alley of bending boughs

Where so often at dusk you used to be;

Till in darkening dankness

The yawning blankness

Of the perspective sickens me!

What might it be like to be the carrier of a ‘heart in a box’, an object that might release poetry and sound effects as you walked - and which allowed you to ‘charge’ it with your own emotions and memories and images, depending on what route you took, on where & when you chose to stop for a while – or even on where & when you chose to leave the box or pass it on to another walker/carrier?

Joe has now listed the different kinds of affordance that could be offered by a haunted ‘box’. I have mapped out some routes across the landscape that could be used to take a box from place to place, from cradle to grave.

I imagine us using recitations of 1912-13 poems as the core assets to be ‘unlocked’, as well as sourcing the sounds of his wife's (Emma) Cornwall that Hardy keeps referring to as he mourns in the Dorset landscape.

I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,

The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

When you were all aglow,

And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

What we need to do now is map out the different ways people might ‘play’ with this idea. Here’s some possible models:

1. Walkers carry one box from a single start point to a single end point. Poetry, sounds and story released along the way with a possibility to record reactions & thoughts.


2. Walkers carry one box stopping with it at various locations along various routes. The box releases assets according to how it is manipulated (and perhaps ‘charged’ via USB?) at each waypoint. Opportunities to record reactions and thoughts at various points.


3. Walkers start with one box, swap it for another at a waypoint, carry the new box to a second waypoint, swap for a third box and so on along various routes. The choice of route and waypoint and sequence of boxes changes release of assets and recording options.


4. Two or more walkers each take a box on different route to the same end point. The choices of route (and waypoint in terms of listening & recording?) alters each other’s final listening experience – i.e. one walker can ‘influence’ the other walker’s box attributes (both consciously & unconsciously).
   
   
5. Walkers carry a box along a predefined route, appearing to give the walkers some means of communication with and/or control of a distant figure (an actor) walking another route. The box is perhaps housing the 'soul' of the distant 'ghost' and the walker has to both 'steer' and 'commune'.


6. Walkers actually encounter actors with boxes at points along various routes, engage in a (forked?) dialogue and choose whether to carry a box on to the next encounter, swap boxes, refuse a box etc. A more complex branching narrative and/or game mechanic required here. (And potential cheese factor of street actors needs to be accounted for)

Although I rather like option 5 for its idea of spooky interaction at a distance, we probably should try and keep things simple. Essentially, we need to give the walker a feeling of intimacy with the box and pack the walk itself with poetry and emotion, seemingly embedded both in the carried object and in the landscape that is being passed through. 

By tracking the walkers’ choices of route and encouraging recordings of their thoughts & feelings, it should be possible to ‘charge’ the box with a range of human emotions – to give the box a ‘heart’ and a chance to find its natural resting place. 

The Story: using the wrong tools for the job

Like most other people I came away from Matt Locke’s #thestory2011 with my head bent. It’s taken a few days for me to recover. Now that I’ve calmed down, I’ve been left with two overarching themes rumbling around in my mind.

One is the thread of death, destruction and killing that wove its way through the day’s talks (self-immolating monks, exploding sheds, flesh-eating zombies), and with it came the accompanying methods we adopt to stave off death by ‘immortalising’ ourselves (as a txtbot, as a recorded ‘voice’, as a set of photo portraits, as sets of ‘audited’ data).

The other theme was provoked initially, I guess, by Adam Curtis’s contentious argument that the Internet may not be a particularly effective environment for telling stories, since - if I’m getting this right – most storytellers on the ‘Net (by which I think Curtis means the web) are rather naive or wilfully ignorant about the structures of power and commerce that surround and control the Net, and most Net/web writers are affected too much by the widespread Western fetishism for honouring personal emotion above all, so that we all often fail to offer anything more substantial than narrative ‘whimsy’ (the stories always explore ‘how do I feel about this?’ as opposed to ‘what do we think?’ ‘what should we do?’, or even simply ‘this is what *this* is’).

Whilst I found Curtis’s argument rather patronising and under-researched, it did make me wonder about the tools we choose to use to tell stories. For Karl James who came next onto the stage, the answer might be that we need only our voices and someone to listen to us (“*really* listen to us,” warns James). And then along came Cornelia Parker with images of Dickens’s quill, the Brontes’ nibs, Einstein’s chalk marks.

Why on earth have we bothered, I wonder, to progress from here: a quill, some ink and a sheet of paper; chalks and a board; a speaker and a listener?

To some extent, you see, Curtis is right to worry about what people like me are up to trying to use the web to tell stories. Many of the other speakers at the Story, it seemed to me, did indeed spend a lot of time being interested in deliberately using the wrong tools for the job: the Ministry of Stories using a retail space to 'sell' the idea of reading and writing; Phil Gyford attempting to boil down Pepys Diary entries into elegant tweets; Nick Ryan trying to define landscapes with the lights turned off; Mary Hamilton reducing narrative to ‘froth’ within a zombie LARP; Lucy Kimbell attempting to audit her life and publish it in the style of a company prospectus; Martin Parr getting studio photographers from around the world to make weird and wonderful portraits that he could have made himself; Graham Linehan finding the web to be both an inspiration and a distraction - and a sometimes trickisome way of collaborating with other writers; Cory Doctorow going the long way round to a method for re-inventing books.

Don’t get me wrong. I found all these talks inspiring and thought-provoking. These people are all very VERY brainy. And I’m also of that party that seems to enjoy the wrong way of going about things, loves using tools that weren’t really designed to be used that way, deliberately wants to hi-jack business tools and processes for artistic purposes (notably the PC itself, a corporate/capitalist tool if ever there was one). I am a man after all who once attempted to write a poem in Excel.

It was odd, though, that the strongest desire I came away with from The Story was the desire to write with a quill – a quill perhaps that I had made myself.

I’m not saying I’m about to abandon my computer or this blog account, or quit Twitter. But certainly The Story made me think about trying to use much simpler forms of storytelling, using natural tools designed by artists for artists. And it leaves me asking these questions - for a digital writer, what are those natural tools designed by artists for artists? Where is the electronic equivalent of the quill? And who’s going to make me some internet chalks?