fisharepeopletoo

A Box of Foldups #futr09

If you are at Futuresonic ask me for a copy. I'll have a pocketful.

Foldup launches tomorrow at @Futuresonic09 #futr09

OK so "launches" "at" "Futuresonic", if you put it like that, might not be strictly true - Futuresonic is too cool for comics and monsters after all ;-)

But I'll be at Futuresonic with a pocket full of Foldups which I will be leaving around the place and handing out to unsuspecting strangers.

WannaWeeWee, Frisboing and Sweetish

WannaWeeWee , who lives in the London Eye, has taps for fingers and metal bucket feet. He creeps up behind small children and makes the sound of gently running water.

Frisboing , who lives in Hyde Park, lollops along on gangly legs throwing frisbees from a sack with eight arms, chased by a pack of dogs.

Sweetish , who lives in Tate Modern, is a jellyfish floating high in the turbine hall that trails long silky tentacles to steal from packets of sweets

"Roll up roll up for Foldup!"

Foldup issue 1 will be available on Wednesday 13th May.

Collective Dostoyevsky

Are the collectively written archives of places like One Sentence the great literary novels of the 21st century?

Think I'm kidding?

Listen to Rosamond Vincy talking through Secret Tweet:

 "I will leave my husband if he loses his job. I do love him, but life's short and I want to live mine in comfort."

For a dinner hour short story rather than 1000 page epic, try Secret Life of Cumbria .

"Please be single."

40 Prayers for Atheists

Please let me have some battery left.
Please let me have the right change.
Please let them miss the penalty.
Please let them score.
Please be single.
Please don't be late.
Please don't let me forget.
Please don't make me remember.
Please let it be negative.
Please let it be positive.
Please don't change your mind.
Change your mind. Please.
Please make the sun come out.
Please make this last for ever.
Please make it stop.
Please give me a drink.
Please let there be a splash of milk left.
Please make the room stop spinning.
Please be the right answer.
Please accept our offer.
Please hurry up in there.
Please have snowed.
Please be found.
Please don't let them find me.
Please let me turn the clock back.
Please remember to put your clocks back.
Please have my size.
Please be enough petrol.
Please stay on green.
Please be open at this time.
Please let me get to sleep.
Please let me wake up.
Please let me speak.
Please let me be listened to.
Please let it be me instead.
Please be OK.
Please be the right way.
Please be mine.
Please forgive me.
Please. Let me get a signal.

This is what I would have done if I'd gone in Nexus cafe's 40 Days of Public Solitude

London's most advanced and sophisticated mobile platform - the No. 4 bus.

Over the last year I've been working with Jo Claessens and Jo Quaye from BBC Learning Development on Stories from the No. 4

We wanted to find somewhere the BBC could go and make something together with its audience (or perhaps the people who aren't its audience?).

And to find a journey the BBC could go on to share learning resources in the places the audience were.

The place we came up with was the No. 4 bus between Archway and Waterloo.

A bus journey is a great way to tie together everyday stories - it has a shifting beginning and end for everyone who gets on, but invokes a bit of curiosity because no one ever goes right from one end to the other except the drivers; time on the bus can be a reflective in-between moment in which we might be glad of something to read or learn; all sorts of people pass through and pass by a bus journey but the journey also has its own changing character as it moves into the city.

And in an old city like London there is also quite a lot of history and writing layered onto the route, from Charles Dickens to, of course on the route of the No. 4, Nick Hornby.

Some of this "professional content" is part of Stories from the No. 4, but we wanted it to be a process in which the BBC and the people along the route made something together, so we had to think of a way of letting those people tell their own stories.

We came up with a workshop that first of all taught people a tiny little bit of film making awareness - A BBC editor, Kumail Tayyebkhan, went along as the professional expert, and I think this role is quite valuable because people enjoy the sense they are learning something useful.

Then the next part was a structured way for the participants to use the pocket-sized film making equipment they were already familiar with - the video camera on their mobile phone - to record rich autobiographical fragments.

Once again it's this structured process, no matter how light the structure, that is what makes it work - a blank page staring back at you saying "go on, create something" is frightening for both professionals and amateurs.

Despite this workshop structure happening with the hardest possible group of participants - people on an ESOL course, mostly teenagers and newly arrived in London, learning English as a second language! - it worked.

Taken alongside the work I did with Lee Hutchinson at Northampton Museum on Mobile X, and even the very early camera phone project Postcards from Fenland (in which we used the same structure of a skills introduction from a professional photographer first, then gave a group of teenagers a camera phone to share - this was 2004 when most people still had phones without cameras - to record a picture message diary of their summer) the Stories from the No. 4 workshops show that it is possible, by using everyday-mobile, to engage with participants straight away, in any context, and get them to create rich audio-visual as well as text fragments. I wondered whether or not this would be true because talking into a camera is much more unnerving than writing.

The question then is how to present those fragments as a whole story in a meaningful way.

A bus journey is great for that, both to make a narrative structure and as a place to hand out the stories to the people for whom they will be most meaningful - the people who are part of the story by being on the bus.

This handing-out was the second part of Stories from the No. 4 - we decided to distribute the stories to people by bluetooth while they were sitting on the number 4 bus, along with literacy and numeracy learning games made by the bus drivers (which is a really nice touch that I can't claim any credit for).

The bluetooth buses are now trundling up and down the route until 20th April, so if you are going anywhere between Archway and Waterloo look out for the number 4s marked TP 1, TP 9 and TP 16 and turn your bluetooth on.

After that we are hoping there will be a small exhibition in Islington Museum, dates to be confirmed.

I go into the woods, remove my clothing, light a cigarette, sit in a stream, close my eyes and listen

Me and Alison are making a comic.

Issue one will be "How do you escape?" and it will be out in May.

Bruce Sterling Hates Me! #sxsw

The best bit of South By Southwest has been Bruce Sterling's talk in which he spent most of it shouting angrily at us for not living up to our responsibilities as an audience.

Instead of keeping our side of the bargain and paying proper attention, both when we should be present and participating in the room and throughout the long term relationship between us and the artists we claim to like, we are spending all our time first twittering when we should be listening, then pirating books and records, not bothering to work hard enough (in fact not needing to bother at all) to search out and own obscure records on vinyl or second hand paperbacks.

He went further than decrying piracy and pretty much said everything digital was shit and was killing art.

And he proved his contempt by eating crisps and drinking beer all the way through the talk and giving away copies of his book to anyone under twenty five, helping them to understand what he was doing by explaining that books were "lots of words in a row".

In return for us not being good audiences any more, artists are going to back out of their side of the deal.

No more H.P. Lovecraft spending a lifetime dedicated to the service of the horror writing community of America, helping everyone who turned to him, with their personal as well as professional problems, then dying in poverty at 42.

And much worse for the audience in the room, no more open invites to Bruce Sterling's house for a party during SXSW.

We didn't deserve to be asked.

Viva Monstruos! A Story for Mixed Realities #uksxsw #sxswi #sxsw

Where now stand shops, factories and offices were once streams, woods and hillsides.

And every one of those places, even the loneliest tree standing by itself, had a monster to guard it.

The place belonged to the monster, and the monster belonged to the place.

So when towns and cities were built, the monsters had to stay, trapped under the tall buildings made of brick and stone and concrete.

And there they remained, for nearly 200 years.

Until now...