fisharepeopletoo

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.

The World's Worst Board Game

With five other artists, I was commissioned a year ago to look at an organisation called Community Network for Manchester (cn4m), which exists to try and grow, and then make the most of, connections between voluntary community groups in the city in the arts, health, community safety (crime), transport and so on.

Seeings as I consider myself to know a bit about this kind of stuff already, and fisharepeopletoo even started life as a record of my time at Newcastle University looking at evolution, cooperation, networks and so on, I thought this piece of work would be falling off a log.

So of course it didn't turn out like that at all.

I'm pretty much of an uncritical supporter of cn4m - things like cn4m might not always work, but they've got to be tried - but this was one of those times when the person who got most out of making something was me, which I feel a bit bad about given how much hard work and dedication goes into the network.

I ended up making the world's worst board game to illustrate three of the parts of cn4m - arts, health and community safety.

Trying to invent a board game showed up how much I don't know about board games, which is why it's so bad as a game. It looks the part, for which I can take no credit, because Trae England made it all by hand out of old monopoly boards and craft materials.

But its rules are so limited as to be almost pointless - the challenge is very one dimensional - and the board design itself looks like Monopoly, which isn't the right metaphor for a network of community groups, but because I had so little board game vocabulary I didn't have the confidence to stray from the most obvious model.

Making a board game though, no matter how feeble, fitted in perfectly with the kind of stuff I've started doing in the context of the Sandpit events (Free London's Monsters and Monster Hunt [coming soon]), and taken together the board game and Sandpit have been a great hands-on introduction to thinking about game rules as a way of inviting and holding participation.

I've always approached participation by setting up processes in which people make something - a monster, or a City Poem, for example - and even though I got all my early schooling in how creative participation works through taking part in creative writing games at the Poetry Business, I've only just opened my eyes to participation as a process of trying to win a game.

What do we make that is of value when we participate by trying to win a game? That's a lovely question for me, though I'm sure everyone except me already knows the answer.

Anyway, the exhibition is called One and All, and the preview event is this Thursday 2 April 2009, 6-9pm at the Castlefield gallery.

I guess there will be free beer, so if you're in Manchester, come along and marvel at the world's worst board game (you'll quickly find I'm not kidding!). And there will be five great pieces of work by proper artists there as well, to make the trip worthwhile.

"A bald man with a furry orange pencil case"

"When I walked into the Institute of Contemporary Arts(ICA) on Wednesday night, a bald man passed me a furry orange pencil case and several sheets of white paper. He fished a crumpled set of instructions out of his pocket. "Free London's Monsters," it said at the top. He pointed up the stairs to the bar, told me to grab a drink and get drawing."

A nice video of people making monsters at the ICA is here.

I went to quite a lot of trouble to get the furry orange pencil case.

I wanted something that was fun, welcoming and made sure that the participants weren't put off by thinking they had to produce fantastic drawings - which was the reason for the glitter glue and big chunky felt tips as well.

I was also careful not to go for a pencil case that seemed ironic and cool - for example I saw some with boy bands on  - and would make participants think the event was one in which they might be laughed at by the ironic and cool proper artists.

Handing out felt tips and glitter glue from a furry orange pencil case in the Institute of Contemporary Art, no less, meant that the joke was on me - I was happy to look silly and uncool, and so people would feel comfortable taking part themselves.

Bike-Eating Monster

Bobolink, a new monster set free in London by illustrator Edward Ward, inspired by the thieves who stole his bike saddle from outside a pub.

Everything That Is Wrong With Our Shitarse Country Made Flesh In One Frail Human Being

A couple of weeks ago I was banging on as usual about what everyone could already see for themselves - that the reason we are in such a fine mess was because Margaret Thatcher deliberately wiped out any counterbalances to the City of London (financial services industry).

This meant there was no one left with any political authority to say

 "letting 28-year-olds make massive bets with other people's money, pay themselves billions of pounds of bonuses based on what they claim the bets are going to win some time in the future, [and] retire at 35 to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil importing business because they've always been passionate about the finest ingredients"

isn't the only possible way to run a country.

The pixels weren't dry on the page before the Independent had a double page feature (I can't be bothered to find a link to it - why would I make this up?) on Harry Blain, the owner of the Haunch of Venison art retail outlet.

Harry was brought up in Surrey, went to Eton, and was a stockbroker before he retired to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil, sorry, art gallery in Mayfair.

You see what I mean?

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...

What Are "Stories for Mixed Realities"?

I've been trying to write a definition of "stories for mixed realities" but I've got lost.

So far, I've had a go at the "mixed reality" bit: "mixed reality is the sense, whether we like it or not, that other people are always present, caused by the physically, socially and psychologically pervasive nature of connectedness through broadband, wifi, "social media"*, mobile phones and so on.*"

I don't think that works, and it's just a badly remembered version of things I've read elsewhere.

It doesn't really say what I want to say, which is "the mixed reality is in our heads."

This bit though: "mixed reality is the sense that other people are always present" is maybe why I've got so keen on unrealism in stories for mixed realities - ghosts, monsters, folk stories, enchanted things and invisible worlds.

After all, wireless networks are invisible entities that haunt places, and ghosts are invisible entities that haunt places.

And anyone who has had their heart broken in our age of flickr, twitter, facebook, IM buddy lists and mobile phones will know how powerfully ghosts from the past can haunt the present. It's turning us all into Miss Havishams! (It bloody is me anyway, I'm sitting here in my wedding dress typing this!)

And what about stories?

Again, I'm miles off the right track:

"Mixed realities are when we experience more than one story at once.

Imagine two teenagers on a first date going to see a film.

The first story they experience is the story of teenagers going on a first date to see a film, and all the possibilities and dangers that holds for them.

The second story is the story of the film.

They experience this second story at the same time as the first, until the credits roll and the lights go up."

There is some truth (or truism) in there somewhere, but then I started talking about cinemas, TV, radio, and paperback novels, and which was the best mixed reality technology.

"Cinemas are venues for mixed realities, but their stories are stuck within the walls of the building. "

But the mixed reality is not about the technologies so much as our heads.

In fact headspace would be a handy word to use if it wasn't so naff: "mixed reality is the space in our heads".

The only other bit of what I wrote that seemed worthwhile was that paperback novels are bloody brilliant at creating mixed realities.

So, I'm in the woods and can't see a path out.

Oh well. Time to stop for a bite of this delicious gingerbread house.

*"social media" is in quote marks because it's one of those phrases like "new media" which isn't going to last, and I'm using it here as a shorthand.

*"so on" will come to include things like RFID tagged objects - "the internet of things" - but not yet.

South by Southwest Interactive "We are practically related" #uksxsw

I'm off to South by Southwest Interactive, thanks to the lovely Arts Council of England.

I guess there must be a handful of people who read this weblog who live in America ("I guess there must be a handful of people who read this weblog." is more precise!) and so might be going to SXSW?

fisharepeopletoo is such a specialist publication (apart from my ranting every now and then) that if you are reading this, not only do we share interests, we are practically related.

If you are at SXSW and we meet, I'll be so pathetically chuffed that you won't have to buy a drink all night.

I can be collared by emailing andrew at blinkmedia dot org or through the SXSW site by my pen name "Andrew Wilson" or my real name fisharepeopletoo.

And watch out for Free Austin's Monsters!

I Just Don't Like Being Taken for a Mug

Saturday's Guardian sport had an "interview" with the Fulham footballer Danny Murphy that was blatantly cut-and-pasted from an email written by a PR person from the club.

How could anyone think that this sounds like real human speech patterns?:

"Like them, Fulham are now an efficient unit, hard to beat. We don't play with great width, attacking wingers and dribblers, but with effective team players who get it down and play."

And that is just two lines taken from a speech of no less than 140 words long, end to end.

Danny Murphy's words are in quotation marks, next to a big photo of the player, under the heading "Saturday interview", so to me that is claiming it's him talking.

I'm sure this happens all the time - this isn't the first time I've thought "that doesn't sound like a person talking" - and that I'm the only one who isn't already in on the joke. I'm not even all that bothered - the tabloids are probably nothing but.

I just don't like being taken for a mug when it's so badly written.

It must be easy to build or adapt software that scours news sites for anything within quotes, analyses the word patterns and marks up those that were written by PRs - it probably already exists somewhere. If you mashed this up (are they still called "mash ups"?) with PR company client lists and the names of in-house PRs and cross referenced it with journalists' names, you could map who was lying on behalf of who (should that be "whom"?).

You could probably even build in some sort of quality scale to identify the PRs who were crap writers and which journalists were laziest.