fisharepeopletoo

Occupy Bristol and Free All Monsters! @Occupybristoluk @OccupyLSX

Monster Makers from Rossendale in Pennine Lancashire.

 

Press release, apologies for the press release tone.

Calling All Bristol Monster Makers

Saturday 3rd December, 1pm-4pm

Bristol children, and even grown ups, have the chance to create monsters that will travel all around the world as part of a new mobile phone game.

To make a monster, children use the power of their imagination and the pens, paper and art materials provided to conjure it up. The monsters are then uploaded into a mobile phone game called Free All Monsters!

The game has players all around the world who use their mobile phone as a Monstervision Machine to look for invisible monsters visiting their local streets, and monsters created in Bristol will regularly be seen as far away as America and Australia, as well as on the streets of Bristol.

So far more than 300 monsters have been created by children and grown ups, and these monsters have been spotted more than 4000 times in total around the world. Children who take part are awarded a unique Monster Makers badge.

Andrew Wilson, of the Advanced Monstrology Institute said “Making monsters is a great way to practise being creative, and to imagine the world differently.”

Adults as well as children are welcome to come along and make monsters. Dr Paul Coulton, also of the Institute, explained “Grown ups often say that they aren't creative, but we've found that everyone enjoys drawing monsters if they give themselves chance.”

As well as monster making there will also be a monster spotting trail in which players must find monsters living in Bristol city centre and prove their Advanced Monstrology skills to earn a Monster Spotters badge. Families and grown ups who want to take part in the monster spotting trail need to have an iPhone and should download the Free All Monsters app, but there is no need for an iPhone to take part in Monster Making.

The monster making session and monster spotting trail are both free events as part of a range of activities for this week's Community Day at Occupy Bristol.

Families and grown ups should come to College Green between 1pm and 4pm on Saturday 3rd December.

To spot monsters made in Bristol at any time, download the Free All Monsters app.

 

The respected monster Mean Green Giraffe Bee.

 

How To Split the Lib Con Coalition and Have Fun Doing It. #ge2010 #ge2015

We've woken up with a whole new political rule set, and everything from now on is going to be lots of fun.

The rules of politics in the age of coalitions are about listening, negotiating, collaborating and coming up with unexpected solutions.

But most of all the new rules are about shifting alliances.

Everything is always to play for.

And in our day and age, "everything to play for" is the best and most beautiful state to be in.

Everything is fluid, uncertain, changeable, unexpected, chaotic and complex. Any state we are in from now on is always just another state waiting to be born.

From this morning onwards all sorts of wonderfulness from science and economics and even maths have come into play. Ideas about self organising systems, game theory, evolutionary biology, autopoiesis, complexity science and systems thinking, all of which I can't even pretend to properly understand, are suddenly our guiding principles.

And one of the things these ideas reveal is that small actions can have big effects, which is great if we don't want to wait around for the over-networked posh idiots to sort the world out for us. Things that we can all do in structures outside of party politics matter. In complex non-linear systems the small things have unexpected consequences, it's a mathematical fact!

There are lots of big challenges of course, but that is great because you can't have a decent story or a decent game without risk of failure.

And best of all is that this new rule set is perfect for, and demands, creativity. Political systems become a subject for creativity.

I read a smshing definition of creativity in neuroscience the other day: "creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way. "

And if nothing else, what was sadly sadly missing over the last 13 years was anyone ever doing anything "non obvious". They made an obsession of finding out the obvious and doing it. No one ever, ever, took a step back and looked at the system as a whole and said "ok what is really going on and how can we really change it?"

For all the battered nobility of his last few days, all Brown ever wanted to do was sit in the centre and command the world to change based on the force of his will and his absolute understanding, and his chosen mechanism for doing so was to throw tax revenues at it skimmed from the City.

But the world just doens't obey that command any more, if it ever did.

So here is a policy to test out in breaking up the current coalition:

Local income tax.

It's a Lib Dem policy I think anyway. The Cameron wing of the Conservatives would have to pretend to be in favour given how much they have gone on about localism, but the devolutionary implications would be too much for the right. If it passes then the control of revenues and the autonomy that goes with it will allow Labour to build up the independence of its English regional strongholds and push for greater freedom from London regardless of which coalition is in power there. And a hundred city states all experimenting with the rule sets of government is million times more creative.

God knows whether that would work or not in any way.

But that's not the point. The point is the process. Release early release often. Prototype. Beta test. Declare a republic in Sunderland and see what happens.

That is the world we are in now, and it is miles better than the old one, regardless of who it is that thinks they are in power.



A great essay about creativity and experimentation in political rule sets here.

A useful primer about systems thinking here.

A bonkers and almost mystical introduction to autopoiesis here.

Playmakers and Rule Sets #playmakers

I watched the documentary Playmakers last week.

It's a very entertaining and funny film that brings together lots of good reference points for "pervasive games" or "playful social experiences in public space".

(The subject is still so happily undecided that there is no name to cover even Barg/iglab/Sandpit and all the things that could be at home there.)

One of the questions the film asked was "Why now for this stuff?" and answering "why now?" was a part where I might have added more than is in Playmakers.

The reason being that I think the answer to "why now" is portable gadgets, going right back to the Sony Walkman and ghetto blasters (and for fun why not include skateboards?), because they've made people sharply aware of the unsaid, invisible, unconscious rules of acting in public spaces.

Everyone has these experience daily - the rules are being negotiated, or not, on the fly.

I was in a cafe the other day where there were lots of people working on laptops, me included, with phones on the tables, so this was a place where the agreed rules clearly are "this place has been colonised by people who come here to work, which means they'll need to talk on phones sometimes", but when one bloke's work-related conversation went on past what seemed to me, without having any idea how long it had been, like a reasonable length of time I started to get pissed off, thinking "why don't you go outside? There are people trying to work in here!".

But how on earth were we going to find out exactly what the rules were in order to stick by them, or not?

The rules aren't new, they were always there, and we don't need them written down, we never have, but portable gadgets make us conscious of them, everywhere, all the time.

A mobile phone is an X ray machine for the rules of public spaces.

Quiet coaches on trains are an example of what happens when these negotiations on the fly come up against rules to make the rules non negotiable.

I hate sitting in quiet coaches because you always know that someone is going to break the "no mobiles" rule, which means everyone else is going to feel like they ought to say something to them, not because they are bothered by mobiles, but because of an instinctive sense of fairness - if I have to stick to the rules, so do you.

That makes it sound like mobile phones challenge the "rules" in a trivial way, and that not using your phone in the quiet coach is just bowing down to The Man.

But in fact it's the other way round.

This emotion of wanting to punish rule breakers connects with game theory as it's understood in biology, economics and politics - that we've evolved to cooperate, and are very good at it, and don't need anyone except ourselves to police cooperation, but one of the conditions of cooperation is to punish "defectors", people who try to get the benefit of cooperation without paying the costs (for example if you want to conserve and share irrigation water amongst small farmers, what you need is either lots of policemen with guns and a legal and prison system, or a long standing traditional rule set for making clear, agreed quotas and for publicly shaming people who break them - this year's nobel prize for economics was for the study of rule sets for collective action).

One of the things that I like about Charter Cities is that it brings an awareness of the power of rule sets, and the way they operate - that the outcomes are always emergent, and you can never write enough rules to proscribe all the possible outcomes - into politics, saying (this is my sneaky paraphrase) that you can't dictate good ends, just put good rule sets (good means) in place and wait to see what happens.

And if you looked at contemporary Britain, what you'd probably say, if you were honest, was "it's not fair." The rule set has got messed up somehow. Or ignored. Or it's too easy to defect and get away with it.

In fact, once you start looking at the world through a lens of looking for rule sets, it's quite hard to stop seeing them all over the place, everywhere from nature to how we act in cafes. What is so coherent and timely about Barg/iglab/Sandpit is that they let us rehearse, and have fun with, our observation and negotiation of rule sets.

I know that is quite a lot to claim for a mobile phone to have revealed. But I guess if it's an iphone?

La Noche de los Muertos and igfest 09

I'd been waiting to write about igfest 09 till I'd photographed and uploaded the Book of Monsters, but seeings as it's nearly 2 months later and I still haven't had chance, here we go...

I played La Noche de los Muertos on the Friday evening. I'd never taken part in one of the city-wide chase games before, so there was some "always remember the first time" added awe from not knowing what to expect, but it was wonderful.

The Day of the Dead theme was the perfect clothing for the chase structure (which is to navigate from point to point across a city centre while being chased by baddies).

I wouldn't want to understate the pure joy of being chased around by zombies, but what really made it was the thoroughness and detail with which the Day of the Dead theme was carried through, and the care, wit and artistry that had been put into the little theatrical events at each checkpoint.

From the zombie Mariachi band to play us off, to the Zombie Marilyn in her grotto singing Happy Deathday Mr President to the red London bus ride to the cemetery at the end, the amount of effort that had gone into these was fantastic, and each checkpoint really did feel like a reward for getting so far.

At the final checkpoint we all made ourselves skeleton masks so that we could be ancestors of the dead, and this was a nice touch as well, involving our artistry in the making of the event, and making a keepsake, as well as "making" meaning to be there as an audience.

I took my god daughter Cherry along, and 14 was a great age to do something like this because she was happy to throw herself into screaming the loudest and running the fastest while keeping up just enough teenage coolness, and that made it even more unselfconsciously fun for me.

The final section was a walk through the very spooky and overgrown Arnos Vale cemetery at night, which was a great location, more of a damp, decaying wood with broken gravestones between the trees than an ordered graveyard, and one that I was glad to have seen just in itself.

Right in the middle of the walk through the cemetery me and Cherry managed a horror film moment so comic-dumb you couldn't have scripted it by slowing down because we thought we'd seen a zombie in the trees, then realising by the light of mobile phones that "it's only a statue" just as two real zombies jumped out from the other side of the track, which had us both screaming so loud (I changed mine into a  pretend  scream almost straight away of course) that it left everyone, living and undead, rolling around on the floor laughing.

The rest of the weekend I spent on Free All Monsters! The igfest base was in a great spot on a busy walkway next to the harbour, which made it very open to passers-by who just happened to be on an afternoon out and looking for something to do.  Most of these very warm pictures are from igfest and a good guide to the sunny feel of the whole weekend.




Big thank yous to the Simons and Helen for igfest and Clare Reddington for a space on La Noche de los Muertos at the last minute.

Free All Monsters!

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Free All Monsters! is a game for children, families and even grown ups.

You'll use a Magical Monstervision Machine to look for invisible monsters living in the streets around you, then answer questions about the monsters to show your monster spotting skills, and set free your own monsters for other players to find.

To play Free All Monsters! you'll need a Magical Monstervision Machine, a Monster Spotter's Guide for the place you want to look for monsters, and some felt tip pens and paper.

 

 

 

Follow the picture clues on your Monster Spotter's Guide, and they will lead you to monsters that live in the streets around you.

Photos of players at Hide and Seek, London, and igfest, Bristol by Liz Milner, Paul Coulton and Andrew Wilson.

 

 

 

When you get close to a monster's lair, use the Magical Monstervision Machine to look for the monster.

 

When you see the monster, look at it very carefully.

 

 

On your Spotter's Guide you will find some questions about the monster, to test your monsterology skills.

 

First you have to answer a question to show that you have watched the monster carefully, then you have to add scientific knowledge by coming up with a new theory to answer a question such as “ Where does this monster go on holiday and what does it do there?”

 

Even though some monsters look very fierce and scary, they are really very old creatures who look after the places where they live, so they should never be captured or harmed, just watched.

 

 

 

Every monster that you find was set free by somebody else, and when you have finished looking for monsters you can set free some monsters of your own.

 

 

All you need to set free monsters is your imagination and some felt tip pens, paper and anything else you want to use to make a monster.

 

 

When you have set free your monster it can be made part of the game for other people to find using the Magical Monstervision Machine.

 

 

Where Do Monsters Live?

Monsters live outside, in the streets, squares and parks of the places where you go everyday or go to visit sometimes. The monsters live there all the time, in the cold and wind and rain as well as on warm sunny days.

 

The places where monsters live are the places where everyone should be able to go, not just real places, but places in their imaginations as well, and the job of the monsters is to guard those places, and make sure they are always open, free and welcoming for anyone who wants to go there.

 

Wherever you find a monster, it means that somebody cares about that place, and has set free a monster to live there and guard it.

 

 

Where Do Monsters Come From?

“No Gods, just Monsters!”

There haven't always been towns and cities, full of people hurrying to and fro to school or work.

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 on the moors, 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 200 years.

Until now.

Because the monsters have got very grumpy.

They are fed up of people walking on top of them, and they are really fed up of people squashing them under big, heavy cars.

They want to live on the streets in the places that belong to them, the places where they used to live, a long time ago.

Every time you play Free All Monsters!, whether you are using the Magical Monstervision Machine or setting free your own monsters for other people to find, you are helping to make a world that has monsters living in it again.

And that is a much better place for people to live in as well!

 

Children, families and grown ups have been setting free monsters in Manchester, in London at Sandpit and Hide and Seek, in Bristol at igfest, in Austin, and in Leeds at Pavilion gallery.

Isambard Kingdom MONSTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #IGFEST09

Blot Out the Artists!

I had a smashing time at the Hide and Seek Weekender.

The Magical Monstervision Machine Mk2 and Spotter's Guide got a very positive response from families and children, and there were some unexpected insights.

The Fluffy Orange Pencil Case brought many monsters to life.

But most of all, having lots of children running around made the always unselfconscious and enthusiastic Sandpit atmosphere into one of the warmest and most enjoyable events I've been involved in.

Big thanks yous to the Cell of Inventors for the Monstervision Machine, Holly, Alex and Rosie for the invitation to such a fantastic event and Aoife for helping out on the day so ably.

The Mk 2 Machine in Action

The Mk 2 Magical Monstervision Machine in action capturing monsters in Lancaster.

Big thank yous to Paul Coulton and the cell of inventors in Lancaster.

Magical Monstervision Machine

I've been in communication with a cell of eccentric inventors based in a ramshackle unmarked building deep in the grounds of Lancaster University.

These inventors have built a Magical Monstervision Machine, which can be used to reveal the presence of the ancient monsters that lurk on our city streets, invisible to human eyes.

Trials are still at their earliest stages, but last week I successfully used a Magical Monstervision Machine Mark 1 to discover for the first time several monsters in their lairs.

Here are the secret blueprints of the Mark 2 Machine.

Your computer will now self-destruct in 10, 9, 8...

"we are at the stage of the invention of the television camera"

"In the development of the internet and connected, two-way media, we are at the stage of the invention of the television camera...

We have not yet created media or entertainment native to the internet. We will not for a while, it’s going to take us time."

From the blog of one of the blokes who runs the internet story company Six to Start.

I'm not sure about it being the invention of the TV camera - "birth of cinema moment" sounds cooler.

But otherwise I'd pretty much agree with that.

Which is why I've been trying to figure out  what are stories for mixed realities?

Here are some of the states of the art  so far.