I’m at Shift Happens with Geraldine and George from Apples & Snakes and Chris Unitt from Meshed Media.

Now the talk I was going to give this afternoon for Shift Happens has slightly changed and what we’re going to do now is make some poems together.  It’s an idea we’ve been working on with Andrew Wilson from Blink Media, we’re exploring some ideas on making poetry together.

We’re putting this idea out there early because we’d like to share our process with you and do some creating.  Have a go…….

Journey Poems is a creative writing game about journeys and destinations.

It can be played by anyone. We don’t have rules but here are some instructions.

1- When you make a journey, start a text message with the name of your destination (all one word, no spaces, e.g. Oxfordroad) then a space

2- Write about whatever’s interesting – where you are going, or where you’ve come from, or what you are passing, or the other people on the journey with you

3- Write a poem that’s as long as a text

4- Send it to Sarah on +44 7545 596603

Poems will be posted together as comments here on the My Place Or Yours blog www.myplaceoryours.org.uk

This is a partnership project with Blink Media and www.thumbprintcity.com/

Costs and Privacy – It only costs the same as sending a normal text to your friend’s phone. You will not be signed up for anything, ever.

Byron’s blog – A dubious quip for Scroobius Pip (or how it feels to fail your peers) got me thinking and reminded me….
Blimey, in less than a couple of weeks, I’m going to be giving a talk about My Place Or Yours at a conference called Shift Happens 2.0. (http://www.pilot-theatre.com/redesign/default.asp?idno=17061)
My brain is full of what I’m hoping to say but at the same time I want to get it right and explain what it’s really about.So it feels like a good idea to blog on My Place about this to share some thoughts with you and get some feedback for the talk.

I’ve just arrived back from Texas physically exhausted but utterly energised.  One of the reasons for this mental upbeatness is this photo  – it’s a scene from my notebook written in one of the many seminars I went to at the SXSW Interactive Festival.  It’s made me even more excited by the aims and potential of My Place Or Yours and creating online places to share to understand our work together.

It’s been a great week for digital innovation and literature at SXSWi.  The company Six to Start won best in show for their online project with Penguin – http://wetellstories.co.uk/ – Six writers commissioned to write digital fiction that could only be told online.

In the panel session Six to Start were hosting, I said how pleased I was that literature had been championed on this platform and that I would take this achievement back to the community I work with and celebrate.  So in writing this post I am keeping my promise.

It’s about connecting and collaboration.  During my time at SXSWi, I’ve learned more about the possibilities and potential of interactivity for performance poetry and also working with other interactive genres and specialisms who are asking themselves similar questions regarding audiences, infrastructure development and creative opportunities.

The delegation I was part of were asked to blog our experiences of the festival, and they certainly did.  The huge amount of blogging from the group was fantastic to read.  The posts included so many different approaches to style, opinion and analysis.  I won’t deny that blogging is a relatively new thing for me and it was great to be around people who were very comfortable with this way of working. It gave me more confidence to blog my thoughts and comment on others in a more immediate way – to think of the conversation and not the statement.

In light of this, I thought I’d share with you some of the conversations that have happened this week, here is a link -  http://www.ished.net/projects/sxsw/?page_id=2

I’d be interested to see what you think and how it might connect to you.

This week I’ll be off on a plane to Austin, Texas for the SXSW Interactive Festival.

http://sxsw.com/interactive/

It’s going to be an opportunity to talk about My Place Or Yours and performance poetry.  I’m going with a delegation of people from the UK.  We all come from different places and do different things and that’s exciting to me.  We’ve met up a couple of times and as I get to know them better I’m fascinated by our similarities and the connections we’re making.

Texas is somewhere I’ve never been and when I talk to people about it they ask – what will it be like?  Is it cowboy country? Can you bring me back a stetson? – and it’s got me thinking.

I actually have no idea what Austin is like, its history, culture or politics.  How do we talk about places and the people in them?  One of the reasons I’m going to Austin is to make links with pioneers in digital technology and create connections on behalf of writers as well as explore the interactive possibilities.  But I don’t think that the people who live in Austin are necessarily who I’ll be meeting.  Instead, they’ll come from all parts of the world.  The common denominator is interactivity.

So I’ve made a poetry robot… well it’s an interface – that is a device which connects audiences and artists without the artist being physically in the space.  The words are Byron’s and the technology is Neil’s from Greyworld.

I have lots of questions… from different perspectives – producers, artists and audiences.

How do you communicate quality?  How do you navigate interactivity?  How do you connect with the online community?  How do you build audiences in a digital environment?

I’d be really interested to know what your questions are and your thoughts on the ones I’ve just asked.

I think that’s it for now.  I’m packing for the journey and I look at my book shelf for something to read on the plane.  I pick up The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski.  It’s a series of lectures that deal with the concept of otherness in a globalised world.  It kind of fits.  I’ll add it to the other things I’ve chosen to be important – my newly bought iphone, digital camera, specially bought notebook and pen for the occasion and the poetry robot/interface that I’ve made with Byron and Neil.