Been a bit quiet on the blog front. Reckon we owe you a catch up, so here goes:

My City, My Art

With Pecha Kucha Coventry, we’re organising a web-enabled artists conference as part of the Twin Story project – linking up artists in Coventry and its twin city Volgograd. Entitled ‘My City, My Art’, the event is in two parts – the first half is powered by Pecha Kucha and the second relies on the magic of skype! It’s an event for artists, and those interested in the way cities inspire them – we’d love you to join us.

When: 1 March 2016 15:00 – 17.00
Where: The Tin Music & Arts, Canal Basin, Leicester Row, Coventry

The Difference Engine

We’re delighted to announce that the Paul Hamlyn Foundation has invested in a years worth of development on the Difference Engine. This means that we are currently recruiting a technologist to work alongside us and we will shortly be getting in touch with companies (and audience members!) who want to partner us in testing it (Hurray!).

Complicite are continuing to use the Difference Engine to caption their extraordinary binaural show, The Encounter. It is at the Barbican at the moment and heading up to Home in Manchester in March.

At the weekend, as reported in the previous post, Complicite trialled our captioning system The Difference Engine on their extraordinary and captivating show The Encounter. Without resorting to spoilers, The Encounter is told mostly through sound – and (among other things) powerfully explores memory – and the way that the brain processes, stores, re-plays and communicates memories and thoughts when we are stripped of the objects and devices that we now rely on to help record and subsequently prop up our recall/playback.

As the binaural sound is such a key feature, not only in the storytelling but in the audience’s experiencing of the story in a truly visceral way, it may seem a particularly challenging show to attempt to make accessible to a deaf or hard of hearing audience. But maybe it takes a show that, on the face of it, is so inaccessible, to throw the issue into relief – the company had to find a way to make it work. And, for what it’s worth, I think that with their direct feed to hearing aids, the copious numbers of capable technicians, and delivering captions via the Difference Engine, they really have.

Retrospectively, I can see that Talking Birds’ experience in making our work accessible has been similar. The more difficult we have (apparently) made things for ourselves, the more we have had to apply all our creative minds to devising the access solutions but, crucially, the better the subsequent show has been (with the accessibility almost a bonus).

When we made our foley-show-in-the-dark, Capsule, we made it to test the first iteration of the Difference Engine. Through the process of making the show, we ended up accidentally building in loads of extra challenges for ourselves (similarly to The Encounter, we were effectively attempting to make a show told mainly through sound available to deaf audiences) but in stepping up to tackle those challenges I think we made a blinkin’ brilliant show, a much better show than we might otherwise have made (and it was of course also accessible). Maybe it is precisely because it is difficult, that we can crank our inventiveness up a notch, a better solution is devised and an ultimately better show is made…?

Anyway, back to the captioning – just how well did the Difference Engine perform?

When we’ve used the Difference Engine on Talking Birds’ shows, I’ve generally, been the person operating (that is, feeding the captions out to the audience) and although I get feedback from those who’ve been testing the system, until Saturday I hadn’t had the chance to just sit in the audience and experience it as one of them, on a show I had not seen before – and it worked perfectly, and was actually just ridiculously exciting (in a kind of proud-parent sort of a way).

I had a long and rather excitable discussion afterwards with the staff member at Complicite who had operated the captions, and a deaf theatre-maker who had also come to user-test the system and was equally excited at how well it had worked. It is hard to write about what did and didn’t work without giving away too much about the show, but basically, technically everything worked as planned and the text was easy to follow. There was no sensation of tennis neck from looking from stage to screen and back again (which is something some people have questioned) and although there were aspects of the show where we felt the captions could have been better worded or formatted these were all things that are to do with finessing the captions as you see them in context and get user feedback. By the time they perform at the Barbican in February, I’ve no doubt that Complicite will have cracked this and it’ll all be there. After all, Saturday’s show was the first time they had used the Difference Engine – although you wouldn’t know it.

The icing on the cake was this comment which arrived later by email: “I had given up going to the theatre and live shows because of the isolation it creates when you cannot hear, particularly when the audience is laughing at something said on stage. So thank you for making this experience more inclusive.”

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If you also trialled the Difference Engine’s captioning of The Encounter at Warwick Arts Centre on Saturday and would like to give us some feedback, we’d really like to hear from you – all comments are really useful as we continue to develop the system. Likewise, testers are really useful, so if you’d be interested in user-testing the system on other future projects, please get in touch with us…

For those of you who are in or near London, we highly recommend you go and see The Encounter, which is next on at The Barbican in February, with captioned performances listed as Feb 28th and March 3rd.

NB: Although the Difference Engine is being developed to perform other functions too, it is the captioning that is most robust at the moment, hence Complicite using it for this show. Talking Birds is currently fundraising to continue to develop the Difference Engine. If you would like to help make it happen, you can make a donation towards this development here.

[Posted by  jv 12.10.15]

We are currently working with Complicite, who are trialling the use of The Difference Engine to make their work accessible for audiences who are deaf or hard of hearing, through captioning to mobile devices (smartphones / tablets).

They are touring their new show, The Encounter – inspired by the book, Amazon Beaming – and this weekend the show will play at Warwick Arts Centre (Saturday 10th/Sunday 11th October), before going to the Barbican in London for a 6 week run, followed by Manchester and Athens. The show opened at Edinburgh International Festival in August and has since played to sell-out audiences in Switzerland and Bristol, receiving rave reviews in the national press.

The Saturday October 10th matinee performance at Warwick Arts Centre (2pm) will be Complicite’s first shot at using the Difference Engine, and we want to gather as much feedback as possible so that we can keep improving the experience and so that we can keep developing the tool. Tickets can be booked through Warwick Arts Centre and it would be great if you go and user-test, if you could get back in touch with us afterwards to let us know what you thought. Thanks.

A mystery benefactor has set up a foundation to promote the art of queueing. The Q Foundation’s stated aims are to “promote excellence and innovation in queueing, whenever and wherever it occurs” and “celebrate the cultural distinctiveness of the British queue as a progressive post-colonial force for good.”

A Queue

Moreover the group are lobbying for the recognition of queueing as an Olympic sport. “Nobody’s told us it can’t be done,” said a spokesman. “Where there’s a queue, there’s a way.” It is claimed that Britain’s celebrated Queuers could sweep the board should the activity become recognised by the IOC.

The identity of the benefactor behind the idea is a closely guarded secret, but rumours that he or she is a London-based Russian oligarch have been hotly denied. “Nyet,” said a spokesman.

Editorial notes:
The National Theatre will be hosting a masterclass by the Q Foundation by its outdoor River Stage on Friday 31st July 1.10pm onwards.

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/your-visit/welcome-to-the-national-theatre/river-stage/week-2

Make/Believe at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Having formed part of the award-winning UK National Exhibit at the Prague Quadrennial (the slightly less frequent Theatre Design equivalent of the Venice Biennale), the designs for Capsule and the OakMobile are now on show at the Make Believe at the V&A in London. At a packed private view last night, curator Kate Burnett praised the scope, vision and creativity of the work being done by British set and costume designers across the world. She stressed the importance of this exhibition, which runs at the Victoria & Albert museum until January 3rd 2016, as a rare but significant opportunity for the public to experience the breadth of design work being done, but also especially the ‘hidden’ work – which may not take place in traditional theatres or feature in national press reviews – but is nevertheless key to, and illustrative of, the innovation and vitality of this sector. The Prague Quadrennial Jury said “This award recognises the richness and diversity of an exhibition that shows high quality work from across the spectrum of contemporary performance design – in a variety of venues, and embracing space, light, media and costume. The complexity of the selection shows scenographers working in many different ways and, importantly, a confidence in the way scenography can shape productions and engage audiences in multiple ways.” Needless to say we’re very chuffed to be a part of this!

A Festival of Whales

As we write, the Whale is en route to Belgium to appear at the Salto Festival – which is all about whales and also features a huge professional and community cast performing a new version of Moby Dick. The script has been translated into Flemish and we’ll be training up a couple of locally-based performers to prepare to dive! If you *happen* to be in Menen this weekend, do pop along and say ‘Hallo!’.

The Talking Birds ‘fleet’ of aluminium mini-theatres on wheels has been out in force this weekend. And as we write, both the Whale and the OakMobile will now be making their respective ways back to the stables. The OakMobile has been out at CoCoMad at Cotteridge Park in Birmingham today, whilst the Whale has been down south at the Winchester Hat Fair. Do toot our lovely drivers Greg and Jonathan if you pass one of them on the road!

Some of the most exciting things about the development of the arts sector over the last 5 or 10 years have been the growing respectability of socially-engaged practice, the gradual convergence of different disciplines and the emergence of ‘art for good’ as a kind of thing. It’s an area that certain bits of Talking Birds’ work has slotted into and developed alongside over the years, probably most notably perhaps with our work on accessibility. That’s why we were so chuffed that the Difference Engine, our little invention to deliver subtitles and audio description (and much, much more!) to our audience’s mobile devices, made it into the final of the Tech 4 Good Awards. This felt like ‘art for good’ competing with the bigger tech guys (somehow tech guys seem big to us even if they aren’t really, being grown up people with ‘proper jobs’). Pretty awesome just getting there. But when we looked at the competition we were up against in our category, we realised there was not a particularly high probability of actually winning – for example, against a company 3D printing artificial limbs. Surely that really *is* tech for good, however you judge these things?

Anyway, we’re now into the final four days of voting for the People’s Award (our second chance at winning something) of the Tech 4 Good awards and, despite being in the top five last week, we’ve just heard that we’ve been overtaken by some of the other contenders (unsurprising given how good all the finalists are, but disappointing nonetheless after the slightly disbelieving euphoria of last week).

We always find it a bit tricky asking for votes for things – because you don’t need to be the best, you just need more friends – but we’ve tried our best to canvas as many as possible for this because we really believe in the Difference Engine as an idea and we know lots and lots of other people (users, artists and companies*) do too. Being a finalist in the Tech 4 Good Awards is a brilliant opportunity for Talking Birds because of the attention it points in the direction of our Difference Engine project – and the potential investors that this attention attracts. We really need financing to finish the development of the Difference Engine – without that, it doesn’t matter how brilliant an idea it is, how well it works, or how transformational it has the potential to be – it just won’t get out into people’s pockets.

So that’s why, unless you happen to be a rich investor moved to write us a fat cheque (which obviously trumps the votes), we need your votes! The more we get, the nearer we become to commanding the attention of someone who believes the Difference Engine is worth investing in.

And of course, you could look on a vote for Talking Birds’ Difference Engine as really good karma too…

WHERE TO CAST YOUR VOTE: http://www.tech4goodawards.com

* (just one example of a company who thinks its a good idea and wants to use it!)

There are 3 of us at Talking Birds. Two part time employees (with a couple of days a week each) plus one freelancer. On top of that, all 3 of us work freelance for other companies – in the region and further afield. This is by way of illustrating that we haven’t got much in the way of time or resources (or, actually, even brain space) to conduct any kind of coordinated campaign (whilst being only too aware that any serious marketing/voting campaign needs a lot of time, natch). It’s a capacity issue: even throwaway low-tech videos, it transpires, take (too much) time. And the only way that it becomes ok to spend time you don’t have making a video for something like this, is if it generates a shed-load of votes and you win something worthwhile. Maybe.

For Talking Birds, winning the Tech 4 Good People’s Award could be worth the amount of time we’ve spent on it. It won’t bring us a cash prize, but after 8 years of trying to fund our in-pocket subtitler (The Difference Engine)’s development, the attention the award brings could just mean that it becomes that little bit easier to finance. And this would speed up the process of getting it into the hands of the people who really need it (as well as hopefully reducing the likelihood that someone else nicks the idea and gets it out there first).

We’ve written about this before, but basically if everyone who reads this votes for us and shares it we could win this award – and (eventually) experimental, site-specific and other small, interesting work could become much more accessible.

Pie in the sky? Maybe. But definitely worth a try.
(That was the idealism bit).

You can make your vote for Talking Birds by clicking here – and share your support in tweets marked #T4GTalkingBirds

THANK YOU – we really appreciate your support.

Please vote for Talking Birds by clicking here and share your support in tweets marked #T4GTalkingBirds

THANK YOU!

Vote for us in the Tech 4 Good 2015 Awards!

» If you only have a few seconds, just read this bit:

Talking Birds’ in-pocket subtitler, The Difference Engine, is a finalist in this years Tech4Good Awards and we need your votes to help us win!

PLEASE VOTE FOR US! You can vote via the Tech4Good website or on twitter using the hashtag #T4GTalkingBirds eg “I Vote for #T4GTalkingBirds @Tech4GoodAwards”

The Difference Engine (named for Charles Babbage) delivers captions, audio description and more to audiences’ mobile devices during performances. The response from people who have used the technology included this coverage in the Hearing Times: “I followed brilliantly because…within Talking Birds someone had created a new way of captioning that I honestly think, with some backing, could be the next big thing.”

» If you have a bit more time, you can read this too:

If you’ve been following Talking Birds for a while, you probably know that we make performances in lots of different kinds of spaces (and sometimes in theatres). You probably also know that we try really hard to make all our work accessible.

In the past we’ve hired sign language interpreters and audio describers, and we’ve used LED captioning boxes – all the conventional (and very effective in the right context) solutions. But somehow none of these really worked for us. And as a rule, they don’t work for – or are just beyond the (financial) reach of – most smaller scale or experimental theatre companies. This means that users of these access services and technologies tend not to consider themselves target audiences for this kind of work – and we don’t think this is fair.

We’ve tried lots of different things to make our shows accessible – you may remember Solid Blue in 2002 where we made a specifically accessible second performance space, the Juror’s Gallery, in the cloister below the long dormitory for which we made the performance – we combined live video feeds showing things that were not seen by the upstairs audience, and brought the live performers downstairs when they were ‘offstage’. We put together a slightly Heath Robinson set up with radio mics, headphones and a rather nervous director, to deliver audio description to audiences for 25/7, our revolving-restaurant-on-top-of-a-tower-block-in-an-Olympic-city show. And when we built the Whale, right from the start we knew we didn’t want people to have to step up into it, but made sure it was accessible to audience members in wheelchairs and pushchairs – and added an induction loop.

Over the last 13 years we’ve challenged ourselves to try to think differently about accessibility – to view it as a creative possibility, rather than an add on or an after thought which spoils your best theatrical idea, which, to be honest, it sometimes had been previously.

And out of this, The Difference Engine was born. A way to deliver audio description, captioning and other stuff – programme notes, translation, misinformation, take away links and reference materials – to the phones and tablets people had begun to carry round with them. And, crucially, a way that our audiences could send things back to us – feedback, comments, their interventions into the show…

We got some funding from the Arts Council to work with Coventry University to build our first prototype and, a few years later, ACE gave us a bit more to make a second iteration. We’ve tested it on a number of different projects over the last 5 years – a chamber performance in an unheated industrial unit in the coldest November since Queen Victoria was on the throne; an installation to mark the closure of the sorting office; an uproarious alternative Christmas show featuring a Danish tourism officer dressed as a goose, to name a few…and every time we’ve had really positive feedback from users.

Despite being a *brilliant* invention (!) it is *fiendishly* difficult to raise funds for! Lots of other companies are interested in using the Difference Engine, but we need to pump a bit more money in and develop the system into a more robust format before we can distribute it more widely – and make more work inherently accessible.

So this year is *the* year. We’re determined to raise that money.

Even though there’s no cash prize, winning this Tech4Good award will really help (as would any spare cash you might have down the back of your sofa…!)

PLEASE VOTE FOR US! You can vote via the Tech4Good website or on twitter using the hashtag #T4GTalkingBirds eg “I Vote for #T4GTalkingBirds @Tech4GoodAwards”

The Cricketers will be unleashed on the good folk of Warwick this Friday 15th May as part of the Great Warwickshire Show & Tell.
They’ll be in Market Square, Warwick outside the Shire Hall at the following times:

3pm – 3.20pm
5.05pm – 5.25pm
6.45pm – 7.05pm

Rain (unless torrential) will not stop play!

Applications are invited for an open audition for actors and actor/musicians with Talking Birds Theatre Company in Coventry. This is an opportunity to meet and work with the company in a relaxed group setting over the course of a day (11am-4pm), at the Shopfront Theatre in Coventry. We are not auditioning for specific roles, but rather identifying talented and versatile performers who the company can draw on for future projects (see www.talkingbirds.co.uk for examples of our previous work). We will also be inviting Artistic Directors from other regional companies to join us in the afternoon. Travel expenses and lunch will be provided.

To apply, please e-mail us at birdmail[at]talkingbirds.co.uk subject: Open Cast, with a resumé/CV of your experience to date (can include video/audio links), plus a short statement on why you would like to attend the workshop and what you would bring to working on a project with the company.

We particularly welcome applications from artists based in the Midlands, disabled artists and artists from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds. This opportunity is aimed at emerging or established professionals rather than students, though those approaching graduation or postgrads will be considered. We will accept submissions through agents if they are accompanied by a personal statement from the individual.

Applicants of any age over 18 welcome.

Date of Workshop: Friday 5th June (Coventry)

Deadline for applications: 18th May (10am)

Date we will inform successful applicants: 22nd May

Telephone number for any queries: 024 7615 8330