Monthly Archives: September 2012

MotaMouf

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MotaMoufEvent 4 the ‘turgid Trent’ is now live on The Space and features four essays by myself and two spoken word videos from Andrew ‘MulletProofPoet’ Graves and Alex ‘MotaMouf’ Young. I want to dedicate this blog to MotaMouf.

I first saw beatboxer MotaMouf performing at the Riverside Festival with Maniere des Bohemiens, a gypsy swing-jazz band from Nottingham. Then a few months later with Nina Smith on the LeftLion stage at Spendour. I was blown away by this teenager with the elastic mouth who was able to adapt his style to any kind of rhythm. I asked him if he would be interested in performing on stage with me at a spoken word event called Gunpowder, Treason and Pot. The conceit was simple: I’d ask him a question and he would make all of these weird noises. Then when I gave up trying to communicate with him and motioned to walk off stage he would burst out with an amazing poem about Rosa Parks (which is published in Issue 49 of LeftLion, out today.) It worked brilliantly and was the latest example of his incredibly versatile talent.

MotaMouf’s inclusion on The Space was not planned and was completely inspired by Kate Tempest’s outstanding performance video for Tongue Fu. I realised we had to diversify our text heavy content and that it would also be great to see him given a voice on such a prestigious stage. As always he was excited and prepared to try anything. A fitting lesson to other performers out there…

MotaMouf signs contract on the bribe of cake and tea in Lee Rosy’s. Photo and food costs James Walker.

The theme for Event Four is ‘Solitude: Is it possible in a digital age?’ I met up with MotaMouf a few times at Broadway and we worked on various ideas. I asked him to think about the electronic noise of modern life such as vehicles telling you that they’re reversing, elevator musIz, Tesco self-service tills, and city buses asking you to join their Facebook group every five minutes. He then went away and worked on a narrative.

During these meetings MotaMouf confessed that he felt kind of typecast as a beatboxer and was currently the front man of a new band called Just James. He was also more in to rap and grime music now. I told him to combine all of these things and to go with what felt right as I had every confidence he’d produce something fantastic.  At the time I was writing accompanying essays about how Alan Sillitoe hated being labelled as a ‘working class writer’ and an ‘angry young man’ and so it seemed a bit hypocritical to limit MotaMouf in a similar manner. The whole purpose of the Sillitoe Trail is to broaden the reach of literature and make Sillitoe’s novel accessible to audiences who may otherwise never have encountered it. Rap and grime are such audiences.  Tick.

The video was shot by NG64bars and is absolutely beautiful. My only instruction was that it had to be near a canal to link to the essays. A really important element of The Space is building up partnerships with other organisations and trying to support and promote each other. Robert Freeman Cooper has done a brilliant job and I’m delighted to be able to bring his organisation in as a partner and promote yet another great organisation in Nottingham as well as an incredibly talented beatboxer. I mean rapper. I mean poet. You know what I mean.

Please note: MotaMouf used to be spelled MotorMouf. He has very recently changed the spelling of this as it is not quite as unique a name as you might imagine.

Space contract extended

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Arts Council England published its Creative Media Policy in July 2012 and within this, they’ve committed to a future legacy for The Space pilot project. This is fantastic news as it means that us guinea pigs producing content must be doing something right.

I’ve been so involved in the Sillitoe project that I’ve not really had time to reflect on what might happen with the content or how it would feel to see it all suddenly switched off on 31 October when the project finishes. So I’m even happier to announce that “both the Arts Council and BBC believe that it is imperative that The Space retains a digital presence after the ‘switch off’ date.” Both organisations have committed to maintaining their support for the project in its current form, and to extend the pilot to the 31 March 2013 in order to create more time to explore the potential of a permanent service.

There’s been lots of teething problems on the way. My main gripes would be videos not playing or freezing when being streamed, lack of interactivity between producer and consumer, errors in uploading content (such as missing vital paragraphs from text documents), font sizes that work on large screens but not so well on mobiles, and the lack of control that project editors have over the production and appearance of their work, but these are minor issues in the grand scale of things and all issues that can be resolved.
An example of this would be projects being limited to how many articles or files can be grouped together on a holding page. Now they’ve mastered this it removes an unnecessary restriction on editors who can concentrate on producing content that they deem best for their project rather than content that fits into the needs of the programmers. The holding page now looks fantastic and means that viewers can more easily be drawn to similar content. This is a massive progression and deserves a big thumbs-up given the scale of the project and the inevitable demands this entails.

The programmers and curators need time to sit back and reflect on how best to address the various issues outlined above but it would be a great pity for the content to simply disappear as I’m sure it could be tweaked as they go along which seems to be the general idea. Therefore there is also talk of a further option to renew this extension for a further six months, from the 1 April 2012 to the 30 September 2013. This decision will be taken in early January 2013. Needless to say we’ll be delighted to see Alan Sillitoe spend a little longer in the technological void.

The only downside to all of this is we might have to faff about a bit with existing contracts or in the worst case scenario, The Space may choose to remove our project. There is also the depressing matter of clause 3.8 which means we cannot financially benefit from the project until the end of 2015. As the whole purpose of the project was to raise awareness of our statue fund and none of this is for personal gain, it would be great if we could charge 50p per mobile phone app download. Hopefully we will be able to find a way to resolve this issue as well.