SESSION PROGRAM
Thursday, November 20:
Working session (by invitation only). IN3, Room and time TBA.
Friday, November 21:
Public session: “Co-creating fiction, imagining futures: key challenges for collaborative design and development of multimodal narratives” . IN3, William J. Mitchell Room. (The session will be held in English).
PLUGIN NARRATIVES
Storytelling experiences which expand across multiple platforms have been gaining momentum through popularized notions like transmedia narratives, gamification, augmented reality, immersive journalism, webdocs, crossmedia broadcasting, Alternative Reality Games, media franchises, videogames, etc.
Most discourses on multimodal narratives highlight the empowerment of audiences, collaboration, interaction and de-centralization of traditional linear and bi-directional cultural experiences. However, most attention has been devoted to the design and production of complex and tightly designed directed experiences that, at the same time, wish for a deep engagement of participants through time. Consequently, more discussion is needed regarding the actual contribution of participants to these narrative experiences, and the promises and realities of fiction co-creation.
The Plugin Narratives research project, a collaboration between the IN3 and the University of Sussex, and funded by the Communities and Culture Network (CCN+, UK), is focused on the study of the roles and practices of participants in co-created fiction initiatives, with particular emphasis in creative communities, participatory processes, experience design, narrative co-development, literacies, engagement and new forms of collaborative and multimodal digital storytelling. In the end, these are key topics in the explosion of digital storytelling and transmedia narratives in fields as diverse as advertising, education, media production, computer science, activism and participatory politics, visual design and organizational management.
The aim of this event is, on the one side, to publicly present the project Plugin Narratives, and on the other side, to open a transdiciplinary discussion process on the main challenges, potentialities, methodologies and case examples. That is, to reflet on what it means to co-create storytelling experiences. Attending the broad scope and potentialities behind the Plugin Narratives project, we welcome scholarship from different fields, ranging from cultural and media studies, advertising, design, education, sociology, anthropology, business and organizations, computer studies, music, games, political science and entertainment.