The Playspace event at The Contact Theatre on Saturday seemed to span everything from dance to data.
Impossible to cover everything that happened there so this is a few notes and thoughts from the part of the day I was involved in – the unconference sessions where I joined a strand about digital storytelling.
I spoke briefly about the challenges for professional story tellers such as journalists in a landscape where everyone can, and does, tell stories using social media. I was followed by the Collette Curry from Manchester Metropolitan University who gave a fascinating talk about her work with artificial intelligence.
AI for storytelling?
Collette has been working with chatbots which use AI to stimulate an intelligent conversation making it possible to explore stories in a new way. Take a look at Inanimate Alice for one example of what’s possible.
The unconference format meant the sessions ran simultaneously so I was unable to catch the others which included my husband Julian Hartley and his colleague Steve Devine who talked about mixing museum culture with networked culture; Prof Keith Brown on 3D printing; Mike Cook on changing everyday objects with electronics and Suhail Khan on whether Seseme Street provided a new model for making and creating work for the arts.
I did catch the end of the talk by Dr Erica Wright from MIRIAD about curating art galleries in Second Life. As someone who gave up on SL a few years ago, it was interesting to see how things have been developing and to hear about plans to make SL available on the web. No more clunky downloads or avatar manipulation could well give the early virtual world a new lease of life…..
The rest of the day involved lots of geekery and amazing gadgets courtesy of MadLab, tons of energy and a heap of ideas. As people post their own summaries of the day, I’ll attempt to round up the links here for a fuller view of the event so please do let me know if you blog about it.
More images from the day at my Flickr stream here.
Update: Inside the M60 blog has written about the event here.
