Reading Time: 8 minutes Paper Nations, a South West England-based creative writing incubator dedicated to diversity and innovation, has commissioned three writers with links to the region to develop exciting and experimental writing projects that use smartphone technologies to tell immersive stories. Led by Bambo Soyinka, Professor of Story at Bath Spa University, Paper Nations promotes collaboration across all… Read more »
Posts By: Amy Spencer
An Interview With: Mez Breeze
Mez Breeze
Reading Time: 10 minutes Mez Breeze is one of the leading innovators in the fields of experimental storytelling and virtual reality literature. Her work has heralded new ways of making and collaborating for creators, and her ethos and politics demonstrate ethical practices for all creative practitioners. In 2019 Mez was awarded the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award to honour… Read more »
Bringing short story form into the 21st century: a call for bold and inspiring ideas
Rachael Bull
Reading Time: 3 minutes Storytelling forms an integral part of our understanding of the world. Historically, traditional literary forms saw us give entirely to the storyteller as a submissive listener, but with the rise of technology and an ever-growing experience economy we are leaning more and more towards active consumption. Theatre, traditionally seen as a passive experience, is rapidly… Read more »
Leaving Space at the Table
Nathan Sibthorpe
Reading Time: 5 minutes Democracy is starting to feel uncomfortable. In 2016, we saw the rise of the ‘silent majority’ with Trump, Brexit, and the return of One Nation. In the most recent Australian election, all of our polling was proven wrong with another surprise victory going to the major right-wing party. It doesn’t matter how often this same… Read more »
The Fantastia Express
Alastair Elibeck
Reading Time: 6 minutes This is an article about an augmented reality practice-based research project, The Fantasia Express, commissioned by the UK Department for Transport through an InnovateUK competition. And about how a non-writer tried to create a story around a train journey from London to Edinburgh. I am an artist who specialises in technology-driven public realm work that… Read more »
Developing Lotus, A Meditative Story App
Niels ’t Hooft
Reading Time: 5 minutes It can be scary to look back sometimes, almost like a fear of heights. It’s six years ago (six years!) that I first started thinking about the project that was just released in the iOS App Store. A lot has happened in those years. All of it helped my meditative reading app ‘Lotus’ take… Read more »
Sound, Fury, and Consistency: Writing Recombinant Fiction
David Wright
Reading Time: 11 minutes Multiple recent digital narrative works utilise recombinant poetics. Yet such an approach to fiction is not dependent on code. Multiple examples predate the computer. In Electronic Literature (2019), Scott Rettberg argues that the study of digital literature ‘not only takes us forward to explore new horizons but also on a retrospective journey that can lead… Read more »
Dare to Write? Atlas
Joanna Nissel
Reading Time: 3 minutes Today, creative writing incubator Paper Nations launches the Dare to Write? Atlas, the latest portal on their creative writing platform, Dare to Write?. The Atlas is designed to help writers to connect to their writing community in the UK by enabling them to discover the brilliant editors, publishers, writers, bookshops, festivals, organisations, and events (and… Read more »
Who owns digital stories?
Guy Gadney
Reading Time: 6 minutes This is an abridged version of a keynote speech delivered at the MIX Conference 2019 With the increasing convergence between creative industries and artificial intelligence, there is an emerging misunderstanding of how the tech world sees creativity, and this is important for publishers, authors and the broader creative industries. To frame this, it is important… Read more »
Reading on a Revolving Path
Amira Hanafi
Reading Time: 5 minutes I set out to make ‘A dictionary of the revolution’ in 2013. I planned to record conversations with different people, asking them to define words I heard people using to talk about politics in Egypt. Then I’d use transcriptions of their speech to create entries in a subversive ‘dictionary’ that tries to represent language as… Read more »