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 »
Article Archive: Research
Working with Totalising Algorithms
Freya Wright-Brough
Reading Time: 8 minutes Excited by the possible storytelling functions and forms that digital technology enables, I set out to foster meaningful encounters between author and audience in a digital narrative project titled We See Each Other. I had never considered the possibility of an invisible third party shaping these encounters, but they were there, ever-present and impossible to… Read more »
How To Wallpaper a Dungeon
C. M. Taylor
Reading Time: 6 minutes It was early in 2013 and really I’d had enough. A novel of mine had come out in 2011, and another in 2012, and now I was supposed to sit down and start another? I bridled. The solitude of novel writing, the grating solipsism of the form – strapping yourself alone to the industrial word… Read more »
Writing, Weaving, and Performativity: Some Notes on Solid State Poetry
Richard A Carter
Reading Time: 8 minutes As a researcher, my focus is on critically examining digital literature—texts and writing practices where digital media is rendered integral to the experience of literary or poetic forms. In recent years, I have been working so that my research manifests not just at the level of written critique, but also through creative practice, placing my… Read more »
The Book as Recombinant Structure: A Century of Art and Experimental Books
Amaranth Borsuk
Reading Time: 9 minutes The following is an excerpt from Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, part of the ‘Essential Knowledge’ Series from MIT Press. This chapter explores the various ways writers and artists for more than a hundred years have approached the book as an object and a structure that can be cut up and rearranged as early examples of ‘digital’… Read more »
Virtual Reality Literature: Examples and Potentials
Mez Breeze
Reading Time: 7 minutes Way back in the wilds of the year 2008, artist-extraordinaire James Morgan and I engaged in an animated discussion about Augmented and Virtual Reality. At that time James and I were collaborators-in-crime in the Third Faction Collective, a group of digital artists intent on constructing game interventions in Massively Multiplayer Online Spaces. During this discussion,… Read more »
Data Driven Creativity
Chris Smith
Reading Time: 3 minutes Collecting and analysing the data we generate every day—whether it’s how much we exercise, changes in our heart rate, even how much we use our devices—have become indispensable tools to improve health and wellbeing. Can a similar approach to other data we generate—say when we write—bring benefits to our creative lives? Prolifiko has just launched… Read more »
Hands Up for Digital Humanities: The Beginnings of an Exposé
Lauren Hayhurst
Reading Time: 7 minutes There was nowhere to park. As if it wasn’t daunting enough to throw myself into the alien world of tech-heads and program-people, now I was late. I found the Loft – a boutique entertainment venue on Plymouth Sutton Harbour – and launched myself up the stairs, down a deserted corridor and towards the sound of… Read more »
Introducing the Poetry Map
Matt Bryden
Reading Time: 8 minutes Origins The Poetry Map has its origins in a feature on Facebook’s homepage by which users could list countries they had visited and see these appear as pins on a map. While this was a good way of ‘showing off’, it also got me thinking about the places I had lived in the course of… Read more »
The Hidden Systems of Academic Writing – 6 Findings from Research
Chris Smith
Reading Time: 7 minutes We’ve been working with The London School of Economics’ Impact blog to explain the findings of our user research into academic writing. Over January and February this year, we interviewed 23 scholars across the world to help us get a better understanding of how they write — the practices they adopt, the processes they use and the… Read more »