7 July, 2023 at the British Library, London

Plus an optional afternoon tea and tour of the Digital Storytelling with the exhibition’s curators on 6 July, 2023

MIX 2023, the biennial conference on where and how creative writing and emerging technologies meet, will be co-hosted by Bath Spa University and the British Library. It will coincide with the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition of digital literature and emerging formats, which will highlight digital publishing over recent years. MIX 2023 will enable scholars and practitioners to come together to explore the exhibition at the British Library as well as share current research and practice in the rapidly developing field of storytelling in immersive environments.

Major themes for MIX 2023 will include text in immersive media, interactive and locative works, digital and film poetry, narrative games as well as digital preservation, archiving, enhanced curation and storytelling with AI.

MIX 2023 is looking for proposals for 15 min papers or presentations and 6 min lightning talks from technologists, artists, creative writers and poets working in the digital realm as well as academic researchers and independent scholars. They are particularly interested in the work and views of creators, audiences and communities currently underrepresented across writing and technology. Papers, presentations and lightning talks focused on teaching and pedagogy are also welcome.

Visit the MIX website or email MIX@bathspa.ac.uk for more information.

Are you interested in the future of content publishing? Are you a writer, artist, technologist or researcher engaged in finding new ways to tell stories to new audiences? Are you keen to hear from people working across books, digital, sound, video, AR, VR, and games? Held virtually this year, MIX 2021 offers an opportunity to join us from wherever you are in the world as we think about the future of content creation and publishing.

Based at Bath Spa University in the UK, MIX is a biennial conference that explores the intersection of writing and technology, bringing together people from around the world to make, think and talk. It includes two days of Maker Sessions on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th July, including StoryFormer with BBC R&D and body as home/ phone as home: A digitally embodied workshop, followed by two days of papers, presentations and discussions on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th July.

Our keynote speakers are Annie Reid, narrative director at Ubisoft, Dialogue Book’s Sharmaine Lovegrove,  poet Caleb Parkin and Kathi Inman Berens, Associate Professor of Book Publishing and Digital Humanities at Portland State University. The conference programme also includes poetry film screenings on the theme of Amplified Voices curated by Adrian B Earle from Think/Write/Fly and Sarah Tremlett form Liberated Words.

This year, MIX is a collaboration with Bristol+Bath Creative R+D’s Amplified Publishing, exploring future models of content creation, discovery and distribution, alongside our industry partners Epic Games, Future and BT. B+B Creative R+D is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, exploring new and innovative applications of technology across the sector and boosting the creative economy. Our other partners include Paper Nations, a creative writing incubator championing approaches to the art of writing that are inclusive, playful and exploratory. 

All events will take place virtually on Zoom. We hope to see you there.

Book your ticket and for more information visit our website.

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 to understand the basics of AI. In essence, AI is like a child-computer. It can learn, be educated and trained, and just like a growing child, it needs feeding.

AI’s food is data and to train an AI you need to feed it on data. Lots of data. And like a child, it will grow well if you feed it on good food.

Looking for large datasets, many companies ‘scrape’ data from open public websites like Reddit, or download datasets from various bulletin boards and websites.

Some companies try to aim for quality, and turn to published books as sources for their data. In the world of natural language, there is value in the content of existing works.

Perhaps one of the first indicators of this was the legal case between the Writer’s Guild of the United States and Google. In 2004, Google started scanning and offering books as part of its Google Library project, now called Google Books. It hailed this as an enormous democratization project, expanding the reach of human literature and knowledge.

A year later, the Authors Guild sued Google for breach of copyright. The case continued – and so did Google’s scanning. In 2010, Google estimated that there were 130 million titles in existence, and stated its goal:  to scan all of them.

The concern from the Authors Guild, and of course from publishers, was that by offering copyright titles, Google would damage revenues to authors, publishers and copyright owners.

By October 2015, Google had scanned over 25 million book titles.

In 2016, after the US Supreme Court found in favour of Google, Authors Guild President, Roxana Robinson, summarised: “We’re witnessing a vast redistribution of wealth from the creative sector to the tech sector, not only with books but across the spectrum of the arts.”

Now, imagine I am a producing a film and want to quote a section of a book in the film, and use part of an audio track. As well as enhancing the story within the film, this will grow the value of the film product itself. So the process I take is to contact the copyright holders, do a deal and carry on with my production. Even if I base my film loosely on an existing text, I clear the rights. There are legal, moral and commercial reasons to do this.

In contrast, Google is using scanned copyrighted material to build its current and future products, and as far as we can tell from the settlement with the Writer’s Guild seven years ago, without any reference to authors being compensated for the use of their work.

For example, Google’s Talk to Books project allows users to: “make a statement or ask a question, and the tool finds sentences in books that respond, with no dependence on keyword matching. In a sense you are talking to the books, getting responses which can help you determine if you’re interested in reading them or not.”

Google has been similarly looking at the museum and arts sector. I wrote in a previous article that many museums are placing their images in the public domain as part of an advanced digital strategy to create worldwide creative usage of its content. While a museum’s public service approach is to allow commons access to its work, the 360 StreetView version of that museum that Google photographed has a discrete “copyright Google” at the bottom of the screen – so the virtual tour of the museum belongs to Google.

True, the marketing strength that Google brings to large and small art museums creates a global awareness that could only be dreamed of before digital media.

But look ahead: new developments in virtual reality are all about immersion, and Google is a key player in its development. As this technology improves, the experiential gap between visiting a museum in reality and visiting it virtually will diminish, and with it, the reason for people to visit the physical space.

VR will allow for the emotional connection with art to be recreated from the digitised versions. Once an artefact has been digitised, it does not impact Google’s service if the physical location exists or not.

Remember that Google is a search and advertising company. Its primary profits come from its unparalleled ability to tailor advertising to an individual segment of one – you.  And the advertising it displays is the trade-off that allows you to see its search results, its YouTube videos and its maps for free. As you use its services, it builds up a profile of you, which it sells to advertisers.

While this seems like the most enormous copyright abuse in history – and indeed it could be – it is more broadly symptomatic of a wider disrespect by the technology industry towards the creative industries.

Certainly there has for a while existed a valley of misunderstanding between the tech and creative world, and it is important for the health of both sectors, and humankind itself, that this valley is bridged as soon as possible.

When I joined Penguin Digital in the mid-nineties, our IT manager referred to all the books we published as “data”. You can imagine how this went down with the editorial teams at the time!  Yet with hindsight, his outlook was prophetic.

Later, working in TV, I found the engineers called the programme makers “coloured pencil people”.

This year, in his book The Creativity Code, the Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy proposes that computers can produce art like Rembrandt’s. It seems like art and creative writing have now become a summit for AI programmers to conquer.

This is dangerous.

Firstly, it makes the cultural supposition that Art is somehow a technical problem to be solved. It is not. This perspective belittles the creative industries and will have an impact on funding, perceived quality and indeed on the academic, practical and soulful journey that it takes to become an artist.

If Art is somehow perceived as something a computer can conceive better than humans, and infinitely replicable, what hope do the true artists have?

Du Sautoy cites Christie’s selling an AI-generated Rembrandt-style artwork for $350,000 as legitimization of the value of AI and art.  It categorically is not. Christies recognized a novelty, all within the highly commercialised world of international art auctions.

Secondly, there is no merit to humanity in getting AI to create Art. Indeed it is a waste of AI’s strength, to try to anthropomorphise it into recreating human creativity. It should be used to solve problems that are NOT able to be solved by humans, but whose solutions are profoundly needed by humankind – education, inequality, climate change, population growth, energy efficiency, new politics. These are valid and urgent challenges that AI can solve.

Thirdly, and regardless of any futuristic developments, existing works of art should not be used to create technology projects without recompensing the vast numbers of people who have contributed their works to it – whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Ultimately, and most importantly, we must recognize that as technology companies like Google and Amazon seek to engage audiences with stories, conversations and entertainment, they will be looking to the creative industries as fodder.

While some of the proverbial horses may have bolted due to decisions made in the past, this is not the end.

This is our time to define our own narrative and decide what we future we want for our stories. We need to understand that the major technology companies are not benign, and they think far into the future. Seemingly fun experiments with AI “talking in the voice of a book” have implications that will travel down to whether an author can afford a coffee.

So this speech becomes a call to arms. A call to words.

A call that control of the future of the creative industries should not rest with monolithic search and advertising companies.

So beware geeks bearing gifts. Pause before you partner. Don’t default to letting Google scan your libraries, museums and galleries. Don’t let Alexa listen in on your life, your love and your arguments. Do query your presence on Facebook.

Do understand that words are powerful, but also need protecting.

Do understand that, where advanced technology is involved, there are moral decisions that are being made, and without us at the table, these decisions will only have company objectives at their heart.

Be very sceptical of any company’s “AI Ethics Board”, which is a compromised jury.

As storytellers, we are smart, creative and economically vulnerable. But we have stories and creativity that are valuable.

To recognise this is the first step towards being aware of the value we have to technology monoliths, and why, as we head towards the dawn of a new phase of technology, we need to stop them trying to recreate us inside their machines, and instead work jointly to safeguard the importance that human creativity has in all our futures.

After the success of the last four MIX conferences, MIX 2019 returns to the beautiful surroundings of Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court Campus in Wiltshire on the 1^st and 2^nd July 2019. This year’s conference will be a more intimate, single strand version, curated for a smaller audience to give time and space to instigate conversations around digital writing with a focus on experiential storytelling, including immersive technologies and new forms of publishing, from transmedia and poetry film to virtual reality to AI in storytelling. Confirmed speakers include publisher, Maja Thomas, Chief Innovation Officer, Hachette Innovation Program; Thomas Zandegiocomo, Artistic Director Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin; Guy Gadney, Charisma.ai and writer Nikesh Shukla.

Bath Spa University is the UK’s foremost provider of creative writing programmes at undergraduate, masters and PhD level and MIX is well-established as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology. MIX has previously attracted an international cohort of contributors from the UK, Australia, and Europe as well as North and South America. MIX is situated within the international research centres, the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, in collaboration with the Centre for Media Research, Creative Writing Research Centre, and The Writing Platform.

This year, our conference focuses on experiential storytelling, which encompasses works that foreground the experience of the audience or reader. Within the single-strand programme there will be four themed panels. We would like to encourage the submission of research papers and artist/practitioner presentations on the following topics;

• Emerging forms of digitally-mediated narrative, including projects that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithmic writing practices and locative-aware narratives.
• Poetry film, including the future of poetry film, current developments in social media sharing, current developments in poetry film content and practice.
• Immersive technologies and narrative, including Extended and Mixed Reality, VR, Augmented Reality, and Ambient Literature
• Ethics of Storytelling, including accessibility and appropriation, but also issues around technology and ethics, i.e embodiment in VR, algorithmic bias in cultural works that use AI, etc.

A conference where creative writing and media creation intersect with and/or are dependent upon technology should be as interdisciplinary as possible, and that’s what we are aiming for with MIX 2019. The conference will host a vibrant mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations and keynotes.

We are looking for proposals for 15 minute papers/ presentations or 60 minute panels (composed of three 15 minute papers with time for q&a). Please submit 300 word abstracts for each paper/presentation you are proposing via http://mixconference.org/submit/ by Monday 4th February 2019. We will let you know whether your submission has been successful by the end of February 2019.

Speakers who are selected to present at the conference will be encouraged to develop their papers into innovative, practice-focused outputs published in Bath Spa University’s recently launched International Journal of Creative Media Research. The journal is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed and open access journal devoted to pushing forward the approaches to and possibilities for publishing creative media-based research.

For queries on your conference submission, email mix@bathspa.ac.uk

You can find the full call for papers on our website.

Following the success of the MIX DIGITAL Conference 2012, The Writing Platform is partnering with Bath Spa University to co-host a second MIX Conference this July. The three-day series of events will take place at Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court campus, a Grade One-listed Jacobean mansion in the bucolic Wiltshire landscape.

Day Three of the conference should be of particular interest to The Writing Platform readers, providing a series of hands on workshops. At ‘The Making Day’ on Wed 17 July attendees will have the opportunity to partake in workshops and introductory sessions run by practitioners, technologists, web designers and digital publishers, giving them the chance to develop their web presence and digital know-how on the spot.

The first two days of the conference will mix academic papers and artist presentations, with keynotes from Naomi Alderman on her prize-winning blockbuster independent game Zombies! Run. and the Literary Platform’s Sophie Rochester on the intersection between writing and technology.

Text on Screens: Making Discovering, Teaching will continue the conversation started at the first MIX Conference in 2012; through a series of high quality papers and presentations of creative works we’ll be talking about text on screen in the many forms it takes including fiction, video, poetry, mobile, locative, and site specific works, non-fiction, games, text-based digital art, and other electronic, hybrid forms. We will discuss classic texts as they are re-imagined for digital platforms and will look at how these works are taught and what they mean for the future of literature.

Mix Digital Conference 2013: Text on Screens; Making/Discovering/Teaching

Date: 15 -17 July 2013

Location: Corsham, England

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