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| Me delivering my paper on Tuesday morning |
I gave a half hour presentation about The Lucerne Project,
which was accepted into the line-up on the strength of the blog part of the
project, the QR codes linking to YouTube audio files, and the use of images
culled from the internet in order to provide the source for the 100 page
accordion book. I threw in a bit of Walter Benjamin for the 9 page paper that I
wrote, but mainly I was describing the process of making the book, and so
forth. I was I the first time-slot for presentations on Tuesday morning. On
Tuesday afternoon, Patty and I did a 90 minute Journal and Sketchbook workshop,
which had no multimedia elements at all, unless you count crayons and paper as
two media: the excuse was that we were giving people “back to basics” tools
that they could use for generating material for the digital arts.
As far as the rest of the presentations and workshops are
concerned, the best one I saw was the one that came immediately after mine. It
was by Kevin Henry, who works in Product Design at Columbia College Chicago and
who has a fine art background, and his wife Doro, who works at the School of
the Art Institute in Chicago. They are developing a program for the iPad which
presents a multi-media interpretation of a journal Doro kept during an illness
last year. It used sound, maps, social media and other features of current
online activity in a really beautiful and inventive way. There was also a
decent talk on the second and last day by a writer who had created a series of
radio plays with lots of interaction from listeners.
The least interesting parts of the conference were the
presentations by the invited guests, or keynote speakers. Most of them were
badly presented and ran well over their allotted time. They were also, as I
feared they might be, very weighed down by theory, and very little concerned
with having an effect on an audience that might involve things like pleasure or
even comprehensibility. Quite the opposite: it seemed like a badge of honour if
the visual aspect of their digital poetry was to create a completely new (and therefore
unreadable) language, in the name of avant garde invention (I suppose). Anyway,
Patty and I were very much the old school people there, and it was nice to be
invited. I tried to keep an open mind (no, really), and there were some things
I heard that made me think I should discover more, such as:
Immersive storytelling, where for example each character has
their own Facebook acct/blog/way of interacting with the reader.
GPS based material, which is adapted to the location of the
reader’s tablet/smartphone.
The way video games use narrative.
The conference was only two days, plus an introductory
dinner on Monday evening, but it was as exhausting as if it had lasted a week.
We were also having dinner nearly every night with friends in Bath, too, so by the
time we crashed into bed at or after midnight, we were both too tired to do
anything more than check email. We were staying in Bath, but only got to walk
around a little, mainly when exercising in the early morning before the
conference started. It’s a beautiful part of England, though, and Corsham was a
classic little market town with the aristocrat’s mansion looming over it
(complete with peacocks, that roamed the lush grounds of Corsham Court and
emitted their piercing, elongated, almost feline cries throughout the day.)