Interactive Fiction Guest Speaker Programme Autumn 2015
This is an internal seminar series, which takes place within the Interactive Fictions course taught classes, but we have a few places available for interested scholars. The Interactive Fictions course is part of BA English and Creative Writing, headed by Dr Karlien Van Den Beukel.
The events are free and open to all, but please RSVP me if you would like to attend.
Best wishes
Dave Miller
[log in to unmask]——
We have an amazing programme of guest speakers for Autumn 2015. See the programme below.
The speaker events are all on Fridays at 2 pm London Road LR388 (it's linked into the Creative Writing module 'Interactive Fiction' timetable). Some events last 1 hour, other 2 hours.
Nathan Penlington (9 October)Nathan Penlington is a writer, performer and obsessive. He has performed his work in venues as diverse as Tate Modern, Oxford Literary Festival, Chicago’s Drinking & Writing Festival, SXSW in Austin, Texas, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1, 3, 4 and 6music. His last show Choose Your Own Documentary, was a live interactive documentary in which the audience voted what happened next in the manner of Choose Your Own Adventure books. The show won a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival, and in 2014 was an official selection at Tribeca Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and Antenna Documentary Film Festival in Sydney The Boy in the Book.
Emily Short (16 October)Emily Short is a freelance game designer and consultant specializing in interactive narrative, dialogue, and social interaction modeling. She has created over two dozen works of interactive fiction, including the award-winning Galatea, a reworking of the Pygmalion myth; the interactive epistolary story First Draft of the Revolution; and Counterfeit Monkey, a wordplay puzzle game that addresses issues of language and democracy.
She is part of the design team behind the interactive fiction creation languages Inform 7 and Versu. Her work has been collected by the Electronic Literature Organization and displayed at the Library of Congress, among other venues.
Mez Breeze - via Skype from Australia (23 October)Mez Breeze is the Creative Director and Lead Digital Content Creator of Mez Breeze Design. In August 2015, Mez – along with fellow collaborator Andy Campbell – was awarded the Tumblr International Prize and The Space’s “Open Call” Commission for their in development transmedia project “Pluto”. Mez was also shortlisted for both the 2015 Thiel Grant Award for Online Writing and the 2015 “Games Development” Category of the MCV Pacific Women In Games List, which profiles the: “…most influential women across all facets of the Australian and New Zealand Games Industries.”
Kim Plowright (30 October)Kim Plowright produces and helps design interesting digital and cross-platform experiences; working on projects where the internet, culture, games and 'old' media fight like excitable kittens in a sack since before the last
dot.com crash. She enjoys collaborative problem solving, and bridging the gaps between creative vision, user needs, experience design and technical implementation.
Tim Wright (13 November)Tim Wright is a digital writer, a crossplatform producer and a director of XPT Ltd. His writing credits include two BAFTA-winning interactive projects: the comedy self help disk 'Mind Gym' and web & email drama 'Online Caroline'. He also co-developed, devised and scripted the BAFTA nominated science-learning Web drama ‘Planet Jemma’ and BAFTA nominated online holiday farce ‘Mount Kristos’. In 2004/5, he created the popular collaborative web fiction and Sony Award-nominated BBC Radio 4 play 'In Search of Oldton', pioneering the use of user generated content within a narrative fiction format. Tim has consulted and written for many high profile cross media projects in the entertainment industry (BBC Castaway Remote Control, Penguin’s Malice Box Quest, Channel 4 Lost Generation) and also in the education and public information sectors (Creative Partnerships StorySpinner KS2&3 English project, English Heritage Belsay Hall Interactive.)
Robert Pratten (27 November)Robert Pratten is the creator of Conducttr, an interactive multiplatform storytelling tool. Robert has more than 20 years experience as an international marketing consultant, has written and directed two award-winning independent feature films and established himself as a thought-leader in the field of transmedia storytelling. He is the author of the book Getting Started in Transmedia Storytelling.
Trevor Klein (4 December)Trevor is an award-winning freelance digital strategist and producer, specialising in narrative and youth content. In 2014 Trevor produced Unity games The Doctor and the Dalek and Merchant of Menace, and this year is spending most of his time on interactive children's sitcom The Secret Life of Boys.He also consults on business strategy, app marketing, creative ideas and pitches for clients including Telegraph Hill, Coney, The Usborne Foundation and Sunshine Partners. Prior to going freelance, he was Head of Development for digital at Somethin’ Else, and had a lot of fun pitching and making projects that combined content and technology in the worlds of brands, broadcasters, museums and publishers. Most notably he produced the award-winning book app The Magic of Reality for iPad.
Claudio Pires Franco (11 December)Claudio is an Anthropologist and New Media Academic (MA Media, Communication and Culture, Institute of Education) who has experience working in digital media and games industries and digital government initiatives. Claudio is conducting research and writing that contributes to the UNESCO-sponsored project 'Crossing Media Boundaries: New Media Forms of the Book', at the University of Bedfordshire. He's been thinking about the world of the digital book, the continuities and transformations from print, the potential of digital media for storytelling, and generally how to make sense of a growing range of new and hybrid forms of narrative media/book texts being created.
