Narrative Strategies- 28th and 29th June 2008

Narrative Strategies 2008

Time's Up, based upon over ten years of experience in interaction design, is developing a parallel city world that interacts with its visitors and tells the stories of its inhabitants; the visitors plus a cast of imagined characters who built and inhabit the space.

This story should react meaningfully to the actions and concerns of the visitors without losing the plot, i.e. getting lost in narratively insignificant and uninteresting byroads and tangents.

In order to draw upon the expertise and experience of closely related fields, as well as to enhance communication between them, Time's Up is organising the Narrative Strategies Workshop.

Invitees are practitioners working with narratives that are dynamic in several ways. The core areas that we have paid attention to are Computer Games, Live Action Role-Playing, Physical Narrative, Alternative Reality Gaming, Long-form Improvisation, Live Cinema and Locative Gaming.

The first day will be spent with each participant explaining some of the strategies that they have developed for their work in their area, from the character development of Live Action Roleplaying to the world building of computer games.

The fields brought together have a collection of mutually complementary strengths that fill out a whole area of practice.

The second day will be spent examining, analysing and applying these strategies. Bringing together the expertises of the group, we hope to find new ways of building narrative structures that enable the creation of resilient narrative arcs that are compelling in their physicality and responsiveness.

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Saturday 28th of June

11.30 – 12.00 Welcome & introduction by Time's Up

12.00 – 12.40 Presentation by Chris Crawford
computer game designer and computer narrative evangelist. Investigating and implementing a transition from gameplay to narrative with StoryTron.

12.40 – 13.20 Presentation by Geska Helena Andersson
Interactive image design with Performing Pictures, with a strong involvement in Live Action Role Playing and other “games” in the Interactive Institute.

13.20 – 14.40 Lunch Break

14.40 – 15.20 Presentation by Bronwynn Mertz-Penzinger
Abstract Improvisation Player and Director, developing ways for group-based design of large narratives ex nihilo in real time and stage space.

15.20 – 16.00 Presentation by Adrian Hon
Alternative Reality Game designer and nonlinear narrative creator. Perplex City was a successful non advertising based ARG, presently working with SixToStart on a literature project with Penguin.

16.00 – 16.40 Presentation by Julianne Pierce
With ANAT, TPS and the Adelaide Festival has curated and guided a number of experimental media forms, leading to her present involvement with Blast Theory, a UK-based group developing locative and physical narration as forms of technology enhanced storytelling.

16.40 – 17.00 Short Break

17.00 – 17.40 Presentation by Kate Amstrong
A visual artist and media theoretician, has developed a number of physical and locative narratives including PING, a Situationist inspired technologically enhanced derive in New York.

17.40 – 18.20 Presentation by Mia Mäkelä
Working with Live cinema, investigating techniques for audiovisual storytelling that react to the mood and flow of an audience without abandoning a narrative arc.

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Sunday 29th of June

10.00 – 10.40 Presentation by Maja Kuzmanovic, Nik Gaffney and Theun Karelse
Interaction designers, storytellers and space designers with FoAM. Currently developing a long form experimental ARG.

10.40 – 11.20 Presentation by Time's Up

11.20 – 11.40 Short Break

11.40 – 13.00 discussion forum 01:
commonalities & complementarities:
what we can learn / steal from one another

13.00 – 14.30 Lunch Break

14.30 – 16.00 discussion forum 02:
characterisation:
characters, movements, threads, objects,...

16.00 – 16.30 Short Break

16.30 – 18.00 discussion forum 03:
“How does the audience know that it is live”
resilient responses to audience interventions

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For any enquiries please contact andrea[at]timesup.org