Event overview
"From the caves of Lescaux, to the next Harry Potter, man has been a storytelling animal” says McCrum in an article in the Observer in 2002 and continues, challenging: “Narrative is part of our DNA”. He is not too far from the view shared by scientists. Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling, by the fact that our brain seems to be wired to enjoy stories. Anthropologists, historians and linguists have similarly been fascinated by storytelling, one of the few traits of humankind that is truly universal across culture throughout all known history. This talk, however, takes a different but related perspective: it reflects the growing interest of computer scientists, ranging from multimedia to artificial intelligence researchers, and narratologists alike in developing new forms of communication and creative expression in the current context of digital media, more and more driven by interactivity. This talk is about the creation of a new form of storytelling: interactive moving- image narratives, which adapt, whilst they are being told, in response to explicit or inferred interactions from the viewers, transforming thus passive audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, allowing them to influence the narrations they receive, to reshape them, and to establish new forms of social communication. The focal point will be on results of a joint European research endeavour which devised and developed generic (production independent) technology for the creation and delivery of interactive moving-image narratives – dubbed ShapeShifting Media Technology – and validated the technology with a number of interactive moving-image productions in traditional genres such as drama, documentary and news, realised in collaboration with national broadcasters such as BBC, YLE (Finland) and SVT (Sweden). A brief demo of the technology accompanied by snippets of the productions will illustrate the talk.
Dr. Marian Ursu is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths and leads the Narrative and Interactive Media research group. He and his team have pioneered research in computational representations for interactive and narrative media. Amongst others, he is one of the main architects of the ShapeShifting Media Technology and the creator of the Narrative Structure Language, on which the former is founded. Apart from further developing and exploiting ShapeShifting Media, his current research regards the development of artificial intelligence techniques for image based communication technologies which aim to remove barriers of space and time between groups of people and, at the same time, maintain the naturalness of the communication.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Mar 2009 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
Accessibility
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