MIX 2019

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 between 1st and 2nd 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 Guy Gadney, CEO of To Play For and Charisma.ai, a storytelling platform powered by artificial intelligence; Dr Donna Hancox, transmedia and digital storytelling scholar at Queensland Institute of Technology; Thomas Zandegiocomo, Artistic Director Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin; 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 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 online magazine of writing and technology, The Writing Platform.

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.

Experiential storytelling encompasses works that foreground the experience of the audience or reader. Works that offer authentic and often personalised experiences are becoming increasingly prevalent and this year MIX offers opportunities to think about what that might mean for digitally-mediated narratives. Additional themes for this year’s conference include immersion and publishing; we define these themes broadly and are interested in how new forms of storytelling can respond to and learn from emerging works that explore the potential of immersive technologies. Our Ethics of Storytelling panel will be curated and chaired by writer Nikesh Shukla, and we’d like to encourage a broad range of responses on that theme. We are also interested in new models of publishing across Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Ambient Literature, as well as the influence of the grammars of film and theatre on new forms of storytelling.

Paper Nations is a creative writing incubator. We commission writers throughout the South West of England to create new work, we nurture local communities of support for writers, and we create multi-channel partnerships to showcase new writing internationally.

Our vision is an inclusive literary ecology – a culture of excellence in participation, where industry, education, and arts work together to support diverse writers.

The Writing Platform is a website dedicated to arming writers with digital knowledge.

The website is a free online resource for writers and poets­ – whether they are emerging or established, traditionally published, self-published ­or not yet published – who are looking for neutral and best practice information about writing in the digital age in order to inform their practice and career choices.

The Writing Platform launched in spring 2013 in collaboration with Kate Pullinger and The Literary Platform. Since 2016 it has been edited by Kate Pullinger and Donna Hancox in association with Queensland University of Technology and Bath Spa University.

You can read more about The Writing Platform in this  introduction by Editorial Director, Kate Pullinger.

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.