MIX 2023

7 July, 2023 at the British Library, London

Plus an optional afternoon tea and tour of the Digital Storytelling with curators on 6 July, 2023.

In its seventh year, Bath Spa University’s MIX has established itself as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology, attracting an international cohort of contributors from the UK, Australia, and Europe as well as North and South America.

MIX 2023 was co-hosted by Bath Spa University and the British Library and coincided with the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition of digital literature and emerging formats, which highlighted digital publishing over recent years.

MIX 2023 enabled scholars and practitioners to come together to explore the exhibition at the British Library as well as share current research and practice in the rapidly developing field of storytelling in immersive environments.

MIX is situated within Bath Spa University’s world-class Creative Writing department within the School of Writing, Publishing and Humanities, as well as the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, which also co-hosts the online magazine of writing and technology, The Writing Platform.

Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon is the co-founder and CEO at Six to Start, creators of gamelike stories and story-like games including the world’s best selling smartphone fitness game, “Zombies, Run!” with ten million players, the exhibition of which will be a highlight of Digital Storytelling.

He’s author of You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All and A History of the Future in 100 Objects, a columnist at EDGE magazine, and has spoken at the flagship TED conference, the Long Now Foundation, GoogleX, and Disney Imagineering. Before becoming a game designer, Adrian was a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at Cambridge, UCSD, and Oxford.

Thursday 6th July 2023

13:00 – 15:30
Tea, coffee & tours of the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition

Friday 7th July 2023

09:00 – 09:30
Registration

09:30 – 09:40
Welcome

09:40 – 10:25
Keynote: Adrian Hon

10:25 – 10:40
Gathering 1 with Euella Jackson

10:45 – 11:40
Panel 1: Short Stories: Reflections on Projects and Practice
Joe Reddington, Angela Joosse, Samuel Pegg, Rachel Pownall, Faith Samuel Bassey, Deena Larsen and Caitlin Fisher

10:45 – 11:40
Panel 2: Building Worlds: Playful Narratives, Storytelling and Game Design
Rianna Dearden, Helen Greetham and Freja Gyldenstrøm

10:45 – 11:40
Panel 3: Endless Horizons: Teaching with Narrative
Kristine Kelly, Dr Jack McGowan, Dr David Devanny and Dr Judith Pintar

11:50 – 12:45
Panel 4: Unlocking the Digital Archive: Preservation, Archiving and Enhanced Curation
Dene Grigar, Alastair Horne, Florence Smith Nicholls, Giulia Carla Rossi, Dr Simon Rowberry

11:50 – 12:45
Panel 5: Narratives of Climate Crisis – Voicing Loss, Resistance and Hope Through the Poetry Film
Janet Lee, sCsilla Toldy, Sarah Tremlett

11:50 – 12:45
Panel 6: The Right to Roam: Interactivity and Participation in Digital Story Spaces
Corey Brotherson, Claire Carroll, Roy Hanney

13:45 – 14:00
Gathering 2 with Euella Jackson

14:05 – 15:00
Panel 7: Navigating Narrative Innovation: People, Pathways and Connection
Rob Morgan, Sarah Haynes, Dr R. Lyle Skains

14:05 – 15:00
Panel 8: Story Machines: Imagined Pasts, Alternate Realities and Speculative Futures
Rachel Genn, Ana Falcon, Alasdair Swenson, David Jackson

14:05 – 15:00
Panel 9: Experiments with Liveness: Theatre, Audiences and Immersion
Dr Amy Spencer, Christine Chong

15:30 – 16:25
Panel 10: Prompted By: Insights on Generative AI Creation
Tom Livingstone, Siobhan O’Flynn, Caitlin Fisher

15:30 – 16:25
Panel 11: Immersive storytelling: Participation and Playing with the Past and Presence
Andy Campbell and Judi Alston (Dreaming Methods), Lora Markova, Dr Judith Pintar

15:30 – 16:25
Panel 12: Remixing the Archive: Creative Digital Reimaging, Reworking and Reuse
Neda Milenova Mirova, Toby Martinez da las Rivas, Melanie Lee, Fiona Graham, Lynda Clark, Jane Glennie

16:30 – 17:00
Gathering 3 with Euella Jackson

19:00 – 20:30
An Island of Sound
Jules Rawlinson, J. R. Carpenter

VR & Literature: An (Im)possible Romance

Throughout the conference, we will be hosting a showcase of virtual reality works, including The Abandoned Library, that explore the connection between VR and literature, curated by Agnieszka Przybyszewska, Assistant professor at the University of Łódź in Poland. The showcase will be accompanied by a downloadable catalogue that tells the story of the romance between VR and literature.

Download catalogue

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, providing academic, business and scientific communities with access to the world’s most comprehensive research collection of over 170 million items, which includes artefacts from every age of written civilisation. They keep the nation’s archive of printed and digital publications, adding around three million new items every year. They have many books, but so much more. At their London and Yorkshire sites, they have everything from newspapers to sound recordings, patents, prints and drawings, maps and manuscripts. Public exhibitions interpret the Library’s collections to inspire and surprise audiences of all ages.

Working with UK legal deposit libraries, the British Library is actively building knowledge and capability to collect, curate and preserve “emerging formats”, including eBook mobile apps and web-based interactive narratives. These are digital publications that are in scope to collect under UK Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations, but whose content and structure are more challenging compared to those currently collected.

In 2023 the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition (2 June 2023 – 15 October 2023) explores the ways technology transforms and enhances our narrative experiences, from the widely popular audio fiction running app, Zombies, Run!, to award winning interactive adventure, 80 Days, to experimental electronic literature. This hands-on exhibition invites readers to become a part of the story themselves, through interactive works that invite and respond to user input, reading experiences influenced by data feeds, and works that draw from multiple platforms and audience participation to create immersive story worlds.

Funded by the UKRI Strength in Places Fund, MyWorld is the flagship for the UK’s creative sector and is part of a UK-wide exploration into devolved research and development funding. Led by the University of Bristol, the £30 million programme is made up of 13 partners from the West of England region’s creative technologies sector and world-leading academic institutions to create a unique cross-sector consortium.

Launched in April 2021, MyWorld will run for 5 years and has a mission to catalyse the region’s creative economy, creating new jobs, driving inward investment and supporting sustainable and inclusive business growth.

To achieve this, the programme will enable the research and development of new products, processes and services that advance regional capabilities in creative digital production, network distribution and audience evaluation research. With its unique set of creative partners and research collaborators, MyWorld will also deliver ground-breaking experimental productions, invest in innovative research and production facilities, create new skills programmes and develop the region’s creative business ecosystem. Visit www.myworld-creates.com for more information.

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.