The paradox of words today is that they appear both extremely cheap and extremely valuable, perhaps as never before in history. This is expressed in everything from advertising’s omnipresence, to the careless comment begetting scandal on social media, to the leveraging of the entire internet as training data for generative AI.
The status of writing – and perhaps even more, of the writer – is in flux. For this SGSAH-sponsored training event, we consider the consequences of this within a field of practice also undergoing (and responsible for) seismic change: games and interactive storytelling. Bringing together voices from across research, industry and creative practitioner perspectives, we ask how the worth of word might be affirmed and expressed differently? How, in a world wrought by ‘ubiquitous computing’ and the ‘attention economy’, might this worth be put in other words? How might abundant word be sustained today?
We also consider how ‘writing’ in the context of games might be better understood with recourse to ‘gesture’. This pairing allows us to mobilise performance and poetics to both challenge and embrace current practices in interactive storytelling. Across this day-long event, we will look to a series of interdisciplinary approaches with both creative and critical valences, including creative writing, videogame design, comparative literature, performance studies, comics studies, philosophy, art, technology and cultural studies.
Contributors: Dr Broderick Chow, Dr Lynda Clark, Tim Etchells, Harun Morrison, Dr Darshana Jayemanne, Phil Vaughan, Dr Pip Thornton, Dr Martin Zeilinger
Organsiers: Dr Johanna Linsley, Professor Chris Murray, Professor Mark Robson, Dr Undine Sellbach, Dr Dominic Smith
Abundant Word is hosted by Creative Writing, Comic Studies and Philosophy in the Division of Humanities at the University of Dundee. This event is supported by Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) as part of the annual training programme of the Creative Economies Knowledge Exchange Hub. Twitter: @CEhub_Sgsah
| Period | 17 Nov 2023 |
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| Event type | Workshop |
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| Location | DundeeShow on map |
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| Degree of Recognition | National |
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- Media Art
- Media Activism
- English Literature
- Literature
- Design
- Philosophy
- art and media
