MIX Conference

 Event 

Mix conference

MIX has established itself as an innovative forum for the exploration of writing and technology, attracting an international cohort of contributors from the UK, Australia, and Europe as well as North and South America.

After the success of the last three MIX conferences, MIX 2017 returns to Bath Spa University’s Newton Park campus. 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 now situated within the recently created international research centres - Making Books: Creativity, Print Culture & the Digital, and the Media Convergence Research Centre.

After more than two decades of innovation and experimentation, the relationship between reading, writing, form, content and delivery platform remains in flux. The e-book has taken its place alongside the print book and the multimedia story app and/or website have become familiar modes for reading and viewing. Developers are creating dramatic story and character-led narratives via independent games while interactive and immersive theatre-makers are finding new ways to engage audiences well beyond traditional theatre spaces. Television storytelling conventions continue to evolve in line with the dominance of streaming services; new reading habits and engagement strategies now surround the form of digital comics. Music exhibitors are forging increased participatory opportunities via developments in live-touring; spoken word continues to thrive at the same time as poetry film is gaining wider recognition; virtual reality and augmented reality are both making in-roads into documentary and fiction; literary forms are morphing and changing in response to the affordances of the smartphone and tablet; pervasive and locative media are shaping how literature is understood and read.

Digital media technologies foster creative ways of telling stories across multiple platforms. New media hasn’t been ‘new’ for quite some time and the word ‘digital’ is rapidly becoming redundant as technology becomes more deeply enmeshed within our cities, our homes, our lives.

In this context, a conference that looks at where creative writing, storytelling and media creation intersects with and/or is dependent upon technology should be as interdisciplinary as possible, and that’s what we are aiming for with MIX 2017. The conference will host a vibrant mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations, seminars, keynotes, discussions and workshops. Alongside scholars and researchers, artists, creative writers and creative technologists interested in literary forms are welcome to submit proposals.

View the 2017 programme