We Make Stuff: Play and Multiplatform

 Event 

We Make Stuff: Play and Multiplatform

How can we utilise gaming and multiplatform strategies to create new digital methodologies for narrating the journeys of place and community?

Exploring how rich digital methods can be fathomed out of apps, gaming and multiplatform media to tell the personal stories of community and sense of place, We Make Stuff: Play and Multiplatform is a collaboration with Create Studios, an award-winning hub of digital creatives, and is the third in the Media Convergence Research Centre’s public engagement event series.

The event will consist of presentations delving into different ways in which playable media – such as gaming and apps – and transmedia storytelling can be used to empower communities in different contexts, spanning education in Latin America, the UK’s political groups, and questions of public place in Lancaster.

Presentations will be followed by a Q&A discussion panel.

We are privileged to also feature an interactive workshop co-led by Shahina Johnson, CEO & Artistic Director at Create Studios, and Claire Levy, Senior Lecturer in Film. Shahina Johnson brings her skills from Create Studios as a leading community organisation, working on aspects such as inclusivity in the arts and encouraging aspiration in young people through creative methods. The workshop will focus on different methods which might help individuals and community groups to foster participation in the arts. Exploring how digital and other creative approaches can reach different sectors of the community will be at the heart of the session. It offers the opportunity to share experiences as well as experiment with varied digital and analogue methodologies.

Create Studios is a collaborative team of digital creatives working nationally and internationally across film, web, apps and games from their base in Swindon’s emerging cultural quarter. With a not-for-profit model, Create Studios delivers three project strands – creating inclusion, talent, and production – each of which aims to make inspirational digital media projects for and with partners. Claire Levy is Senior Lecturer in Film and also a PhD researcher, examining how multi-media methods can help to communicate experiences of young people in rural and urban localities. She has also worked as an evaluator in participatory arts projects in UK and Europe.

The event commences with a welcome wine reception from 5:30pm.

Featured presentations include:

Desarmados

Matthew Freeman will present work from Desarmados (Disarmed), a project which aims to harness commercial ideas about storytelling across multiple media platforms as a tool for documenting the Colombian citizens of Medellín and for narrativizing their memories of the Colombian armed conflict. An innovative multiplatform project supported by the Colombian Ministry of Culture and the Colombia Government, Desarmados ultimately seeks to reconstruct the cultural memory of the Colombian armed conflict, and develop workshops with secondary schools in Medellin to help test our new transmedia storytelling education materials as tools for social enterprise between survivors and civil society.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Reader in Multiplatform Media and Co-Director of the Media Convergence Research Centre at Bath Spa University.

Trespass

Ron Herrema will present Trespass, an iPhone app/artwork he created in collaboration with artist Layla Curtis. Trespass uses one of Curtis' custom-drawn maps to present the stories of numerous residents connected with a contested green space in Lancaster, Freeman’s Wood. A local gallery, Storey G2, explored this issue and commissioned Curtis to create the work. A location-based app, it requires the user to trespass in order to access most of its content.

Dr Ron Herrema is Senior Lecturer in Creative Computing at Bath Spa University.

Government collaboration

John Curry will discuss his work with the military and government to show the role of serious gaming techniques across a variety of political, community and social contexts. This work includes documenting the journey of how the British Army adopted commercial computer games technology as part of its training and how the health service use games for its emergency planning training.

John Curry is Senior Lecturer in Games Development at Bath Spa University.

Please contact Matthew Freeman (m.freeman@bathspa.ac.uk) for further information.