Conceptualised by the Digital Narratives Studio, supported by Luminate ( Kristel Mucino  and Ksenia Zheltoukhova), and Sanaz Alesafar (Storyline Partners), co-facilitated with Maya Indira Ganesh, in critical dialogue with Leni Velasco and the fantastic team at Dakila, hosted at the always welcoming Eaton House, anchored by the fabulous Sonia Wong, and with design elements by Space of Inquiry in Seoul.

Digital Now is a writer’s retreat for film and television writers to make these digital technologies muddy, visible, and usable to ‘un-blackbox’ the pre-wired scripts, stories, roles, functions, and expectations that are normalized through repetition. The retreat is built around a simple creative move: make the familiar strange enough to write. We draw on three bodies of research – computational histories (how these systems were designed, with what assumptions, and how they can be redesigned), human technology relationships (what people feel and believe when they encounter the ‘digital’), and digital narrative shifts (how the role and feelings around these technologies are shifting). The research stays in the service of this craft-first experience, where it becomes a shared set of patterns, archetypes, metaphors, and constraints that writers can use to generate scenes, twists, and character engines across genres.

Digital Now is not prescriptive about what anyone should write, but instead holds space to test what feels possible to write now, right now. The structure is game-based and collaborative, designed to introduce and manage provocations, and move ideas into developable material. Participants leave with story directions (characters, tensions, origin stories, premises) that they can take back into development, and are gifted a polished portable toolkit that can be reused to make informed choices, whenever “the digital” enters a project.

Learning Objectives

• Expand how digital technologies are represented in screen and stage narratives, with attention to everyday lived experience.
• Develop a repeatable, game-based toolkit for integrating research into creative writing workflows.
• Generate developable story materials through guided writing exercises (characters, tensions, premises).
• Gather structured feedback to refine tools and produce post-residency synthesis insights.

Reflections

This is not a story: A Narrative Change about Narrative Change

by Nishant Shah, Digital Narratives Studio, CUHK

If you ask anybody working in narrative change right now, they will tell you that there are no simple or collectively shared definitions of what this means. The field is marked by different interpretations and approaches: updating older communication and outreach methods to fit the current digital landscape; creating new ways of community and movement building to forge more relational infrastructures; building new tools and playbooks to counter the weaponisation of information through digital media and technologies; resourcing collective modes of learning and doing that harness the power of stories and those who tell them; championing new voices and new modes of storytelling that might lead to collective action and hope. The metaphors, descriptions, and explanations of what all this can mean, how it can be held together, and how we might operationalise these approaches have saturated the field, creating, ironically, fiercely competed and contested terrains over whose framework will become the dominant narrative.

When I carried this work on narrative change into the Digital Narratives Studio, I was already in the winter of my discontent, unable to shake the feeling that while there is plenty being said and done in the field, much of it seems strangely memetic. The words, metaphors, approaches, logistics, and descriptions change, but they often still box themselves into familiar constraints. I do not have an exhaustive list of my unsettled engagements with the field, but I do carry one recurring observation: when thinking about narrative change work, there is often an inevitability to the conditions within which narrative change is imagined to happen.

Given my narrow interest and specialisation in thinking through digital narratives, it has constantly struck me that while the applications, interventions, operations, and forms of community mobilisation through and with these digital technologies are often inspiring and creative, they rarely question the technologies themselves. Digital technologies, and especially emerging technologies like GenAI, proliferating through extreme investments and accelerated speeds, often arrive with a sense of inevitability that asks us to accept them at face value. There is a breathlessness and an intensity that they naturalise, forcing us to naturalise them in turn as the default and singular expressions of technology. Narrative Change work, then, often ends up trying to fit itself into the changes, structures, vocabularies, and tropes that these technologies bring with them.

We talk about adopting, adapting, changing, shifting, translating, refusing, and recasting these technologies, but there is very little questioning of the black-boxed conditions and constraints that they present to us as natural. Much of the effort is spent either in using or reclaiming these technologies to do narrative work, or in refusing and critiquing these technologies through narrative work. In both instances, the technological condition remains largely unquestioned. I often boil it down to a pithy, and perhaps reductive, takeaway: asking how to keep people away from the harms of digital technologies is like asking how to de-weaponise a gun. In both instances, we accept the existence of the weapon, and instead of changing the world within which this weapon exists, we end up trying to regulate and govern it, and tell stories of how to use it differently.

At the Digital Narratives Studio, over the last three years, we have been trying to think about narrative change through a different lens: if we want to shift the narratives of our digital futures, and orient them towards collective action and hope, then we will also have to shift the narratives of our digital technologies. Technologies are narratives first. How we tell their stories, accept their impact, and learn to cohabit with them are all narrative practices that socialise and naturalise these technologies as intimate partners and immersive conditions of life, labour, language, love, and longing. The hope of our technological futures is not in imagining only the responsible use of these technologies, but in reimagining technologies that can lead to hope.

The only way to step out of the gloom, doom, and despair of the damage-centred narratives of our current digital technologies is to imagine other kinds of technologies, and to refuse the technologies we live with as the inevitable and singular expression of the digital. Digital Narrative Change, for us, remains a project of reimagining the very tools that we critique, rather than simply an attempt to tame or adapt to them.

The Writing in the Digital Now session was a first comprehensive distillation of these questions and ideas, testing what they look like in practice. Through a range of artefacts and exercises, informed by computational histories, socio-technical learnings, creative interventions, and elements of narrative formation, we invited 30 writers to put theory into practice and, through action, reflection, and interaction, co-create for us the possibilities of what it means to change the narrative about narrative change.

This was a first pilot, and it will need more refining, thinking, and streamlining. But for now, we are excited that we have a comprehensive set of artefacts through which these conversations can be facilitated: Witness Cards that help us understand our relationships with digital technologies beyond the familiar language of usage and adoption; a minifesto on 13 ways of looking at the human; a deck of cards that explores the digital counterparts of traditional roles and actions that have become tropes in our habitual storytelling; alternative worlds through which computation can be reimagined; and a set of prompts to rework the principles of digital technologies towards intentional, collaborative, and caring futures of hope.

Watch this space, as we slowly put these into production and begin socialising some of these ideas, with a first stop in Los Angeles, working with writers and makers in the Hollywood ecosystem, to write in, of, and for the digital now. Because it is only in writing for the now, informed by the politics of the past, that we can begin to create the poetics of the future.

The Cat Sat on the Mat: A Reflection on AI, LLMs, Cultural Computing, Narrative

Change Practice, Probability Mirrors and Prisms of Possibility, and Hope Tokens

by MarlonN

Maya's phrase, "The cat sat on the..." is the heartbeat of modern artificial intelligence. To a Large Language Model (LLM), the word "mat" is not a physical object, but a statistical inevitability—a token calculated from billions of previous sentences. It is not magic, but the peak of stochastic probability. As we look into this digital mirror, we find a startling revelation: humans have been "finishing each other’s mats" for millennia. (Side note: Googling stochastic probability for 30 minutes is helpful, but also headache-inducing.)

The Mirror of Prediction

We begin with the intimate. When we finish the sentence of a lover, a sibling, or a bestie, we aren't reading minds; we are running a simulation. We have been "trained" on their specific data: their pauses, their quirks, and their history of insisting they don't want anything from McDonald's, yet eating all our fries when the order arrives. This is the human entry point to understanding AI.

Humans as Predictive Processors

Hear me out on this one. Grafting the learnings from the workshop onto my narrative change practice will take time, but here is my first attempt: we humans are Biological Large Narrative Models (Bio-LNMs). Our "intelligence" is, in many ways, a highly evolved pattern probability skill.

From the moment we are born, our cultural hardware is fed a massive dataset of "Narrative DNA"—the stories of our families, our schools, our institutions, and lately, our FYPs. Over time, we develop a "handedness" in reality. We don't just observe a social conflict or a political trope; we predict its conclusion. We say "i know how this story ends" because our internal engine has already calculated the most probable "mat." Our Species as a Cultural Computer

(Or, what I learned from molds, fungi, and ants.) If humans are Bio-LNMs, then society is a cultural computer. Our traditions, laws, and memes are the "source code." I find this similarity to AI comforting. In this light, AI is not a dystopian "black box" to be feared, but a high-speed mirror. It reflects our collective past with terrifying clarity—for only $19.99 a month!

It shows us our "stochastic defaults," the biases and repetitive loops that keep us stuck in the same predictable endings. AI teaches us that much of what we call "common sense" is simply model overfitting; we have seen the same story so many times that we believe no other ending is possible. In narrative change, this applies to what we consider normal, sacred, taboo, ideal, or inevitable.

The Prism of Possibility

But here is where the mirror breaks and becomes a prism. While AI is built on the probable, humans are built on the possible. The machine has speed and scale, but it lacks our "messiness and distractions"—the sudden surge of a memory, the heat of an injustice, or the flash of a metaphor.

What we call "hallucination" in AI, we call "imagination" in humans (our greatest feature). It is the entropy that allows us to leap across the "latent space" of our minds to connect things that have no statistical right to be together. The cat is Eliot's fog or Atwood's sausage. An AI can predict the mat, but only a human can yearn for the cat to fly. This "yearning" is our agency. It is the moment we stop being "stochastic parrots" of our upbringing and become originators. Is hope, then, a token that breaks the closed loop? I'm not sure, but this gives me hope.

Negotiating the Filipino GPS

Let's move away from the Western logic of hierarchy—of dominating the technology or the narrative. Instead, let's embrace the instinct for harmony. We do not "command" the AI; we calibrate against it. We use the AI to see our patterns and to identify the "rehearsed engines" of our status quo: resilience, Filipino time, karaoke masters, land of the corrupt, and auto-smiles.

And then, we use our human "Bio-LNM" to negotiate a new agreement. We can treat the machine as a "Reflected Mind," a partner for our great cultural innovation project. The story of AI and humans isn't a battle for the finish line; it’s a duet. The AI shows us where we’ve been (The Probable) so that we can decide where we are going (The Possible). If we can learn to love what we see in the mirror—even the fuzzy parts—we can finally use that reflection to paint a future we haven't even dreamed of yet.

Conclusion vs. Initiation

The cat sat on the mat. To the machine, this is the end of the sequence. To the human,  this is merely the baseline. Narrative change is the act of recognizing the "mat" for what it is—a habit of history—and then reaching into the unknown to write a different ending.

Why should we be victims of the data when we can be architects of the next token? By learning to love what we see in the AI mirror—the predictable, the messy, and even the unexamined life—we can transform the story of technology into a joyful journey of self discovery. We can build bridges to the world of possibilities.