The Digital Narratives Studio brings together future forward research creating new conditions of digital narratives and produces playbooks, prototypes, and pedagogies for value-driven, humane, and collective narrative change. Our work is shaped by three central questions that also determined the three pillars upon which the Studio is built.
Authorship is a function. It experiments how we tell stories and is created by experiments of how these stories get told. The Fellowship in Experimental Authorship (#AuthEx) prototypes new characteristics of digital author needed to reframe crises.
How do we bring the body back into the stories of computation and networks? Narrative Change Residence (#N-ChaRE) creates ‘playbooks’ that centre care and collectivity to engage people in hopeful action for resilient futures.
Human truths are beyond computational verification. Reality Check (#ReCheck) is a consortium driven research practice to make space for expressions, stories, fictions, fantasies, and speculation, examining boundaries of digital meaning making.
QUESTIONS
Authorship. The function of an author is not only to generate information but to define the very boundaries of what constitutes speech, creativity, ownership, culpability, influence, protocols of telling truth, and the responsibility of spreading it. What is a digital author? How does the emergence of digital authorship create new conditions of social, technological, embodied, affective, and material consequences to the future of information? Can we speculate, design, and prototype the new functions of a digital author?
Authority. In digital networks, the authority over narrative production, access, circulation and deployment often remains ‘blackboxed’ in complex layers of technological and social organization. We are committed to unpacking conditions and practices of authority to equip communities, collectives, and people to intervene, negotiate, and claim their authority to engage in hopeful action for resilient futures. Can we create playbooks that can train and empower people in meaningful engagement with collective ownership?
Authenticity. There is a dramatic shift in our understanding of interpretation, negotiation, and consolidation of meaning. How do we establish new protocols of authenticity and verification? Who is at risk and how do we create conditions to protect people from misinformation? How do we create new frameworks to foreground human agency and action in the face of algorithmically accelerated information spread?