ART | SCIENCE | FICTION: WORLD BUILDING & TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY STORYTELLING
“We have no idea of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our parents had a future, or thought they did. For us things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile … We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
We are excited to be at the edge of the greatest disruption of storytelling in history. And yet we continue to consider the creation and production of our narrative media through the lens of a Nineteenth Century manufacturing industry.
Our entertainment industries are neither adept, nor progressive. They continue to adopt traditional, Victorian tools of creation and outmoded linear processes that no longer serve the non-linear, spherical, intuitive, immersive, experiential, multi-user, multi-platform world space we all now inhabit. This is not only about new media, although this is an important consideration. It is about how we can develop stories with adept tools and progressive technologies that are so accessible that they only require us to wake up to the possibilities. It is about opening our minds to intuitive, collaborative development and production processes that allows us to enhance our storytelling, in traditional cinema as well as new media.
It is time to throw away the Victorian textbooks and methodologies, and to take stock. Time to consider both the power and need for new narratives, and the ways in which we make them. For this we need become media agnostic, and to begin to build worlds that serve all possible platforms, including those not yet imagined.
In his keynote, ART & SCIENCE & FICTION: WORLD BUILDING & TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY STORYTELLING, production designer, creative director and professor Alex McDowell calls for a radical reimagining of our inceptive, prototyping, and development processes. He will describe a world building practice that reimagines the creation and development of traditional and post-cinematic storytelling, across media, to create an infrastructure for Twenty-first Century production:
ART
Design of holistic and spherical worlds provoke the organic emergence of multiple stories, driven by the rules of the world.
SCIENCE
Systems transform our narratives from an author-directed control of the viewer’s gaze into a collaborative interaction between the multiple creators of the world, in a direct relationship between the world-space, its inhabitants, and the human lens.
FICTION
Storytelling returns to its primary role, to challenge assumptions and make sense of the world around us.