Connected memories : contextualising creative research practice

Mencia, Maria (2011) Connected memories : contextualising creative research practice. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 4(1), pp. 37-51. ISSN (print) 1753-5190

Abstract

One of my intentions in putting together the roundtable discussion From the Page to the Screen to Augmented Reality: New Modes of Language-Driven Technology-Mediated Research at Kingston University in July 2010 was to give the opportunity to research practitioners to perform their projects or present their work, with the aim of stimulating discussion on practice-led research in this field and instigating possibilities for further collaborations. I performed Connected Memories, an interactive generative narrative, which I produced especially after the proposal had been selected to be presented at the panel in Interactive Storytelling and Memory Building in Post-conflict Society for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2009). I invited José Carlos Silvestre to develop the technical side of the work. Silvestre is a New Media artist and writer, interested in `how code can signify by means of its native strategies'. It was a very rewarding collaboration, and he needs to be acknowledged for his knowledgeable programming input. The project was performed later in the same year at Landmark, Kunsthall Bergen, Norway as part of the event `Network as Space and Medium for collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice' organized by the Linguistic Literary and Aesthetics Studies (LLE) Digital Culture group at the University of Bergen. I chose to present it again at the roundtable discussion to question, through practice as research; notions of meaning production in digital textuality; the double view of linguistic signifiers and visual-language abstract landscapes; the use of technology as a device to collect and share stories; the programming of non-linear interactive narrative structures and storytelling through the performance of the work; and the use of code to perform generative textualities. These themes will be reviewed in this article by presenting the motivations behind the work, concepts, context, research process and technological concerns. My overall research draws from concrete, visual and experimental poetics, art, linguistics and new media art, as does this work. Keywords: practice-led research; generative; narratives; storytelling; visual; linguistic; the reader/participant

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