Modern Audience Conference 2023

Award winning writer and director of games – Immortality, Her Story and Silent Hill.

Sam Barlow is the founder of Half Mermaid Productions and a director and writer of games that push the boundaries of interactive narrative. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories psychologically profiled its own players; Her Story reinvented the detective genre for the YouTube generation, and Telling Lies explored the conflict between government and intimacy via lives lived over video calls. His most ambitious project yet is IMMORTALITY, a horror story about 20th Century filmmaking, art and death.

Destroying Movies and TV to Build Something Better

With the advent of digital technologies, Movies and TV have remained largely unchanged, still conforming to the same containers that 20th Century’s broadcast media necessitated. Sam Barlow will talk about how he is using the tools of videogames to first deconstruct, and then rebuild live action storytelling for the 21st Century.

Judith Aston is the co-founder of i-Docs, a research network exploring interactive and immersive documentary.

In this talk, Judith will argue that interactive documentary can help us to develop our skills in systems thinking. This is an approach that is multi-perspectival and that, in contrast to linear thinking, can help us to better embrace complexity. This is what lies at the core of her work with interactive documentary and is what has motivated Judith to keep developing and exploring the field since establishing i-Docs (i-Docs.org) in 2011. She will illustrate this through her ongoing work as a Convenor of the Polyphonic Documentary Project in which, together with a group of i-Docs colleagues from around the world, exploring the application of interactive documentary thinking to messy and ‘wicked problems’. Her focus is on climate emergency and ideological polarisation, and the current theme through which she is exploring this is ‘extreme heat’.

Actor, writer and director – Dune, Star Wars: Andor and Dead Man’s Shoes.

An actor and performance poet born in Oldham, Lancashire UK in 1970. Raised in the Mancunian suburb of Failsworth and resident in Manchester UK. Neil became a professional actor and poet in the year 2000.

Acting Interactive Innit?

Renowned character actor Neil Bell from films and TV shows such as Dune, Star Wars: Andor, Dead Man’s Shoes, Peterloo, Enola Holmes, Downton Abbey, Coronation Street and Emmerdale (to name just a small range) … has also starred in several interactive stories and games.

Neil will reveal how he approaches his craft – especially in regard to interactive film - showing some recent work on the mobile FMV game “Clive is a Good Guy” and discussing acting for truth, where he digs deep to find his characters and the power of the human face on screen.

Alexander Kelly is Co-Artistic Director of the Sheffield-based theatre company Third Angel, with whom he devises, directs, writes, designs and performs. The company makes a range of work connecting the territories of theatre, games, conversation, live art, installation, film, video, photography and digital & online media. After 28 years of making internationally acclaimed performance and participation projects, Third Angel will hang up its wings this summer.

Throughout the day Alex will be engaging members of the conference audience and general public in conversation, swapping stories of inspirational ideas and curating a shared oral archive of stories and ideas. Then in this talk he will reveal the ‘story of the day’ created at the conference, and reflected on the process and history of the Exchange.

Chella Ramanan is the co-founder of 3-Fold Games, the studio behind the BAFTA-nominated indie game 'Before I Forget'. She is currently a narrative designer at Ubisoft Massive, in Sweden.

Chella is committed to telling stories that elevate marginalised perspectives and challenge the accepted default. She is also co-founder of POC in Play, an organisation dedicated to the inclusion and representation of people of colour in the videogames industry. Her achievements include Gameindustry.biz 100, Evening Standard Influential Londoner, BAFTA Breakthrough and GDA Future Class.

Chella Ramanan will be in conversation about how she approaches her work as a writer and narrative designer in the creation of the BAFTA-nominated narrative game "Before I Forget" and the upcoming "Windrush Tales"

Nick Tandavanitj is as a core member of the interactive art group Blast Theory; collaborating in the development and realisation of the group’s interactive projects, performances and installations over the last 30 years. In this time, Nick has focused on creative approaches to computing; contributing to the group’s unique mix of skills in structuring interactivity and narrative. This has led to particular skills in technical design & programming, visual & interaction design for mobile and web based artwork and 3D design and animation.

Blast Theory make interactive art to explore social and political questions. The group’s work places the public at the centre of unusual and sometimes unsettling experiences, to create new perspectives and open up the possibility of change. Nick Tandavanitj will explain Blast Theory’s strategies for structuring audience interaction and participation, using examples from projects created at the Venice Biennale, at the Luminato Festival in Toronto and in Philadelphia.