A North-South Shadowpox Summit

What a joy it was to visit Debajehmujig Storytellers with Asiphe Ntshongontshi for a North-South Shadowpox Summit on Manitoulin Island last week! 

This “citizen science fiction” knowledge-exchange enabled Asiphe, a member of the 2019 South African lab, to meet and collaborate with young artists from northern Ontario who participated in Shadowpox labs in 2018 and 2022. We had a blast sharing experiences and discussing future applications of sci-fi world-building and role-playing to improve health in communities on opposite sides of the globe.  

Our colleagues at Debaj, led by Joahnna Berti and Bruce Naokwegijig, also arranged for Asiphe to visit Wikwemikong High School with Principal Harold Fox, who took the time to give us a wide-ranging tour of his inspiring institution. 

Following our wonderful whirlwind visit to Manitoulin, we drove seven hours south to Toronto where Asiphe gave a talk titled "Youth, Health & Life in Masiphumelele," hosted by the Global Strategy Lab and the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. 

Dr. Godfred Boateng’s Global Health and Humanitarianism class was fascinated to hear about her experience working as a young professional in global health, including her work with the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation in the township of Masiphumelele, Cape Town, South Africa.

It was a privilege to host Asiphe during her week in Canada, and we are hugely grateful for the EC3R Small Grant Award that made her visit possible.

Abstract Art

It's less than two weeks till my PhD oral examination! I'm looking forward to the conversation and feel incredibly lucky to have Patrick Jagoda as external examiner, Ian Garrett as internal/external, and Sharon Hayashi as exam committee chair, along with my amazing dissertation committee, Caitlin Fisher (supervisor), Jennifer Jenson, and Graham Wakefield. 

In the process of preparing for the big day, I figured I'd post the abstract for anyone who might be curious.

_____ 

The Shadowpox Storyworld as Citizen Science Fiction: Building Co-Immunity through Participatory Mixed-Reality Storytelling

Alison Humphrey 

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 

Graduate Program in Cinema and Media Studies 

York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

_____
 

Abstract

Scientific evidence can influence us in decisions like whether to get immunized, but so can storytelling, the artful show-and-tell of cause-and-effect which can convey misinformation as readily as it does fact. Building on inoculation theory and active learning, I argue in “The Shadowpox Storyworld as Citizen Science Fiction: Building Co-Immunity through Participatory Mixed-Reality Storytelling” that a new form of participatory storytelling called “citizen science fiction” can intervene in vaccine hesitancy by helping people explore what makes a story compelling, what makes science convincing, and how fear and distrust can be engineered to sway us away from action we might otherwise take. This research-creation dissertation recounts the design and testing of three multimodal experiments in a single science fiction storyworld, titled Shadowpox. The first experiment is a full-body videogame, the second is a networked narrative, and the third is a new form, a pedagogical-dramatic art hybrid I am calling a “courseplay”.  

The design of the gallery-installation videogame Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic began with generative visual effects motion-tracked to the player’s body and avatar, but its procedural rhetoric came together only with the addition of 99 other avatars embodying the concept of community immunity. The vaccine-trial role-play of Shadowpox: The Cytokine Storm re-imagines immunity as an acquired superpower whose bearers are framed as villains as often as they’re hailed as heroes, inviting participants to think more deeply about the story design and real-life toll of misinformation. With the advent of Covid-19, these pre-pandemic workshops in London, Cape Town, and Manitoulin Island were joined by the online courseplay Digital Culture: Science & Fiction, where York University students in lockdown blended reading, writing and role-playing to explore the scientific and social-media dynamics around a historic rollout of new vaccines. I propose a new research-creation pedagogy, “action refraction,” to help learners reflect on the interplay between evidence, affect, fiction, and alternative-fact confection. Citizen science fiction as a broader methodology, meanwhile, has the potential to promote participants and researchers alike from storytellers into story-listeners, moving from the one-way explanation of many scientific-literacy efforts to the reciprocal empathy essential for truly healthy citizenship. 

AI and Theatre (and and and...)

Hope you can join us at today's panel on AI and Theatre at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)! 

Here are a few links for the projects I'll be presenting on:

• Shadowpox
  
  
• Faster Than Night
  
  
• A (motion-capture) Midsummer Night's Dream
  
  
• Starship Titanic

Our conversation on "the current and future uses of AI and immersive technology in theatre and performance," chaired by TORCH Director Wes Williams, will also feature the Royal Shakespeare Company's Director of Digital Development Sarah Ellis, multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Ruthie Doyle, immersive producer & curator Dan Tucker, and David Taylor, Associate Professor of English.

The event is part of Oxford University's Artful Intelligence Season, "a forum to discuss and shape key questions at the intersection of AI and Creativity," hosted by the Humanities Cultural Programme and The Institute for Ethics in AI.

Should be fascinating!

Shadowcasting and TORCH

I'm hugely looking forward to chairing a roundtable next weekend with good friends Asiphe Ntshongontshi (Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre), Joahnna Berti (Debajehmujig Storytellers), and Maurianne Reade (Northern Ontario School of Medicine University).

You can catch our conversation, titled "Shadowcasting from Manitoulin to Masiphumelele: 'Citizen Science Fiction' as Mixed-Reality Role-Play for Civic, Scientific and Media Literacy," at 1:30pm on May 28th. 

The Film and Media Studies Association of Canada conference is part of the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted this year on my home turf at York University.

May 29 update: Pics!

Zoom's-eye view of the roundtable

Asiphe Ntshongontshi joining remotely from Florida

Maurianne Reade, Joahnna Berti and Alison Humphrey

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One month later, I get to participate in another exciting panel, this time on AI and Theatre, chaired by Wes Williams, director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). 

This conversation on "the current and future uses of AI and immersive technology in theatre and performance" features the Royal Shakespeare Company's Director of Digital Development Sarah Ellis, multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Ruthie Doyle, and immersive producer & curator Dan Tucker.

The June 26th event is part of Oxford University's Artful Intelligence Season, "a forum to discuss and shape key questions at the intersection of AI and Creativity," hosted by the Humanities Cultural Programme and The Institute for Ethics in AI.

While I'm there, I'm also excited to talk further with Prof. Williams and his team about their upcoming project Fantasy Futures: Imagining Immersive Innovation, which will use motion capture and augmented reality to "harness the energies and enthusiasm that are generated by worlds peopled by monsters – from Ancient cultures through Tolkien’s monstrous imaginings to the Marvel universe."

"The project emerged out of a desire to reimagine for the twenty-first century the Humanities Division’s centuries-long expertise in unearthing fascinating research narratives from the worlds of Ancient and Fantasy Literature. 

"By synthesizing this research excellence with the UK’s world-leading gaming sector, the project is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by the latest cutting-edge advances in immersive storytelling."

Serious fun!

Media Arts Futures

To celebrate the end of term, I'm posting a playlist of all the Media Arts Futures guest speakers I've been lucky enough to host in CMA 1123 Writing for Games and Interactive Media over the past two years.

• Game Designer Abhi on Venba, a Game about Culture, Cooking and Change
• In Conversation with Susan O’Connor, Founder of The Narrative Department
• Writer Evan Narcisse on Video Games Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Dot’s Home
• SpookiTalk: The Natural Language Parsing Engine of Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, with Robbie Stamp, Emma Westecott, Neil Richards, Yoz Grahame and Jason Williams
• AI as a Character and the AI-Driven ‘Play as Anyone’ Mechanic in Watch Dogs: Legion, with motion-capture author and actor Pascal Langdale 
• How in the World to Carmen Sandiego: Making a Netflix Interactive Special, with director Jos Humphrey

Enjoy!

Starship Titanic 25th anniversary

Forget ChatGPT. A quarter of a century ago, a point-and-click CD-ROM adventure game from Douglas Adams featured a groundbreaking conversation engine called "SpookiTalk", which allowed you to chat with actual robots.

To celebrate the release of Starship Titanic 25 years ago this April, here's a panel discussion with members of the dev team which I hosted as part of my York U course Writing for Games and Interactive Media this time last year. 

March 2022 was the 25th anniversary of the game's original deadline whooshing by, and as I'd actually worked at The Digital Village back in the day, I figured I'd introduce my old colleagues to my first-year Media Arts students, none of whom were alive when the game was released, so we could all feel old together.

In preparation, I assigned for homework J.C. Herz's 1998 New York Times review, PushingUpRoses' 2014 YouTube review, and the following brief audio interview of Douglas Adams by Aram Sinnreich on the release of the new game: 

(CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Excerpt from original audio file "Aram Sinnreich interviews Douglas Adams," publication date 1998-04-21, at https://archive.org/details/ASDA042198. Photo by Robbie Stamp of Douglas Adams working on Starship Titanic in 1997 at The Digital Village, Camden, London.)

With the table set, the class welcomed our guests in from three timezones. Here are our contemporary portraits and job titles at TDV:

Clockwise from top left:

• Robbie Stamp (Chief Executive, The Digital Village)

• Emma Westecott (producer)

• Neil Richards (writer)

• Yoz Grahame (web technologist)

• Jason Williams (software engineer)

• Alison Humphrey (web producer)

Enjoy the chat!

For extra credit: