Digital Direction (MA)
About
Digital Direction gives us the ability to tell inclusive and relevant stories using immersive emerging platforms. Through critical thinking, our practitioners develop meaningful ways to communicate contemporary issues. Using storytelling tools and technologies, we work with others to tell and amplify stories that need to be heard.
Global challenges, pervasive and systemic inequalities, and ever-shifting social, political, cultural, and technological contexts call for bold, imaginative, and critically informed practices. Embedded in digital technology are time-based narratives and the media platforms that host them.
By rethinking what storytelling can be and how it can achieve, we develop new perspectives, explore the ethics of technology and the politics and poetics of storytelling. In order to rethink and reframe storytelling, we must take into account parallel human and nonhuman realities, alternate futures, sensuous modes of storytelling experience, and new narrative ecologies and subjectivities.
By using research-led social and sustainable communication strategies, we raise awareness about environmental threats and explore new storytelling questions, contexts or challenges. Furthermore, we build an open-source storytelling platform, with augmented documentaries, design social VR experiences, and experiment with performance to examine the implications of artificial narratives.
In collaboration with others, we study the distribution of intelligence, or what it means to tell stories with frogs, ponds, plants, and trees. Using contemporary media platforms to promote positive social and cultural change, this course explores political and intercultural topics, material and intangible heritage, and deconstructs (post)colonial narrative practices or experiments with natural storytelling to explore our understanding of the world.