What we’re doing:
Stemming from research within the UKRI’s Creative Technology R&D project, the Multisensory Storytelling research initiative seeks to understand the production, power and radical social potential of emerging forms and formats of storytelling that engage with our increasingly multisensory and multimodal digital media environment.
As a research project our aim is to establish a network for makers and thinkers in this space; address the obstacles and opportunities arising from multisensory storytelling as a technical and cultural practice; contribute to the understanding and advancement of multisensory storytelling.
Why it’s important:
We need stories commensurate to the times that we live in, in formats that work against the routinization of our attention. Where are they? How do they operate? What worlds might they describe? What futures might they make possible? What new forms of knowledge do they enable? And what form of criticism do they require?
Multisensory Storytelling is way of envisioning transformation. As an area of creative innovation and impact-oriented research, it is a means by which to explore issues of sustainability, universal design and the entanglements between humans and their environments that traditional storytelling modes struggle to reflect and unpick.
The research project is committed to supporting innovation in this field in order to best advance the ecological, inclusive and decolonial affordances of multisensory storytelling.
Who we are:
Mandy Rose
Mandy Rose is Professor of Documentary and Digital Cultures at UWE Bristol. Her current research explores immersive media as a platform for engaging speculative futures, more-than-human worlds and multisensory experience. She is Co-Investigator on the UKRI Strength in Places My World programme. She was Co-Investigator on the EPSRC Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters project. She is Co-Convenor of i-Docs. She is a Fellow at MIT OpenDoc Lab. Mandy is on the Executive Board of Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio.
Dr Tom Livingstone
Dr Tom Livingstone is a Research Fellow at UWE Bristol working within the UKRI’s MyWorld programme. His research focusses on the emerging media technologies and their impact on how we interact with and understand the world around us. He has published widely in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals such as Convergence and NECSUS. He received a British Academy Talent Development Award to support his work on game engines, which he exhibited as a piece of playable research at the British Academy Summer Showcase 2024. His monograph Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects was published by Edinburgh University Press in October 2024.