2 - 4 July 2024
Location: School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University
Event Type: In-person
Price: £199 + concessions
Theme: ‘Controlling the Narrative’: Agency, Interaction and Influence in Creative AI and AI Cultures
Storytellers + Machines 2024 is a two-day transdisciplinary conference on creative AI at the School of Digital Arts (SODA), championing the contributions of artists, creative practitioners and technologists, alongside other voices from academia, industry and cultural sectors in the lively and contested creative AI space.
Following a peer-reviewed selection process for all open call proposals, we’ll host talks, panel discussions, artist presentations and performances from over 70 speakers. These will include academics from 20 universities, alongside independent researchers, filmmakers, musicians, artists and creative industry professionals from the UK and around the world – speaking , debating, exhibiting and performing.
We’ll also present a pop-up exhibition of AI creative works alongside the conference and a night of AI-related performances at Manchester venue The Deaf Institute. These events will celebrate the important contribution the practitioner community make to creative AI research, testing and also challenging our ideas of what is possible with these new technologies.
Conference Themes
Theme 1: Agency
AI generative systems are possibly the first tools depicted as having their own creative agency. Yet, the philosophical distinctions between creators and their tools, audiences and their media are often blurred.
What kind of agency do audiences, authors and developers have when using generative and AI tools? Should we think in terms of control at all in these relationships and instead consider notions of collaboration, borderless synthesis of human and machine or something else?
Theme 2: Interaction
New forms of interaction and immersion for audiences are being invented through generative and AI controlled narratives, artworks and experiences. What are the emerging creative systems, aesthetics and relationships between audience and producers of these forms?
Theme 3: Influence
The influence that algorithmic systems exert on society, communities and identities, for example through algorithmic bias and corporate ownership, is increasingly well understood and documented in the media, academia and the software industry.
What are the socio-cultural and economic implications of such these influences on artistic and creative media producers and their audiences? And are there emerging strategies and tools that can be used to avoid, mitigate or otherwise challenge types of harmful influence and bias, particularly as they pertain to our narratives and media?
Schedule
Tuesday 2 July
- 5:00pm – Opening Event – networking and viewing.
Wednesday 3 July
- 9:30am – Conference begins – keynotes and panel discussions.
- Late evening – Conference ends at The Deaf Institute nearby with an AI performance event.
Thursday 4 July
- 9:30am – Conference begins – keynotes and panel discussions.
- 5pm – Conference ends
Tickets
| Early Bird Rate – Academic and Industry (before 15 May 2024) | £169.00 |
| Standard Rate – Academic & Industry Full Rate (2 days) | £199.00 |
| SME discounted Rate | £99.00 |
| Independent Artist discounted rate | £49.00 |
| Subsidised – Postgraduate (core conference only) | £49.00 |
| Subsidised – Unwaged | £25.00 |
Get in touch
If you have any questions related to the conference, please contact the team at aistorytellers@mmu.ac.uk
