Storytellers + Machines 2024

Storytellers + Machines 2024 is a transdisciplinary creative AI conference that champions the contributions of artists, creative practitioners and technologists, alongside other voices from academia, industry and cultural sectors in the lively and contested space. 

THIS YEAR’S THEME: CONTROLLING THE NARRATIVE: AGENCY, INTERACTION AND INFLUENCE IN GENERATIVE AI STORYTELLING AND ART

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?

CONFERENCE FORMAT

Following a peer-reviewed selection process for all open call proposals, we look forward talks, panel discussions and artist presentations and performances by over 70 speakers 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 at the two-day creative AI conference.

We also are very excited to present a pop-up exhibition of AI creative works alongside the conference and a night of AI-related performances at Manchester’s famous venue the Deaf Institute. These exciting and social events are intended to 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.