Hello Culture Remix: Telling Tales

Telling tales has never been so exciting and the future cultural experience so fragmented. The art of the narrative is no longer a linear experience as immersive technologies create new forms of content and augment traditional cultural output.

In addition, diversity, representation and self-identification are subverting traditional narratives and in turn, challenging cultural production and distribution as audiences engage with a plurality of cultural voices through multiple platforms.

Telling Tales showcases what’s new in developing the cultural narratives and experiences of the future.

Once Upon a time.. there was a beginning, middle and end. Now the story and the narrative are no longer linear experiences to be passively consumed as digital technologies disrupt the nature of the cultural experience.

The end is the beginning, the beginning is the end and the middle connects multiple narratives across multiple platforms.

Telling Tales explores how we can retell stories in multiple narrative formats, platforms and in a myriad of ways.  With audiences choosing how, where and when they engage with stories, the augmenting of traditional modes of cultural production creates new and exciting opportunities for artists and cultural organisations.

With the emergence of new formats and technologies, we can communicate cultural ideas through multiple channels which command new ways of storytelling and augmented experiences through VR, podcasting, AR and other new technologies.

The Culture is Digital June 2019 Progress Report  noted that “in the UK there are 48 million internet users, making digital experiences part of daily life.”

With the average Briton spending 24 hours a week online,  62% of this time is spent on a smartphone. The DCMS Taking Part survey found that 90% of adults in 2018 were recent internet users with 30.6% of adults having digitally participated in culture.

In 2017/18 The National Theatre had 8 million people engage through digital channels, with 60% of state secondary schools signing up to use its On Demand in Schools programme, a free production streaming service.

The myriad forms of digital activity are the new normal for audiences, be that streaming, podcasting, VR, AR or AI and increasingly that experience will be a layered integrated landscape of digital platforms and channels.

Simultaneously these platforms are leading to new forms of creative and cultural production, distribution methods and increasing access and inclusion for a variety of diverse, intersectional audiences.

As digital technology is experiential, we move beyond storytelling into story living, reflecting a plurality of stories and voices that are iterative, fluid and open to repeated redefinition.

How does culture address the assumptions inherent in a subjective production of art and reflect a world affected by global social transition?

Telling Tales will explore how by embodying the cultural voice through diverse artistic practices, narrative perspectives and multiple platforms we can create cultural spaces for audiences to experience art in new ways and see themselves reflected.