Creative AI in the Robot Zoo (20th November)

Members of the MA Global Media Management are once again contributing to the Southampton Festival of Arts and Humanities, this time as part of the in-person Hands-On Humanities day at Avenue Campus in Southampton (20th November from 10:30 – 16:30 GMT).

AI and robots are set to play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives. Will they be human-like in appearance or intelligence, or quite different from us – more like toys, pets, and other animals?

In this workshop you play with and program animal-like robots and toys. What new relationships of play, work and care between people and machines can you imagine? You will test their limitations and design new possibilities for a future of life with technological creatures.

Read more HERE and drop by on the day to participate!

The workshop is run by Dr Seth Giddings, Lesia Tkacz (both GMM staff members) and Yijie Gao (Ink – a PhD candidate at Winchester School of Art), and combines their research into, respectively: AI and technological imaginaries; automated creativity; robot-animal-human relationships.

Dr Colette Balmain Speaks to GMM ‘Transmedia’ Students About BTS

On 18th February 2020, the MA in Global Media Management hosted a guest speaker on ‘Celebrity Transmedia and BTS’ (a hugely influential K-pop band). Dr Colette Balmain is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media & Communications at Kingston University London, working predominantly on identity politics and the representation of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability in (East Asian) cinema. She has also organised a major international conference on BTS.

In the session, students examined the construction of the BU (Bangtan Universe) as an example of transmedia storytelling which encourages fan interaction and activity. Dr Balmain’s lecture examined the complex storyworld of the BU as constructed through music videos, webtoons, ‘the Notes’, and other media content as an example of open world storytelling more commonly found in video games.

The session was open to all staff and students at WSA, but was of particular interest to ‘Transmedia Storytelling’ students on the module Global Media 2: Industries and Technologies. As one commentator writes on Medium, ‘In an age where artists must sell themselves as much as their art, social media allows for new types of transmedia engagement with an audience. BTS sells both themselves and their music through the use of transmedia, combining both new media and old media along the way.’ Students explored this idea through a close reading of the song ‘Black Swan’, and ended the session by collaborating on their own transmedia ideas for extending the BTS story.

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A copy of Dr Balmain’s slides can be downloaded at this link (PDF).

escape the room!

This week on the Games and Media strand, Samantha Schäfer challenged the students to escape from the Rotunda’s downstairs room. Through a mix of searching, intense puzzle-solving – and some outrageous cheating – they won through.

Their reward? To brainstorm ideas for their own spatial / architectural games:

playing-studying-designing

For the Games and Media strand of the Global Media 2 module, students have explored the relationships between (narrative) popular media and (simulational) games through quick and dirty design: