Serrano pushing for new network of interactive art/technology research

The influential director of the Habit@t at the Canadian Film Centre is quickly putting together a funding coalition to launch a new research network examining interactive narrative art forms. While resources have yet to be finalized, Ana Serrano is pushing ahead with plans to encourage collaboration within a "SWAT team" of researchers and artists to push the envelope on new forms of storytelling in a race to establish Ontario – Toronto in particular – as a world-leading cluster of industry activity. Serrano tells Canadian NEW MEDIA she’s convinced in the wake of a new book by the American National Research Council, Beyond Productivity: Information technology, innovation and creativity, that there is a global contest currently underway to establish where leading-edge applications development in areas such as digital cinema, gaming, interactive television and across the spectrum of consumer pastimes will take place. She’s convinced Toronto, and Canada in general, enjoy several competitive advantages including a media-savvy population and one of the world’s highest broadband Internet access penetration rates. To capitalize on those, she is suggesting a new collaboration between artist/researchers, high-level culture creators such as well-known authors and filmmakers, and university researchers engaged in late-stage technology development. She’s initially dubbed the effort the Interactive Narrative Research Network, or INR/net. "The intent is essentially to create this collaborative network where these three constituents, particularly the culture creators and the technologists, come up with projects that will start to define the future of narrative, and our team of artist/researchers implement them into robust prototypes," she says. "The intent of INR/net is to develop five to six best practice interactive narrative projects every 18 months which then get exhibited around the world. It’s to start to define Canada, and in particular Ontario and Toronto, as the hub of the interactive art and entertainment industry." Partners in the initiative to date include the Schulich School of Business at York University, the University of Toronto, Derivative Inc. and some other SMEs. Serrano won’t discuss which funding partners she’s approached, other than to say she’s been in touch with Canadian Heritage, but agrees that some programs such as Heritage’s New Media Research Networks Fund seem ideally tailored for the plan. Some details have already been worked out and collaboration partners already chosen with some research at the University of Toronto in mind. The network, Serrano says, would be focused on five research avenues: cinematic, theatrical, literary, architectural, and personal. As an example of personal research, she cites an examination of "wireless devices for just-in-time location-specific journaling through GPS tagging of physical space." She also cites such things as interactive cinema experiments where audiences in networked theatres see different points of view, for example, and can control the outcome of a story in conjunction with actions of other audiences. Xerox PARC a modelSerrano says she is drawing from the Xerox PARC model, which is known for commercializing cutting-edge applications, but has veered from the tried-and-true by introducing a layer of adding artist/researchers between the researchers and artists involved in the project. "…rtists and technologists, not that they’re not necessarily oil and water, but they speak different languages, they have different interests in what they want to do. So the model that we chose is to create a middle layer that essentially acts as a lubricant between the culture creators and the research technologists. And this middle layer is what we call the artist/researcher. These are people who are the new media practitioners already."

Serrano pushing for new network of interactive art/technology research

News | 06/13/2003 4:00 am EDT

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