Sparknow blog

Randomly, I picked up the Film bit of last Friday’s Guardian on the Tube.

Randomly, ‘beyond the silver screen’ or something very like it as a title, was Sparknow’s first event, in the summer of 1998, to explore digital storytelling and the role of image with Judah Passow, who’s work continues to amaze me. Complex storytelling in situations riddled with conflict. The importance of witnesses with integrity and real craftsmanship. These things hold true over 10 years on.

Randomly, I was drawn…

For MLA London, both for the Bridge building pilots we’re working with, now for Challenging History, we’ve been quite dedicated to exploring the role that sketchbooks can play – a largely analogue tool for today’s knowledge professional. I become more and more convinced as I settle into using my own sketchbook that this could be a key evaluation tool, so I thought I’d share the guidance we’ve written by way of encouragement to others:

…managers, under the pressure of high-tempo…

I know we owe you the feedback from the story thing the other week. Shawn will be over here in a couple of weeks and I think we’re going to tackle it then. These things slip away from one like slippery fish. You think you’ve netted one and it wriggles off to swim free. Instead then.

I bunked off to go to the newly opened Richard Long exhibition at Tate Britain this afternoon. I’m quite weary and needed to feed my…

From 1958 – 1997 the Radiophonic Workshop was the BBC’s experimental unit for electronic sound. There was a great article a little while back that put me on to them. I put in my growing pile of to-be-filed noticings, and then heard on the Radio that they were playing a one off gig last night ten years on. There’s lots in this. Innovation-wise, I was struck by the broom cupboard arrangements they had and, in particular, by this distinctive insight…

I had a really intriguing email today from someone who wanted to talk to me a bit more about

large scale intentional community

I rather patronisingly (meaning to be witty) wrote back to ask if the intentional was an unintentional abridgement of international. And of course not it wasn’t, it was intentional:

I used the term intentional communities, as they refer to the top-down and relatively formal approach that has been taken. This provides its own unique challenges – as people without…

I’m supposed to be blogging a thoughtful and quietly impressive reflection on Story Week, but I’ve been distracted by finding this in my junkmail this morning. It’s a festival called How the Light Gets In, to which I’ve been alerted too late to attend. What I’m interested in though is that it appears to be Britain’s first philosophy festival, among other things, and that the lines of enquiry are actually very similar to those we’re exploring with the “MLA Exchange…

Chris Heiman continues his account of his Golden Fleece experiences *Day 2 (‘The Golden Fleece’ – day) was more of a workshop day, with a few sessions in plenary and a lot of breakout sessions in smaller groups. I had been invited to act as the host of the day and guide people through the programme. Being a theatre director with an acting background, I wondered what I could bring to this task that would be relevant to the day but…

*The International Storytelling Weekend took place in Washington DC on 17th / 18th April 2009. The first day at the Smithsonian Institute had the theme ‘Storytelling and High-Performance Teams’. It was mainly a lecture-based day while day two, on the theme of ‘Why Story Matters Now More Than Ever: Exploring Contemporary Challenges’, had more of a workshop format. Both days were incredibly rich in content. I had the pleasure of hosting/running the second day. More on that tomorrow. Today I’ll…

So its Friday and here we are at the end of Story Week. Many thanks to all of you who contributed and here is our final story – something serious…

The organisors of the annual online information conference have caught the story bug and invited us to invite you to think about submitting a request to speak at this year’s event:

- Maybe you’ve been involved in creating a new application for Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo or Google? - Have you made the move to the semantic web to deal with the digital explosion and the need for greater “intelligence” in your information? - Perhaps you’ve found ways to exploit new Online…