Columbia DSL - Newsletter
This month the Columbia DSL celebrates its 10th anniversary with a number of virtual and in-person events. We’ll also be launching a brand new site! For a decade the lab has been exploring new forms and functions of storytelling. The Columbia DSL designs stories for the 21st Century. We build on a diverse range of creative and research practices originating in fields from the arts, humanities and technology. But we never lose sight of the power of a good story. Technology, as a creative partner, has always shaped the ways in which stories are found and told. In the 21st Century, for example, the mass democratization of creative tools — code, data and algorithms — have changed the relationship between creator and audience. The Columbia DSL, therefore, is a place of speculation, of creativity, and of collaboration between students and faculty from across the University. New stories are told here in new and unexpected ways.
Join Columbia faculty and industry innovators as we explore the current and future landscape of digital storytelling.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Breakthroughs in Storytelling
Breakthroughs in Storytelling is a multiple-day event that includes, in addition to the awards themselves, an industry summit at Lincoln Center and a virtual symposium featuring leading practitioners from around the world.
The awards program recognizes signal achievements across the broad spectrum of media that rely on digital technologies, including film, video, journalism, advertising, marketing, games, art, fiction, theater, virtual reality, augmented reality, and experimental narratives.
Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards - online
Wednesday, April 24th, 6:00pm to 8:30pm Eastern Time
Breakthroughs in Storytelling Symposium - online
Saturday, April 27th, 11:30am to 3:30pm Eastern Time
Breakthroughs in Storytelling Industry Summit
Monday, April 29th, 6:30pm to 9:30pm Eastern Time
Film at Lincoln Center - Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
To RSVP for each of the events click below.
Special Virtual Performance of “Where There’s Smoke”
Columbia DSL and DAM zine present a special new virtual performance of Where There's Smoke.
Sunday, April 21st
2pm to 3pm Eastern Time
via zoom and miro
All families have secrets. Skeletons hidden in closets. Things left unsaid.
In Where There’s Smoke, project creator Lance Weiler unravels the secrets of his enigmatic father — a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer — and two devastating fires that struck the Weiler family in the early 1980s. In the final months of his battle with colon cancer, his father invites Lance to interview him, and these conversations reignite 30 years of wondering… were those fires more than tragic accidents?
Where There’s Smoke is an immersive storytelling experience about life, loss, and memory that reveals itself to be both deeply personal and universally resonant. The project employs elements of immersive theatre, interactive documentary and emerging technology to guide people through an abstracted and deconstructed exploration of his father’s life, offering interactive prompts along the way. It had its world premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and in 2023 was a featured exhibition that ran from June to October at ArtYard.
Please note that capacity is limited as this will be a performance for a small audience.
Columbia University and NASA/JPL Present: Messages from Home - Reimagining the Voyager Golden Record
Join us for an evening of interactive art and science as we consider our generation's Golden Record.
In the first portion of the evening, Behrang Garakani and Natalia Espinoza will guide you in an immersive experience where we assemble a collective message destined for the far reaches of our cosmos. In the process of looking towards the stars for life, we invite you to reflect on our shared humanity.
The second portion will feature a seminar by Dr. Jonathan Jiang, Senior Researcher at NASA's JPL. He will present their 'Message in a Bottle' initiative, which aims to encapsulate humanity's achievements across both space and time.
Hosted by Columbia DSL
WHAT WE’RE READING
In a new introduction to the paperback edition of “The Sea We Swim In,” Frank Rose writes about generative A.I. and the stories we tell ourselves about it: "the creative partnership, the Luddite prophecy, the doomsday scenario, the free-speech drumbeat,” this last referring to an argument that’s made by people who disable the guardrails that are put up to help ensure that AI is used responsibly. (As one of them put it, “It’s my computer, it should do what I want. My toaster toasts when I want. My car drives where I want. My lighter burns what I want. My knife cuts what I want. Why should the open-source AI running on my computer get to decide for itself when it wants to answer my question?”) Which of these stories gains the most traction may help determine the future course this technology takes.
The essay introduces the idea of “species panic”—the quasi-hysterical reaction that a lot of people are having to generative AI. "Partly that reaction comes from fear of the unknown—even the most ardent proponents of AI admit that they don’t really know how it will evolve or where it’s going to take us,” Frank says. “And partly it’s a new extension of that age-old question of what makes us human, except now instead of comparing our intelligence to animals’, we’re comparing it to the intelligence of machines, which some people think could evolve to the point that they end up doing away with us.”
Frank has written about AI before, most recently in a review in the Wall Street Journal of Wharton professor Ethan Mollick’s book “Co-intelligence,” which takes the position that AI—at least in its current state—can function as a creative partner.
On sale next Tuesday April 23. Available for preorder now
LINKS
This L.A. escape room explores corporate greed — and shows how corruptible you really are
“Word got out that there was a whistleblower wanting to meet. The company was suspicious, but this was the first overt notice that our place of work was corrupt. Should we investigate and see what ethics were being breached, or play dumb and stay loyal to the firm? We were divided.
I wanted to link with the informant — if something is amiss, we should know, even if it put our fast-rising career in jeopardy. But was that out of character for the avatar we had choosen?”
The New Wave: The Next generation of creators fighting for the soul of youtube
“In its simplest form, the YouTube New Wave is an internet-native film and artistic movement that has emerged as a response to the so-called “Beastification” of YouTube.
But it’s also a robust community of creators taking a cinematic approach to online video in the hopes of creating a new norm for YouTube, their platform of choice.”
Models All the Way Down
“If you want to make a really big AI model — the kind that can generate images or do your homework, or build this website, or fake a moon landing — you start by finding a really big training set.
Images and words, harvested by the billions from the internet, material to build the world that your AI model will reflect back to you.
What this training set contains is extremely important. More than any other thing, it will influence what your model can do and how well it does it.
Yet few people in the world have spent the time to look at what these sets that feed their models contain.”
Columbia DSL Newsletter
Get Involved
Join over 1,500 practitioners from around the world working with story, design and code. The Columbia DSL’s prototyping community is place to learn and network. Gain access to resources, working groups, open source code and much more.
Volunteers Wanted
We’re looking for volunteers to help with a new research project focused on bridging physical and virtual experiences. If you’re interested please email us at hello@digitalstorytellinglab.com