LASER Talks in Bergen presents Interventions in the creation of nonhuman narratives

Join Julian Stadon, Jordan Magnusson, and Jason Nelson for a behind-the-scenes, live collaborative session exploring more-than-human narratives across poetry games, AI-assisted making, and digital design.

Chaired by: Alinta Krauth

EVENT INFO

When: 6th March, 2pm, Oslo timezone, 

Where: Online via Zoom

Access Info: Join via ZOOM

Meeting ID: 682 8355 8527, Password: 3VbUEAeG

Website: https://www4.uib.no/forskning/forskningssentre/senter-for-digitale-fortellinger/aktuelt/leonardo-laser-talks-bergen

How are nonhuman and more-than-human narratives and poetics being engaged by techno-artists in fields of digital poetics, video games, and digital design? We look to practices such as interactive poetry games, AI-assisted making, and sensor-driven interactions to contemplate how historically human-centric digital arts practices can begin to incorporate other ways of seeing. Just us for scintillating conversation from digital artist Julian Stadon, seminal poetry game creator Jordan Magnusson, and seminal digital poet and art games creator Jason Nelson. This event takes a departure from the standard online panel-talk format by taking audiences behind the scenes of how three practitioners each from different fields, design and produce their works. They will show some of their methods live, and might even work together in real time to generate a new artwork concept together. After practice introductions from each presenter, they will turn their attention towards chatting through their processes, and might even improvise and design something new together!

SPEAKERS BIOS

Jordan Magnuson is a game designer and media artist whose work explores how videogames can express experience in poetic and culturally resonant ways. For over fifteen years, he has created award-winning independent games, "game poems," and other interactive works. In 2005, he founded The Independent Gaming Source, a community that helped launch a generation of landmark indie titles including Fez, Spelunky, Papers, Please, and Minecraft. His own games, such as Loneliness, Ishmael, and Freedom Bridge, have been showcased at festivals and galleries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, archived by the British Library, nominated for honours including the IndieCade Grand Jury Award and the New Media Writing Prize, and featured in publications including Wired, PC Gamer, and Le Monde. He is the author of Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), and leads the Game Poets Discord community, connecting creators from games, poetry, and the visual arts around the topics of human and poetic game design. Jordan currently serves as Senior Lecturer in Games and Media Art at the University of Southampton and was 2024–25 Fulbright Fellow in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. https://www.jordanmagnuson.com/

Julian Stadon is an Australian artist/designer/curator/researcher/educator. First studying Marine Biology, then Fine Arts and a Master of Electronic Art, his current PhD research focuses on how art can better our understandings of augmentation aesthetics, identity, & the relationship between bodies, embodied data and data bodies.

His nomadic practice-based research interfaces art, bio-digital entanglements, embodied interactivity, food ecologies, culture and society. He was the founder of Dorkbot Perth and marart.org and has worked in academia since 2006 is Programme Leader of Creative Computing at Winchester School of Art. He also teaches on the Interface Cultures Programme at Kunstuniversität Linz. https://julianstadon.net/

Jason Nelson is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen and the Principal Investigator of the Arts-integrated Research Node of the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian centre of research excellence. He is also an award-winning and renowned creator of quirky digital poems and fictions, builder of art games and all kinds of digital art expressions, and an associate professor of digital art and writing. Apart from enticing students to break, play with and challenge all kinds of technologies, his artwork is seen around the world in places like FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and ELO. There are prizes to mention (Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize), organizational board positions held (Australia Council Literature Board and Electronic Literature Organization), scholarships received (Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Bergen, Moore Fellowship at the National University of Ireland), and a number of other honours to his name (Webby Award, Digital Writing Prize).

SPONSORS

LASER Bergen largely operates under the pressing themes of 'Posthuman Communication', 'Narratives of Interspecies Care', 'Animals and AI', 'Animal-Computer Interactions' and 'Climate Storytelling' - each contributing to an overall theme of SciArt Interventions for Ecological Survival. We provide panel talks and artistic engagements that discuss emergent epistemologies and technologies for communication, narratives, meaning-building, and the potential roles played by artists and storytellers in multispecies futures.

The Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) is a Norwegian Centre of Excellence at the University of Bergen, funded by the Research Council of Norway for 2023–2033 to establish a new, interdisciplinary field focused on digital storytelling. Working across arts, humanities, media studies, game studies, and informatics, CDN explores how narratives shaped by computation such as electronic literature, interactive games, social-media conspiracies, and AI-generated stories are transforming culture. The center operates through six research nodes and organizes rich academic activities including exhibitions and podcasts. In particular, the LASERs will be hosted by the CDN's Artistic

Integrated Research node: The Artistic Integrated Research node serves as a vital experimental hub where digital technologies are leveraged to create, interpret, and contextualize digital narratives. AIR champions groundbreaking artistic research that
materializes in digital art, creative writing, interactive installations, and site-specific works, often showcased in galleries, libraries, and museums to engage diverse cultural
audiences.

The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 60 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks