Elizabeth Kilroy is the chair of the brand new one-year full-time educational program New Media Narratives at The International Center of Photography. The initial class starting this fall has eight students. The program will look at experimental media from the Surrealists to today, exploring multimedia and transmedia.She says, “The students are obviously taking a chance on us but they are not taking a chance on ICP. ICP does these one-year programs really well. They know how to help the students get the most out of it.” The students will have access to ICP's enormous image archive and will look for new ways to engage with storytelling across platforms.
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Kilroy and ICP dean Fred Ritchin decided that this program needed to confront the modern challenges of social media and building out narratives. She says “Narrative has a polysemic quality. It means one thing but it could be interpreted in different ways by different people. Narrative could be a linear story, non-linear story, a news story, a personal story, something experimental but it’s about storytelling.“ We asked her a few questions about starting the program and her own experience with new media.
The Creators Project: Is there a personal moment that lead you to emergent storytelling?Elizabeth Kilroy: Back when I was a grad student at ITP. I was making a story on HyperCard. HyperCard allowed you to tell a non-liner story. You could choose different paths to a story. I created this love story that had three different endings. I became interested in non-linearity, hypertext stories, telling stories that didn’t have one ending. That was back in the day when it was you and a desktop computer. Now we live in a different time with network wired digital culture with multiple people accessing the story from lots different type of devices.What was your AHA moment:Bear 71. It’s about a grizzly bear. It’s told from the perspective of the bear. It was the first time I saw the word transmedia: interactive, web doc, installation. That for me was the story that made me want to make stories like this. It was really beautiful.
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Why is this program important/relevant now?The program is important because of the environment we live in; because you can tell stories on multiple platforms. You can make these 20-minute web docs, you can make a story on Snapchat, create an Intsagram experience, or write a story on Medium. This is an opportunity to tap into that. The one qualification you need to get into this program is that you have a cell phone and know how to use it. From there you can learn about new technologies.The basis of the program is experimentation. Tell us how this works in the classroom.We are going to create a collaborative environment. If you see these web doc projects like Bear 71 or Alma, there might be one director but a lot of people have to work on it. It’s more like making a film, where you need a team around you.Can you share a few examples of visual storytellers?My students! Andrea Cattaneo, Sumeja Tulic, Eman Helal and Mohammed Elshamy
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The Creators Project: Is there a personal moment that lead you to emergent storytelling?Elizabeth Kilroy: Back when I was a grad student at ITP. I was making a story on HyperCard. HyperCard allowed you to tell a non-liner story. You could choose different paths to a story. I created this love story that had three different endings. I became interested in non-linearity, hypertext stories, telling stories that didn’t have one ending. That was back in the day when it was you and a desktop computer. Now we live in a different time with network wired digital culture with multiple people accessing the story from lots different type of devices.What was your AHA moment:Bear 71. It’s about a grizzly bear. It’s told from the perspective of the bear. It was the first time I saw the word transmedia: interactive, web doc, installation. That for me was the story that made me want to make stories like this. It was really beautiful.Why is this program important/relevant now?The program is important because of the environment we live in; because you can tell stories on multiple platforms. You can make these 20-minute web docs, you can make a story on Snapchat, create an Intsagram experience, or write a story on Medium. This is an opportunity to tap into that. The one qualification you need to get into this program is that you have a cell phone and know how to use it. From there you can learn about new technologies.The basis of the program is experimentation. Tell us how this works in the classroom.We are going to create a collaborative environment. If you see these web doc projects like Bear 71 or Alma, there might be one director but a lot of people have to work on it. It’s more like making a film, where you need a team around you.Can you share a few examples of visual storytellers?My students! Andrea Cattaneo, Sumeja Tulic, Eman Helal and Mohammed Elshamy