The family orientated festival which took place between 14th – 17th April, celebrates the wonders of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), with this year’s theme being Spaceship Earth which explores the challenges of living on a planet with limited resources.
To explore the themes of collective authorship and ownership in digital story writing, parents and children visiting the festival were encouraged to work together to create stories using the ORAgen demonstrator, based on a central image shown on the screen and to build upon each other’s ideas. DECaDE researchers set up a story about Space Rice with a mind of its own and a 3D printer on the international Space Station known as the ‘Astrocrafter’, with the simple prompt, ‘What happens next?’
Over the course of the festival, the team received 75 very creative contributions from attendees with story threads ranging from dancing grains of rice, rice transforming into prepackaged pasta, to space monkeys being crowned with 3d printed crowns, and robot wars in space!
The process raised some interesting conversations with visitors about what makes a well-designed prompt to continue the story, at what point can someone be defined as an author, and the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in remix.
In the coming weeks, contributors to ORAgen Fables will receive two stories based on these contributions, one generated by AI, and a second created by storyteller Gerry Durkin, and invited to take part in interviews to explore more critically the technologies underpinning ORAgen Fables.
The technology behind ORAgen Fables brings together distributed ledger technologies, media tokenisation and the C2PA metadata standard to provide a tool for creators in proving ownership over their digital assets and associated licences, create bespoke and unique licences for their creations, and embed metadata into media in a way that cannot be easily stripped or taken away. DECaDE’s exploration and critical reflection seeks to overcome the most pressing challenges regarding digital ownership and authorship.
Read more about the ORAgen framework here: ORAgen: Emerging Futures for Media Tokenization and Digital Media Rights – DECaDE
