Joining Europe's most influential conference for digital entertainment, Anthropologists, Historians, Storytellers and World Building Institute colleagues join Alex McDowell (Founder), Jeff Watson, and Juan DiazB in Stuttgart to launch a vast collaborative world build of the fictive city of Rilao, and develop a new encylopedia of Rilaoan narratives. Creative thinkers from all over the globe will gather on May 8 in Room Heilbronn to uncover stories of this newly discovered world.

Additionally, the World Building Institute is curating a revolutionary track ‘Traversing Reality: Storytelling in Brave New Worlds’, led by Alex McDowell and Tawny Schlieski of Intel’s Experience Group. The track looks at the vast potential of mixed reality technologies in creating and experiencing new narrative worlds in diverse spaces from live theater to perception science and politics. (Tuesday May 5th, Meidinger-Saal, 14:00 - 20:00)

For more information, visit the Wbi FMX event page.

Worldbuilding is a narrative practice involving the conceptualization, visualization, and prototyping of a fictional world. In many cases — from entertainment and business innovation to futures foresight and policy making — worldbuilding demands radical collaboration in the creative process, as voices from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and skillsets are often necessary to envision the many dimensions of a possible world. To explore how these kinds of collaborations can work, the USC Worldbuilding Institute, in partnership with groups of creators around the world, has developed the fictional world of Rilao, an imaginary city in the South Pacific loaded with storytelling potential, as a container for multiple narratives.

The archipelago that supports Rilao has already yielded more than 1,000 distinct stories, and hundreds of artifacts at USC School of Cinematic Arts, the Berlinale Film Festival, and at numerous academic institutions.  Currently known history spans the 1600s to 2050.

Using a set of creative processes developed by the USC Worldbuilding Institute and Jeff Watson of the Situation Lab, FMX participants in this one-day session will build out the world of Rilao, unravel its unique stories, and compile the materials they create into fragments from Rilao’s imaginary Encyclopedia Universalis. Participants will emerge from the session with new perspectives on the creative process itself, and on the myriad ways that narratives can be discovered and developed for the new media landscape. The Transmedia workshop will have a maximum of 50 participants.

–Bill Desowitz

Exploring perceptual space and time in a post-cinematic world, Alex McDowell and Sergei Gepshtein wove their approaches to art and science together into the keynote at the Filmatic Festival in San Diego. By addressing the complications in the ambiguity of perceptual and semantic elements of a visual experience, the pair challenged the attendees to evaluate the intersection of creative and scientific thinking.

McDowell and Gepshtein shared their Hay Grant project that inspired the creation of a versatile measurement platform for mapping the spatial and temporal boundaries of perception in large spaces. With experiments in virtual architecture, mixed reality, and immersive cinema forthcoming, research and innovation led by world building and science will change the future of urban design. Taking the conversation to Germany, the pair will expand the global conversation at the FMX panel 'Weaving Mercury: Art and Science in Perception"