Workshop Participants
John du Pre Gauntt
People need to imagine a better future and then collaborate to reach it --- FAST!!! Ultimately, I believe it's a storytelling challenge. At the Augmented City™, we're blending narrative podcast with design thinking and data science to develop a new format for engaging and educating non-specialist audiences about emerging technologies and the lifestyle changes they unleash.
We call it Weaving Culture & Code.
CULTURE: Living successfully and humanely with emerging technology.
CORE QUESTION: How do the capabilities affect my life and my relationships with other people?
CODE: Innovating successfully and equitably with emerging technology.
CORE QUESTION: How do the pieces fit together so I may collaborate better with other people?
Emerging technology and culture will shape what you discover, where you focus your attention, and what you think is important. If we want that process biased in favor of humanistic ends, we need to get our story straight.
John participated in both the December 2020 and the the August 2013 MediaStorm Methodology Workshop. He had the following to say about his experience:
Prepare to get soaked.
A week at MediaStorm is a plunge into whitewater. You're navigating the core and craft of authentic storytelling. It's exhilarating. And you can bust your ass. But between the expertise and experience of the MediaStorm staff and the workshop participants, you should be able to handle most anything thrown at you.
That's important because this workshop isn't for the timid. You're dealing with people's lives---not "reality TV". Ethical treatment of subject and audience connects every session. Our most passionate and informed debates this week were about how to be true to a story while being fair to the subject and not deceiving the audience. That's hard, which is why a lot of media organizations don't do it.
But through MediaStorm's example, you'll learn that authenticity isn't just good storytelling. It's good business. I'm grateful to witness MediaStorm's success and be able to participate in such a worthwhile challenge.
Burner Face is a mystery thriller that shoots higher than “whodunit”. The audience peels back a debate over meaning and intelligence that takes place in a future Seattle transformed by climate change and accelerating technology. The five-episode scripted podcast blends science fiction, detective noir, and ghost story genres into a richly endowed story world of human and virtual characters.