Opening Keynote | Back to Our Senses: Storytelling in an Age of Technology

In a world increasingly mediated by technology, what if the future of storytelling is not about taking us further away from ourselves, but bringing us back to our senses?

In this keynote, Professor Angela Chan explores how the next generation of storytelling is becoming more immersive, embodied and multisensory. From film and the written word to music, sound, live and audiovisual experiences, stories have always had the power to make us feel as well as think. Emerging creative technologies give us new possibilities to engage the body and the senses — and to create experiences that are richer, more inclusive and more deeply human.

Angela explores the ‘push and pull’ of this technological moment. AI can democratise access to creative tools, enabling new voices to write, make films and build worlds in ways that were previously impossible. But it also risks reproducing bias, flattening difference and distancing creativity from the lived human experiences from which our most powerful stories emerge. As AI becomes embedded in the creative process, how do we keep the human firmly in the loop?

Looking beyond the technology itself, Angela argues for the importance ofcollective creative experience. Whether we are sitting together in a cinema, singing or listening to music, immersed in a fictional world or moved by words on a page, stories reconnect us with our bodies, with one another and with our shared humanity. At a time of increasing fragmentation and disconnection, creativity can quite literally bring us back to our senses. 

Drawing together her experience in television, inclusive innovation and emerging research into sensory experience, Angela asks what might happen if we designed the future of storytelling around the diversity of human experience rather than the capabilities of technology.

How do we practically work with new technologies to create empathy, connection, and collective meaning, to generate resonance beyond our individual experience and out into society. How do we take responsibility for our own tech-driven narratives?  And can a good story save your life?