Meet the Maker: Storymaker

Check out the video below from the Storymaker team – creative technologist Duncan Gough (http://suttree.com) and digital producer Leila Johnston (http://finalbullet.com). These fun folk are interested in exploring the relationship between performance and technology. With puppets!!!

Storymaker from leila johnston on Vimeo.

“We’re turning the tables on the Faire – we want to get the visitors making. We’re interested in theatre, circuses and magic – places of misdirection and illusion but also of fun, where entertainment is the goal. There are clear parallels with consumer technology today, where design decisions obfuscate reality, manipulating a user’s attention and magnifying excitement, and where nothing is quite what it seems. Theatre can inspire creativity through the sheer confidence it has in its own weirdness, and we’re hoping our puppets will bring out some good stories in the people who visit our stand, by intercepting the awkwardness of staring straight into a camera. We hope to find out how some of these geeks became the makers they are today. By inviting people to remember some of their personal experiences of computing, we’ll celebrate the excitement of encountering devices that needed your input before they could speak, machines that asked for an investment of imagination and personality from the user. The maker community has always understood the importance of these kinds of machines, of course, and you only have to look at the explosion of popularity of arduinos etc in recent years to see that we really want our tech to fire the imagination.” – Leila and Duncan