Emergence Lab: Past Projects

Posted on 
March 18, 2016
The Seer's Catalogue
Lab Emergence/ EmerGence Lab is coming back to The Banff Centre in June 2016! Three project leaders will join our Program Director Jonathan Belisle and three mentors to work on their storytelling/writing projects, supported by artist-technicians who will help with programming and design to bring the stories to live on interactive platforms.

The 2015 projects are explained in short below:

Project 1: Memories Cut Short, a transmedia documentary project by Elisabeth Rull

Two years after the death of her father Tamas Rull, Hungarian in origin, Elisabeth Rull, photojournalist, made in his office a strange discovery which disturbed her as a daughter, but also as an author. Strange documents, old pictures, ID papers, which finally turned out to be “false papers” stand there, kept since years. She discovered then that her father had never been who everybody thought he was. The investigation she started dragged her along the troubled paths of his past. From family secrets to state secrets, between Hungary, Austria, and France, at the heart of Cold War Europe, she invites you to follow her on this quest, this mission to save these “memories cut short”, in this trans-media documentary project.

Experts sought for this project in 2015: 

  • designer (graphic designer, animation, illustrator, cartoonist) 
  • sound designer, music composer 
  • programmer & coder 
  • user experience designer & interactive game designer

Project 2: The Seer's Catalogue, a multimedia project by Sean Michaels

Sean Michaels is a novelist and music critic born in Stirling, Scotland, in 1982. Founder of Said the Gramophone, one of the earliest mp3blogs, his writing has also been published by The Guardian, McSweeney's, Pitchfork and The Walrus. Sean's debut novel, Us Conductors, was awarded the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Hugh MacLennan Prize. He maintains the weekly Globe & Mail column "Heartbeats." He lives in Montreal. During Emergence Lab 2015, Sean will be developing a short narrative into a digital story called "The Seer's Catalogue," which provides a rich multimedia, interactive and immersive reading experience. This piece is commissioned by The Banff Centre and will be published on our new Banff Centre Press platform for fiction and nonfiction digital stories, Screens with Spines, after the program.

Experts sought for this project in 2015:

  • graphic design
  • programming
  • Twitter bots and algorithmic art-making skills