The Pararchive Project

In July 2015, Mary Ellen McIntire reported on a fascinating project in the U.S called DataBridge that created a repository of scientific knowledge and data sets that would otherwise be dumped in hidden places thereby rendering them inaccessible. DataBridge helps deposit such data sets in one place to enable their exploitation for any potential value…

  In an update on her Pararchive research project entitled Back to the Future: When Wearable Technology Meets Archive Content, we learnt how Michelle – a member of the MadLab Manchester Arduino Group and Founder and Director of Made With Glove Ltd – is designing fashionable heated gloves for women who suffer from the Raynaud’s…

Wow, Microsoft has also jumped on the storytelling bandwagon with Sway, a typically beige, Redmond-ian attempt to make Microsoft Office relevant to a world in which Powerpoint is a pejorative. Sway allows users to collate images, text and other media from their own devices, the web and social media, orchestrating them into ‘cloud’ presentations. The video below depicts a designer being…

Earlier this month, members of the wider Pararchive team were invited to host a 90-minute breakout session on our project at the Connected Communities festival. I closed the segment with some reflections on our approach to design & community storytelling; here’s my talk… Hey everyone, my name is Imran Ali. I’m one of the founders of Carbon Imagineering, a digital…

Anna Anthropy’s queers in love at the end of the world is a provocative example of a brief game created using Twine, “an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories”. Anthropy’s game takes place in the last ten seconds of the world’s existence, forcing the player to make a series of decisions about how to spend the end of…

Jonathan Harris is one of the foremost artists of the digital era, exploring technology, data, stats, storytelling and visual art at personal and planetary scales. My own interest in storytelling platforms emerged from one of his most recent works, Cowbird, described as a witness to life. Cowbird is notable in that the motivation is not…

Last week saw the release of Storehouse for iPad, a visual storytelling app created by former Apple and Adobe staffers, including members of the iPhoto and Aperture teams. The app reinforces the notion of tablets as more than just consumption devices, but as flourishing creative tools. Storehouse draws on an iPad’s internal photo library as…

“Curator Space is a project management toolkit for curators, organisers, galleries, and artists. It is designed to take the hassle out of managing exhibitions, competitions, fairs, and a whole lot more.” Curator Space is the brainchild of Louise Atkinson, a post-graduate researcher at the University’s Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts & Communications. The service looks as though it…