Following the success of the AI Story Lab, run in collaboration with Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, To Play For, and Bristol + Bath Creative R+D, four excellent writers from the AI Story Lab have been selected for paid, virtual placements with To Play For.
To Play For is a creative technology company that develops interactive immersive stories on its proprietary AI-powered platform, Charisma.ai.
Matthew Thorpe-Coles, Jasmine Richards, Constance Fleuriot and Alex Carter have each received a commission to finish their story that emerged from the Lab, to appear in the Charisma app this summer.
Matthew Thorpe-Coles who is a poet and MA Creative Writing student at Bath Spa University, spoke to us about his experience.
‘I was thrilled to have been given the opportunity to work more closely with Charisma following our Paper Nations workshop. Writing with Charisma was a unique and refreshing challenge and I’m very pleased that I got to be one of the first people to work with it. Both Paper Nations and the team at To Play For have afforded me so much experience, and I’m so grateful to have been able to tell a story unlike anything I could ever have dreamed of writing on pen and paper.’
The other selected writers also have rich writing backgrounds and are eager to take up this fantastic opportunity. Jasmine Richards is a children’s author and is the founder of STORYMIX; an inclusive fiction studio with a social purpose. Alex Carter is a third year Gold Scholar at the University of Bath, studying computer science and mathematics and Constance Fleuriot is a writer, artist and game maker based in Bristol.
We are delighted that the Story Lab has helped us uplift this writing talent in the region and has created a partnership which has helped writers experiment with innovative, emerging narrative forms. Some of their stories are live on the Charisma app now. We look forward to seeing the full range of their work, which will be released over the next few weeks.