Flashbacks, dreams and other stories in the making.
BERLINALE 2024
FEBRUARY 2024- A Wonderful week sharing stories of vulnerability at the Short Form Station by @berlinaletalents
Filmmakers from all over the world and a lot of 6 am or 11 pm meetings did not stop us from our deep dive in story structure and poetics. From the ocean to the Fungi world, mentoring projects has always been a great adventure that now continues in Berlin with the Talents Summit.
NAUTILUS
MARCH 2024- We're pleased to announce our 2024 initiative: Nautilus, a Storyhackers action. Nautilus offers an inclusive space for explorers of hybrid and unconventional storytelling. This program welcomes all varieties of story-driven projects, fostering a supportive environment for creators at every stage. We are particularly dedicated to supporting low-income creators, Latin Americans, women, non-binary individuals, indigenous storytellers, and any misrepresented community that needs a voice, a guide, or a network. Whether you're exploring speculative fiction, interactive or immersive experiences, animation, or narratives with a climate-conscious focus, Nautilus offers a program that entails six months of individual project mentorship for projects in development, StoryHackers Style. Pre-selected applicants will be contacted for a short interview. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.l OPEN CALL
MIT REALITY HACK
POV: our workshop at @mitrealityhack and the power of stories to transform reality. Welcome StoryHackers!
María Laura joined MIT’s Reality Hack as a Judge this year and also had the chance to teach a workshop on worldbuillding, narrative design and all thing storyhackers!
RESISTANCE FICTION
2024- If you want to hack the future, let’s talk about the kind science fiction we’re building today. COMING SOON
Back in Berlin
December 2023-María Laura Ruggiero will be back once again to Berlinale Short Form Station as a mentor for the short films of Berlinale Talents. One on one sessions, writers room and a worldbuilding masterclass await in the most creative time of the upcoming year and in, of course, duhhh..in our favorite Festival: Berlinale!
MIT REALITY HACK
JANUARY 2024- María Laura Ruggiero will be joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (M I T) Virtual Reality Hackathon: MIT REALITY HACK as a Judge this upcoming January. A StoryHackers session there? Maybe. Stay tuned.APLYSIA
December 2023- Our most recent project, Aplysia: landscapes of the mind, a sequence where you fall and a dream about sequoias, was awarded the Artistic Creation Stimulus Grant Amplify-Williams Foundation, within the framework of the Amplify D.A.I program, a joint initiative of the British Council Argentina, Artlab, and the Williams Foundation. All is joy! We share some images and a prototype on our social networks.
MIT WORLDING SELECTION
November 2023 - About three months ago, our project "Wave 201, The Unwanted Atlantis" was selected for the Community Cohort of MIT's WORLDING. WORLDING is a pioneering research and development initiative that explores climate futures at the intersection of documentary, land-use planning, speculative design, and game engine technologies. It's a collaboration between Unity through the Unity Charitable Fund, the Unity for Humanity Program, and the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. This week, we will be presenting the project at MIT in the #Aqua section, which delves into water-related issues, and I will personally share bits and pieces of this project to navigate the overwhelming emotions stirred by the convergence of all my passions: water exploration, speculative futures, virtual reality and MIT.
Freezed: Video +AI
AUGUST 2023 - "Freezed" is now on YouTube. A captivating sound landscape created by Valentino Vigo, where we had the enormous privilege to experiment in audiovisual design through the creation of images made with AI tools. Curated by Sofia Lecuona Pugno, A.K.A Nait Saves Music, and organized by CCEBA, Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires, as part of the Insurgentes series.
MIT REALITY HACK
JANUARY 2023- Today, in another episode of Not even in your Wildest Dreams!- Mara Laura Ruggiero will take part as a Storytelling Mentor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (M I T) Virtual Reality Hackathon,
She will mentor and work with other members of a community dedicated to diversity and innovation outside traditional industrial canons on the narrative and audiovisual design components of student projects from all around the world.
A great deal of thanks and delight for this opportunity. We eagerly await your message if you are nearby and would like to discuss fascinating tales or wild dreams indeed.
UBA x CITEP
November 2023-Another year of StoryHackers and Transmedia, Virtualidad e Inmersión for UBA and adding several programs and sessions regarding Future Design, Worldbuilding and the use of Generative AI for CITEP, FADU and UNTREF.
BERLINALE
JANUARY 2023: Maria Laura Ruggiero will continue to serve as one of the Berlinale Talents Short Form Station's Storytelling and Worldbuilding mentor. Always Berlin and its talents represent the best adventure. Since Talents#2 in 2004, as a student, lecturer, with films in competition, scripts on the market, you name it, to going full circle tutoring short film scripts, non-linear experiences and virtual reality pieces in the screenwriting section of Berlin. Each Virtual or physical return to the Berlinale is exciting, enriching and above all inspiring
EICTV and UBA
OCTOBER 2022- Two special classes of Immersion Design and Artificial Intelligence at EICTV, Cuba for our beloved TV Production and New Audiovisual Narratives class. For the UBA system we created a new edition of our TVI course and a brand new practical Visualization workshop with Artificial Intelligence tools with a mix of Futures Narratives and Worldbuilding.
Dream Parkour
JULY 2022 -Dream Parkour is a dream log created out of absence and insomnia.
Dreams that intersect with the dreams of others, and at times they come closer to be lost once again.
Dream Parkour as the art of displacement, between the ruins of what we dream of and what we want to be. A liminal space between sleep and awakening.
Dream Parkour is also a silent conversation between a waking dreamer and a dreamer that is asleep.
The Atlas specifically recreates the blog as a collective dream space.
When we fall asleep in different cities, can we dream together? dreamparkour.com Machine dreaming
JULY 2022- Machine Dreaming
Dreams are vivid, sensorimotor hallucinations with a narrative structure. But who is dreaming what?Dream Parkour is a dream journal materialized through the visual and narrative exploration of Artificial Intelligence tools.
In constant reverie, Dream Parkour is still iterating its form, its stories, its elusive images. is still dreaming and being dreamt.
Dream Parkour
The DreamParkour process includes the textual description of the dreams that are delivered to the Artificial Intelligence algorithm and the photographic post-production of the resulting images.
The dreams are created using Midjourney, an Artificial Intelligence application to create images from textual descriptions. It uses a computational model of diffusion.
Then, the dreams are processed manually with photographic and audiovisual editing software.
ENTER THE MULTIVERSE
NOVEMBER 2021- Entering the Multiverse is the inaugural presentation by M.Laura Ruggiero at the Digital Jove international festival (Valencia, Spain). An experimental conversation about expanded, virtual, hybrid and playful realities. A E-Homage to Chris Marker and the old paper and neon Cyberpunk.
You can see the full presentation on YouTube and join us in the Multiverse. Spanish only, but an english version is coming soon.ALICIA DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
NOVEMBER 2021- María Laura Ruggiero was awarded the Alicia down the rabbit hole award, awarded during the International Festival of Digital Storytelling and Creative Technologies, Digital Jove, in Valencia, Spain. The “Mr Pixel” designed by the artist Calpurnio for this 2021 edition, was the cherry on top and the tangible side of this wonderful award and story. Many thanks to the colleagues who share this award with us. More info at DigitalJove
CINE CIENCIAS TECH
OCTOBER 2021-Finally we present CineCiencias.Tech to the entire community. Cine Ciencias Tech is a joint venture of Pulpo Films + SeirenFilms in the exploration of new stories and formats that expand, intersect or reunify the frontiers of cinema, the arts, the various branches of science and technology. With this opening we also launched the Hallucigenia Mentoring Sessions and the stimulus award. To apply, you can visit Cineciencias.tech or our social media feed.
MULTIVERSOS
AUGUST 2021- Since the beginning of this New Time, No Time, one of our most Low Fi projects emerged: A newsletter of science fiction stories that finds us wandering between possible and alternative realities. This Multiverse always comes out on Friday, but not necessarily weekly. It's out whenever the planets align. The secret passageways that allow us to access the Multiverse are open here and they are always expanding. Spanish only now. Let us know if an English version is something you'd like to experience.HALLUCIGENIA
AUGUST 2021-We are working on a new proposal for Arts and Sciences projects to share Mentorships to new projects in development. Hallucigenia is created with our partners in science, PulpoFilms and the fundamental support of the British Council's H20 Fund. It is perhaps, the most important year for the Sciences in a long time and emerging from that core idea, we will soon present Hallucigenia. FILM, SCIENCES and TECH: Coming Soon.
IMMERSIVE PhD
AUGUST 2021-María Laura was accepted into the FADU-UBA Design PhD program and she’s beginning her research journey in the audiovisual/immersive field. Her thesis focuses on Immersive Narratives, with a strong emphasis on story design and the architecture of virtual reality experiences. Here we go, PhD!.
NO TIME
MAY 2020 In a moment of no time, in an unexpected, eternal quarantine, eating its tail like a neon ouróboros, we set out to move away from the myth of permanent productivity and rethink ourselves. Thus emerged MULTIVERSOS, the virtual Archipelago and a new version of an old project that today comes to life as a piece of Live Cinema. Hoping to deconstruct the world, maybe a little less cyber and a little more punk. A little more sustainable and a little less diying of deadlines.
FILM+ SCIENCES
APRIL 2020 The year’s planning was filled with visits to the Edinburgh Science Festival with a collaboration on synthetic realities and a tour of creative industries working on the synthesis of Arts and Sciences with PulpoFilms and the fundamental support of the British Council H20 Fund. Perhaps it is the most important year for Sciences in a long time, and we are rethinking how to reset the European Tour 2020 between pixels, molecules and virtualities.
BAUHAUS
FEBRUARY 2020 After countless visits to Berlin and its Archives, conversations with the Goethe Institute and endless readings on Gropius and friends, in February before the Pandemic crisis we visited Dessau. Spending the night in the most famous headquarters of the Bauhaus, getting to know each of the Masters' houses and spending the afternoon observing furniture and colors, as the beginning of a new phase of research that looks at the narrative habitability of digital spaces. Willkommen thesis.
CHAT DE ROBOTS
During 2019 we began to experiment with the world of Bots, both in Conversational Bots and in automated Bots. In this 2020 we are expanding the training of our twitter robots and you can interact with their baby intelligences in ChatRobots, where the bot constantly wonders about the dream of androids in a Phillip K. Dick style and with Storytool, where the algorithm offers input to think stories and structures. SPANISH ONLY (so far)
MOON XR
In another chapter of the “things that were lost in the quarantine”, there is the world premiere of Moon XR, a workshop selected for SXSW and SXSW EDU in the Aerospace Industry section. A speculative design workshop thinking about the media of the future and a fictional moon landing led by women. This space for collaboration with real 3D humans is also in the Reset and Reboot phase, but we are still NASA’s # 1 fans and space lovers in these clear quarantine skies.
BERLINALE
Our most recent experience in the 3D world included guiding the Berlinale Talents Short Format Mentoring program where we experienced, played, prototyped and dreamt with virtual reality experiences in Asia and futuristic short films with glitch lotuses. A fabulous workshop with creators from all over the world looking to give birth to new, innovative stories.