MIX Conference

MIX 2012, taking place between 16-18 July 2012, explored Transmedia Writing and Digital Creativity, 16th-18th July 2012. An international gathering of academics, artists, filmmakers and writers will meet in the stunning location of Corsham Court to discuss the current developments in digital writing.

MIX 2013 explored the theme of Text on Screens and ran in partnership with The Writing Platform. This intimate series of events took place over three days at BSU’s Corsham Court campus, a Grade One-listed Jacobean mansion in the bucolic Wiltshire landscape. The first two days of the conference mixed academic papers with artist presentations; the third day was a Making Day with a series of hands-on workshops.

MIX 2015, exploring the theme of Writing Digital, took full advantage of our brand-new Commons building at BSU and its interactive spaces through hosting a vibrant mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations, seminars, keynotes, discussions and workshops, as well as an exhibition of work by conference participants. Our partners, The Writing Platform, showcased the two winning projects from the competitive bursaries they awarded earlier in 2015 for new creative writing and technology projects.

MIX 2017 explored the intersections between digital media technologies and storytelling, looking for new and innovative ways in which we can tell stories across multiple platforms. 

Keynote speakers included Jon Dovey (Professor of Screen Media in the Department of Creative Industries, UWE); Elizabeth Evans (Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham); Anna Gerber and Britt Iverson (Visual Editions/Editions at Play); and Caitlin Fisher (Director of the York University Augmented Reality Lab in Toronto).

Videos of our keynote speakers from 2017 can be found on the MIX conference website. 

MIX 2019 was held in the beautiful surroundings of Bath Spa's Corsham Court campus. This conference was a more intimate, single strand version than previous years, curated for a smaller audience in order to instigate conversations around digital writing. There was a focus on experiential storytelling, including immersive technologies and new forms of publishing, ranging from transmedia and poetry film, to virtual reality and AI.

Keynote speakers included Dr Donna Hancox, Nikesh Shukla, Guy Gadney and Thomas Zandegiacomo del Bel.

In 2021, MIX was a collaboration with Bristol+Bath Creative R+D’s Amplified Publishing, exploring future models of content creation, discovery and distribution, alongside our industry partners Epic Games, Future and BT. B+B Creative R+D is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, exploring new and innovative applications of technology across the sector and boosting the creative economy. Our other partners included Paper Nations, a creative writing incubator championing approaches to the art of writing that are inclusive, playful and exploratory. The conference programme included poetry film screenings on the theme of Amplified Voices curated by Adrian B Earle from Think/Write/Fly and Sarah Tremlett form Liberated Words.

MIX 2023 took place in the British Library and was co-hosted by Bath Spa University and the British Library.

Major themes for MIX 2023 included text in immersive media, interactive and locative works, digital and film poetry, narrative games as well as digital preservation, archiving, enhanced curation and storytelling with AI.

The conference was hosted alongside the British Library's Digital Storytelling exhibition of digital literature and emerging formats. This enabled us to look at what has been preserved of emerging literature as well as what new forms storytelling might take in the near future.