Crossing Boundaries

Posted by aurelia on 30 June, 2011

“The sharing of stories at the digital storytelling workshops give me rare opportunities to cross race, language, and religious boundaries. We connect with each other as one human being to another. We talk about our mums, our dads, siblings, work, struggles, our likes our dislikes, our concerns, our dreams…Cultural boundaries fade…I can see digital storytelling filling up a lot of our social gaps,” said Digital Storytelling Asia (DSA) founder Angeline Koh at her keynote speech at the 6th Digital Storytelling Festival (ds6) in Wales.

Digital storytelling practitioners and enthusiasts from different parts of UK and other countries gathered last 17 June 2011 at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre for the annual festival.

Angeline talked about “Digital Storytelling in Multicultural Singapore”. She presented the huge potential of the use of digital stories in Singapore with its technological advancement and critical need of discovering, preserving, and sharing the stories of its people.

An excerpt from Angeline’s speech:

While digital storytelling has been widely used in the US, UK, Australia and a few other countries since almost two decades ago, it is not even quite at the infancy stage in Singapore. DSA takes the challenge of pioneering the work in the region.

At the festival, many participants enjoyed sharing ideas, making connections, and encouraging one another. It created a buzz in Twitter:

BBCommArts Breaking Barriers
#ds6 angeline koh – what an inspiration

@Karl_multistory
Karl Greenwood
‘Media shows our need to connect with each other’ Angeline Koh #ds6

@BBCommArts
Breaking Barriers
#ds6 angeline koh really passionate about #digitalstorytelling the story media for the people

@Karl_multistory
Karl Greenwood
#ds6 Angeline Koh ‘Digital storytelling can fill in social gaps’

@getgood
Nicky Getgood
#ds6 “all I wanted to do was tell my story and help other people tell their stories.” Angeline Koh speaks for so many people there!

@digistories
Barrie Stephenson
Cultural boundaries fade at the digital storytelling workshop. Angeline Koh (Singapore) #DS6@

@MoreHavoc
Christopher Carney
@hannahnicklin Gosh! Good work Singapore!

On a separate interview, Julie Gade (Story Field, Copenhagen, www.storyfield.dk), one of the speakers at the festival said: “I’ve really enjoyed the festival. What I’m taking away from here is all the different ways of using digital storytelling that’s breaking a little bit out of the traditional way…people are rethinking the ways they’re using digital storytelling.”

“I was very inspired by Storyworks that does really nice films and the ways they’re using it…and also by Pip Hardy (www.patientvoices.org.uk) …that people who can’t even use their hands to control their mouse but she’s still managed to pull stories out of them – that’s really inspiring.”

Another participant, Brian McCausland (England) shared: “Meeting such great people from all over the world who are all interested in digital storytelling has really been encouraging…and I got lots of interesting ideas, fascinating ideas that I’m gonna follow up…I think telling stories is so powerful…I especially want to work with older people so they can make digital stories for future generations to enjoy because I think it will be lovely to give that as a gift to the future generations.”

Organised by the Arts Centre, Aberystwyth University, the yearly event is Wales’ premier festival to celebrate international digital storytelling and is supported by the Arts Council of Wales, National Assembly of Wales and the BBC.

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