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Excerpt from a report on
the Sedona Conference
by Paul Elsner, Chancellor Emeritus, Maricopa Community Colleges
The format for the Sedona Conferences allows a small assembly, no more
than 250 people, to hear speakers and discuss issues and implications
of the mixing of entertainment, education and technology.
"Sedona
gets better when Dana Atchley
presents his format to the technologists
and educators assembled –
this audience
was not really prepared for what they got."
Atchley's format
was aptly called "Digital Storytelling–Ancient Technologies and New
Technologies." Atchley is creator of Next Exit, an interactive
theatrical performance of the ancient art of storytelling. His clients
range from Coca Cola, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Silicon Graphics, to Simon
and Schuster.
In following Next Exit's visual vignettes, a digitally elicited
stream of Dana's memories of family vacations, career departures, graduate
education in graphic design at Yale, translations of family icons, events
and traditions, peel back Dana's life and living layers of time revealing
significance, daydreams and regeneration of self.
To open the audience to warmth
and bonding, he digitally lights a campfire from his keyboard...pop, comes
up a friendly log fire at the corner of a twenty foot screen: Dana pulls
up a bench and he tells his story with the memories and an iconography
of a soulful but not a sorrowful life on the metaphorical highway.
"Atchley's
performance moves the audience.
This is technology's highest moment."
We are living and coming to allow another person, because technology,
for once, brings us to such an intimacy with this profound man.
To me, a Sedona participant and later a presenter, I never felt the
campfire burn out. It still glows for me, and judging by the audience's
evaluation, that I have never seen as high, his fireside chat still
bonds them as well.
Well, we organized and built
Sedona to be an "intimate examination of the future." I have seen Dana
Atchley's Next Exit, and once again, it is the integration of the
arts, entertainment, education, and technology that moves my heart. Francis
Bacon placed technology in perspective. In his Novum Organum, he
stated that no empire, no sect, no star could have the impact on humanity
as momentous as the invention of gun powder, the magnetic needle of the
navigational compass, or the invention of the printing press, all or in
combination of which may have spawned the reformation or the discovery
of the new world.
"We
have seen technology move empires and sects . . . but can it move the
stars? Perhaps not, but at Sedona,
Dana
Atchley proved that technology can move people's souls."
Judging by the pre-sign-up for the pre-Sedona Conference in Birmingham
in June 2000, faculty in particular want to know more about this integration
of technology for the classrooms. Remember, you will hear more about Digital
Storytelling.
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