Meet the Makers: Grace Boyle

Meet the Makers aims to facilitate meetings and conversations between academic researchers and students, and makers – such as artists, curators, dramaturges, designers, or other creative practitioners and professionals within the wider field of arts and culture.

The Feelies

In this session of Meet the Makers, we will meet with Grace Boyle, who is a multi-sensory storyteller. She debunks the notion that we have 5 senses, and instead believes we have closer to 33. When we tell stories that engage all of our senses, we’re able to tell more powerful and emotional stories. In this session we will discuss the potential of multi-sensory storytelling through the lens of Boyle’s artistic practice. How can we bring the senses together in a meaningful way? What role does technology play in this? This Meet the Makers session will be moderated by Lianne Toussaint (UU).

Grace Boyle is the founder and director of The Feelies, a London-based studio creating original multisensory XR content. Bringing together perfumery, perception science, creative technologists, and artistic installation in the world of XR, The Feelies are developing what it is to write, shoot, and perform stories in a multisensory medium. In 2017, The Feelies launched the sensory VR piece Munduruku with Greenpeace and AlchemyVR. Featuring an olfactory narrative of six bespoke scents, recorded heat, wind, and infrasonics, the experience won awards at Future of StoryTelling in New York, and at Sheffield Doc/Fest and the Raindance Film Festival in the UK.

Moderator

Lianne Toussaint is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Media and Culture Studies of Utrecht University. Her research focuses on wearable technology, and relations between the human body, technology and garments. Based on her PhD research (2013-18), she wrote a dissertation entitled Wearing Technology: When Fashion and Technology Entwine.

Toussaint received a Fulbright Visiting scholarship in 2015 to conduct research on fashion and technology in New York City. She has published on the topic of fashion and technology in both peer-reviewed international journals and a popular academic context.  Her lecturing at both Radboud University and Utrecht University ranged from teaching a MA course on Fashion and the Creative Industries, to BA courses on Cultural Theory, Film Studies and Screen Cultures.