Story I/O - strange objects from imagined worlds

Story I/O is Columbia DSL's annual prototyping festival. This year's theme centers on strange objects from imagined worlds. What happens when you combine worldbuilding, creative coding, and collective storytelling to imagine artifacts from a dying internet?
Join us for a virtual edition of Story I/O, a day of hands-on experimentation focused on vibe coding and worldbuilding. Together, we’ll create strange, playful, unsettling, and speculative digital artifacts for the world of the Dead Internet Museum (DIM).

The session will introduce practical approaches and best practices for using AI-assisted coding tools to rapidly prototype interactive browser-based experiences, while exploring how worldbuilding can help connect individual experiments into a larger storyworld.

We’ll also take you behind the scenes of the Dead Internet Museum, an immersive exhibition opening at MAD Arts in South Florida this fall, sharing what it takes to move from an idea and storyworld to an interactive exhibition involving physical spaces, sound, software, performance, audience participation, and emerging technologies.
Participants will spend time making their own artifacts for the Dead Internet.

Selected experiments may have the opportunity to become part of the evolving DIM storyworld and potentially appear within the exhibition at MAD Arts.

During the session we’ll explore:

• Vibe coding as a creative and artistic practice
• Rapidly prototyping browser-based experiences with AI
• Worldbuilding techniques for developing speculative worlds
• Designing artifacts that suggest a larger story beyond themselves
• Behind-the-scenes lessons from building an immersive exhibition
• How individual experiments can become part of a collaborative storyworld

You don’t need to be an experienced programmer. Bring curiosity, a willingness to experiment, and an idea - or come ready to discover one.
Story I/O is part workshop, part studio, and part collective worldbuilding experiment. Come help us build artifacts for the Dead Internet.