10 Years In, Columbia’s Digital Storytelling Lab Celebrates Breakthroughs

A certain veil of mystery surrounds Columbia’s Digital Storytelling Lab (or DSL), which first set up shop at the School of the Arts in 2013. Opacity may be part and parcel for an organization that deliberately defies categorization, but the people behind the curtain couldn’t be more welcoming; and their brand of wizardry is on the rise.  

Now celebrating a decade of its Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards, the lab is led by Associate Professor of Professional Practice Lance Weiler, a multi-hyphenate filmmaker, entrepreneur, educator, and founding member of the DSL.

As the Lab’s Director, Weiler’s enthusiasm for the work is contagious and even endearing (were he played in film, he would most assuredly be played by Chris Pine). It’s a passion that extends back decades, to a particular focal point in the history of technology, “I was part of Web 1.0,” recalled Weiler, “I saw the early days of the Internet before it became commercialized.” 

Those initial experiences would fuel Weiler’s curiosity, and a passion for the unknown that remains to this day. “I still remember the thrill of interacting with somebody in another part of the world and the thrill of falling down a rabbit hole and finding something that I didn't expect.”

But exactly what is the DSL? Weiler is the first to embrace the fluid nature of the program, “the lab is something where it's experiential. So you can try to capture it, try to explain it, but it finally clicks when you come and participate in it.” I was recently given the chance to do just that. 

At its core, the lab is composed of a series of classes focused on 21st century storytelling, and students are invited to become not only participants, but practitioners. Covering topics as diverse as World-building and Creative Coding, or the practical uses of AI in storytelling, the multidisciplinary courses are open to students across the university, bringing together voices from the medical school or the business school and seating them across visual artists and filmmakers.  

It’s an open-source mindset that extends well beyond the walls of Morningside Heights. At a meeting near the end of 2015, Lab-colleague Frank Rose, another multi-hyphenate with a long history at the DSL, suggested the Awards program as a way to expand the Lab’s work and grow its footprint. The Awards became an annual staple of the program, and celebrated their 10th Anniversary this year.

The Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards are the Lab’s platform for celebrating innovation across the globe. Each year, twelve narrative projects are chosen to be honored in the Awards, a cohort they call the Digital Dozen. 

These projects can stem from any facet of the ever-evolving digital landscape, from film to fiction, journalism and gameplay, virtual reality and augmented reality. “From the start we had this policy of not having categories,” recalled Rose, “the idea being that ‘digital’ kind of tends to erase categories, and there’s no reason we should try to preserve them.”

Unlike other awards platforms, there is no submission process for Breakthroughs. Instead, to cull nominees from this broad spectrum, the DSL turns to experts on the ground. “We have a list of about 150 practitioners that we go out to around the world,” said Weiler. The mandate is simple, “what was something that wowed you, something that you thought was exceptional, something that was pushing at the edges of narrative possibilities?”

Following their input, Weiler and company bring the nominated projects to the Lab’s Columbia community, and they begin the hard work of whittling down the amorphous batch into final selections for the Digital Dozen.  

This year’s Awards were held on Sunday, April 13 via Zoom, an online staging that began from necessity during the pandemic, but became standard operating procedure when the team realized how well the format suited their international recipients.

The twelve honored projects exceeded expectations by defying them, a weird and wonderful selection that ran the gamut from a literal taste of history to a window into the lives of your great-great-grandchildren, a fortune-telling automaton and a customer service line you actually want to call. Anyone doubting the category-free approach need look no further than this year’s Digital Dozen, a treasure trove of nuance and narrative at the breaking edge of storytelling.

The Awards were capped off with two additional prizes. Winning the Special Jury Prize, an honor given each year by the DSL’s Awards Committee, was Kerosene Chronicles. Fungus, by art collective Where Dogs Run. The inventive project bridges the divide between machine and organism as four robots communicate and strategize based on feedback from the kerosene fungus growing in their fuel tanks. 

And finally came the Breakthrough Prize, an award chosen by Columbia faculty to honor a project at the heart of innovation. This year’s winner was Eno, by Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, a generative documentary about the boundary-breaking musician that celebrated his creativity by using a specially designed software to present a different cut of the film with every screening.

You can read the full breakdown of the 10th Anniversary Awards here, and recipients past and present can be explored in detail on the DSL’s Breakthroughs website, an online home and living document of the innovations featured in the Digital Dozen, and an important part of the DSL’s mission.

“At the core, I think the mission of the lab kind of filters through the Awards,” said Weiler. “Ultimately we're trying to figure out how to archive work like this.” It’s a mission that also comes full circle for the Columbia community.

“What ends up happening with it,” said Weiler, “is that we bring it into the classroom and we share the work, and we teach with the work, and then we invite the practitioners who made the work in to interact with our students.” 

While this year marks a decade of the Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards, it’s only the second edition of the Breakthroughs Summit, an in-person event that further marries the Lab’s teaching philosophy and the Awards program, another vehicle for wider engagement set to to join the Awards as an annual event. 

Continuing the Lab’s mission of bringing people in and sharing diverse work, the Summit is a free event that’s open to the public. Said Weiler, “we bring the classroom out into the world and the world into the classroom.”  

This year’s Summit was held the night after the Awards, on Monday, April 14 in Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Film Center on the Upper West Side. The one-time parking garage was reimagined as an amphitheater in 2011, a fittingly sleek venue that includes glass walls and a maple wood facade that continues into the ceiling. The stadium seating accommodates 75, but the audience that night was surely pushing 100, with attendees standing in the back and lining the aisles. 

The theater’s built-in screen was out of commission, but a large television was wheeled in as replacement, lending an air of workmanlike charm to the proceedings. Coupled with occasional din from a nearby film premiere (glass walls), the effect for the Summit was an already engaged audience leaning further in. 

The evening began with Weiler welcoming everyone and introducing a small exercise in which attendees asked one another the same question five times, What brought you here tonight? As the room filled with commensurate chatter, the answers varied not only from one person to the next, but from one answer to the next; a reflection of storytelling as no longer a fixed entity, but something alive, adaptive, and ever changing.

Weiler’s small gambit set the stage for an evening that regularly blurred the lines between audience and artist, presenter and practitioner. A deep dive into the fall of legacy systems and the rise of the creator economy with Media Cartographer Evan Shapiro gave way to a live prototyping of interactive game Last Human, as Adjunct Assistant Professor in Film Shar Simpson and game designer Nick Fortugno (both DSL members) asked the room to determine who was “Human” and who was “Bot.” Digital Dozen winners Sam Barlow (Immortality, 2023), Yasmin Elayat (The Changing Same, 2022), and Annie Saunders (Eclipsing, 2025) held a roundtable with Rose on the sensory experiences offered by the myriad of new mediums, and the project of the Awards in reflecting those changes over a decade.

DSL students also weighed in on the new media melting pot in “Futuremakers,” a series of lightning talks that began with Creative Producing students Zacha Del Rosario and Kuba Wasowicz offering an alternative funding model for the future of independent filmmaking. The dynamic duo was followed by Mila Lin Tabach, Isha Karim, and Diya Nair, a trio of undergrads whose AI-ambivalence turned into empowerment when they began experimenting with the technology during an AI Story Studio last fall with Weiler and Engineering Professor and AI+Design expert Lydia Chilton. The young artists earned audible reactions from the assembly as they presented their work, showing just how personal AI can be in the right hands.

Closing out the night in style was ​curator and XR producer Jazia Hammoudi hosting a “Fireside Chat” with ​Stephanie Dinkins, a transdisciplinary artist renowned for her work with AI on topics of race and gender, and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI (2023).  In a fitting ending, the two discussed the need to engage with this new technology if we’re to shape a future we want to live in.

After wrapping three-plus hours in front of an audience, and two the night before on Zoom, not to mention days and weeks spent in preparation, one wouldn’t blame Weiler and company for closing up shop and calling it a day. Instead, Weiler took the stage for closing remarks, and invited the room out for a drink. The space again filled with easy conversation as attendees filed into the aisles and onto the stage, enthusiasts and practitioners alike discussing storytelling as it is, and as it could be.

The DSL was back in action at Lincoln Center on Monday, May 5 for the Spring Semester Student Showcase, celebrating work from courses Digital Storytelling II, Worldbuilding, Creative Coding, and Transformative Storytelling. In true DSL fashion, the open-to-the-public event ended with an open discussion on methods of creation, bringing together voices new and old for a dialogue about the future. 

Join the conversation and learn more about the School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab here.