Diego Bonilla [United States]
Diego Bonilla has used computers for creative purposes since he was very young. Initially, he used his computer knowledge to manage and edit a literary magazine in Mexico City. In these early years, Diego focused on writing short stories and poetry, which were published in several magazines in Mexico (including Playboy). Diego’s creativity shifted towards interactive media when he traveled to the United States to study his masters and doctorate degrees. At that time, around 1999, he constructed his first non-linear interactive narrative, a personal story about a skydiving accident. From that moment on, Diego continued a trajectory towards the development of interactive media forms to channel his creativity.
In 2004, he finished a film-based interactive story titled “A Space of Time”. This interactive story could be experienced in 2 different (non-linear) ways: (1) A film that is constructed at the time of viewing, providing endless different versions of it, and (2) a virtual environment of a building, where the story takes place, filled with interactive elements. With this project, Diego won a doctoral prize and won the Internet/Multimedia category of XXVI Moscow International Film Festival.
Since then, Diego has been very active developing interactive media experiences: Installation art about online dating services, an interactive poetry book that changes based on the time the book is read, an immersive virtual environment of photographic quality for which he filed a patent, and many more.
In his day job, Diego is a Professor of Communication Studies at the California State University in Sacramento.He has devoted a lot of his academic activities to the teaching of information literacy, helping his colleagues and his students engage in the critical adoption of information technologies. The Internet, once sold to the public as a worldwide library, now has become more of a commercial mall full of cameras, and people need to be trained to use it well.
With this project, Accidental Occurrence, Diego continues his work in developing narrative hypermedia. In this case, a modular film that can be reconstructed in endless ways by a computer program while maintaining a basic storyline.
ACCIDENTAL OCCURRENCE - 10th ed. [read synopsis]