Belfast’s creative sector is blessed with two state-of-the-art facilities where creators can collaborate, explore storytelling techniques and develop new forms of expression. Run by Queen’s as part of the School of Arts, English and Languages, The Seamus Heaney Centre and the recently opened MediaLab are becoming key contributors to the city’s thriving cultural scene.
The Seamus Heaney Centre celebrates the Nobel-winning poet’s legacy, offering courses in creative writing, staging literary readings and showcasing leading writers from Ireland and beyond. The centre is developing a working relationship with MediaLab, which explores the latest video game and screen technologies, and experiments with immersive storytelling.
Founded in 2003 as a centre of excellence for poetry and creative writing, the Seamus Heaney Centre has recently moved into a spacious new building. This larger footprint gives the centre the room it needs to foster collaboration and cross-fertilisation of ideas between poets, writers, critics and creators.
“So many ideas flow from people being brought under one roof and having the space to spend time together. We want the centre to be a welcoming place,” says the director Prof Glenn Patterson.
Running creative writing courses for students of English at the university as well as master’s courses, PhDs and fellowships, the centre builds on the legacy of Heaney, who studied and later lectured at Queen’s.
“We are a centre that is concerned with poetry and writing in all its forms,” says Patterson, a screenwriter, novelist and writer for radio, which reflects the centre’s broad literary interests.
“Heaney was a Nobel laureate in literature, he was a poet, essayist, translator and dramatist, as well as a superb broadcaster from very early on in his career,” he says. The centre hosts an archive of Heaney’s work, including his broadcasting archives, and seeks to bring to life all these forms of creativity.
Spread across three storeys, the centre includes The Wolfson Lecture Theatre, teaching rooms and “scriptoriums” where writers can work and draw inspiration from their surroundings. “It’s really important for us that our postgraduate students are able to have places to work on their own writing,” says Patterson.
As a literary hub, the centre hosts established writers who spend time with students and pass on their experience and expertise through workshops, Q&As and masterclasses. Fellows at the Centre have included Louise Kennedy (a graduate of the Centre), whose novel Trespasses has been adapted on Channel 4; Derry Girls writer Lisa McGee; Anna Burns, the first author from Northern Ireland to win the Booker prize with her novel Milkman; and the writers of the BBC series Blue Lights, Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn. “We are very much integrated into the literary life of the city – of the entire island,” says Patterson.
Writers from the centre also collaborate with MediaLab, which opened earlier this year, in a former garage in the grounds of Queen’s University. A research hub engaged in wide-ranging creative technology projects, the facility explores innovations in film, video games, AI and digital twins.
Prof Michael Alcorn, a Queen’s academic who founded and runs MediaLab, describes the centre as an interface between creativity and technology.
“We are a multidisciplinary team, and we set out to be a slight misfit within university structures, because I think many of society’s needs and solutions are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary,” he says. “Some universities still struggle with working beyond disciplines – thankfully Queen’s strongly support us to operate across multiple disciplines,” he adds.
The centrepiece of the facility is CaptureLab, a production studio with a state-of-the-art motion capture system, which digitally records the movements of actors and objects and transfers them to 3D models that can be used to create animated films and immersive media.
The MediaLab is also investing in a cutting-edge technique known as virtual production, which uses a large-scale LED screen to generate backdrops and experimental projection that can be added directly into a film shoot. This allows actors to perform in front of the screen, hugely improving realism when filming scenes compared with other green-screen technologies. Within weeks of opening, the MediaLab had collaborated on the production of an immersive feature film called Underscore by new media artist, Hugh McGrory.
Other projects include a virtual reconstruction of key locations which were highly visible during the Troubles, the conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the late 1960s to 1998, creating an immersive experience to help people understand the reality of dealing with life during this period of local history.
The MediaLab has also been working to support local artists and creative practitioners who are keen to understand how new technologies can inform and inspire new forms of creative expression. This includes applications in theatre, acting for video games, visual art, music and experimental film-makers.
It is hoped MediaLab’s connections with the Seamus Heaney Centre will help both centres explore storytelling techniques. “We see the Seamus Heaney Centre as one of our most important partners in developing narrative techniques,” says Alcorn. “You need to be able to pull people in and engage them, and that’s where I think the compelling nature of good storytelling comes in.”
Storytelling techniques can be applied both to creative projects such as films, and to technical developments such as gamification, which uses the principles of computer gaming for training, prototyping and research in fields such as medicine, construction and industry.
Patterson says there are great opportunities for partnerships between the two. “Both the Seamus Heaney Centre and MediaLab are informed by a boundless curiosity, constantly exploring new ways of making, and thinking about, work, balancing tradition with innovation and experimentation,” he says.
The creative hubs are blending the ancient arts of literature and poetry with the latest innovations in digital storytelling. Together, they are injecting new energy and momentum into Belfast’s cultural landscape.
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Discover how collaboration is driving cutting edge cultural innovation at Queen’s University Belfast at The Seamus Heaney Centre and MediaLab
