Promoting Bristol at The House of Commons
July 13, 2010
Posted by Clare in: Innovation | Bristol 2| CommentsYesterday I spoke at an event in The House of Commons, a reception for Bristol and the West of England for MPs, press, government employees etc, aiming to highlight the important role that the Bristol and West of England economic area has to make to driving economic recovery. So here's what I said, as the creative industries representative (without the joke about being Liam Fox's warm up girl):
Bristol is home to a myriad of exciting and innovative creative companies and individuals, from the household names like Aardman, BBC Natural History Unit, IMDB, Massive Attack and Portishead to digital agencies like Enable and E3, TV producers like Icon and Tigress, product designers like Trunki and publishers like Sawday.
In addition, Bristol’s silicon sector – the biggest outside of California – consists of over 40 innovative companies – fuelling the growth of the digital technology sector and attracting international companies such as Hewlett Packard and Toshiba to carry out cutting-edge research in the city.
The World Economic Forum recently developed a ‘heat map index of 100 creative environments combining innovation talent, a culture of collaboration and a willingness to source ideas from outside the usual boundaries. It identified Bristol as a hot spring of innovation, a small but growing hub that has already proved itself on the world stage. In other words Bristol is gaining momentum across the world as a place where things can happen.
And it is this sense of open-ness, ambition and action that excites me about the city as a place to live and do business.
Two years ago Watershed set up The Pervasive Media Studio, a research lab set in the heart of the city (rather than a university or corporate campus) dedicated to bringing together tech companies, agencies, academics, artists and startups to look at the future of mobile and wireless media.
Set up in partnership with HP Labs, the Regional Development Agency and the University of West of England, in the first 18 months of operation we worked with the Technology Strategy Board, South West Screen, private companies and brands to leverage business in excess of 1.4 million pounds. Projects have been shown in New York, Korea, Brazil and China. We have worked with brands like Vauxhall and The Gorrillaz, companies including Ogilvy and Microsoft and explored diverse areas from the future of theatre to new business models.
The city’s brilliant mix of independent spirit and embedded collaboration, its willingness to think outside of funding silos and embrace opportunity wherever it arises, is what makes Bristol economically vibrant and internationally distinctive – and I believe we have only just started - there is much potential left to tap into and join up.
Technology Strategy Board funded art and culture -led projects
June 9, 2010
Posted by Clare in: Innovation | Bristol | 1 comment so farThe Technology Strategy Board have funded some great projects led by arts and cultural organisations, but unfortunately they didn't have permission to publish details of the early rounds. I get asked a lot about projects that have been funded so have collected some that I know about here. Do add in any others you know about.
Extended Theatre Project (Fast Track), Watershed, Bristol Old Vic and HP Labs
The Extended Theatre Experience was funded by The Technology Strategy Board as an exploration of how technology can extend and ultimately enhance a live performance experience, like theatre or a music concert. Click here for more info.
Projecting Holograms (Feasability Study), iShed and AntiVJ
The next seismic shift in visual technologies will be to 3D. In 2009 iShed and AntiVJ (projection experts whose 3D mapping technology is already in use in exhibitions and installations across Europe), completed a Technology Strategy Board Feasibility Study Grant to produce a new working software tool-set for stereoscopic content. Click here for more info.
Unlocking markets for content delivery (Collaborative Research), Watershed, Calvium, Bristol Old Vic, Historic Royal Palaces, Bristol City Council
Two major technology trends are reshaping the creative industries: Web 2.0 has created a rapid growth of User Generated Content which is changing the way content is made and delivered and networked and context-aware channels promise to change the way content is accessed and consumed. How will the consequences of these trends be commercialised? In November 2009, Watershed began an 18 month Research and Development project to develop software and prototype pervasive media services. Click here for more info.
The Dramatic Potential Of Pervasive Media, Ralph Hoyte
Ralph’s TSB feasibility study aims to scope ways in which pervasive media can provide new dramatic platforms for explorations in the categories currently known as ‘art’, ‘literature’, ‘poetry’, ‘drama’, ‘music’ and ‘dramatic interpretation’ (eg in the heritage sector); and to set up scratch scenarios to demonstrate some of these capabilities. Click here for more info.
Mobile Social Game Engine (MSGE), SlingShot (was Simon Games)
A cross platform game management system, that integrates mobile comms (sms, email and Twitter) with GPS tracking and Facebook. SlingShot games involve real people and real places and deliver immersive, meaningful experiences. MSGE connects that experience to online social networks and conversation. This creates value for players and the organisations we work with.
Bristol Harbour: An Interactive Experience, Interactive Places
This ran from 1st-26th April 2009, when Interactive Places invited people to take an interactive stroll around Bristol Docks and become part of a story set in 1885. Read more.
New Digital Markets | ARKive and Wildscreen Trading Ltd, Nature Picture Library, VID Communications
This feasibility study will explore the challenges and potential for novel business models and technical applications to address the future management and distribution of a specific range of digital media content (video & images), with the aim of finding a fair and efficient flow of revenue across the value chain, from content suppliers to consumers/visitors to the ARKive site.
How Can Augmented Reality on a Mobile Device be Used by Historical Places to Deliver Content which Informs, Entertains, and Directs the User? | Mobile Pie
A study into how the use of Augmented Reality (AR) on mobile devices can improve the ways that public information available on existing networks can be brought to users in a useful and immediate context. In particular the study will concentrate on using 3D characters overlaid on real world real-time camera input to make users aware of historical sites and facts. It will also look into how the technology could be taken further to distribute more information, through micro-payments and allowing user generated and user shared content.
Movies on the Move, Wonky
WÖNKY has carried out R&D into the creation of location based film experiences having secured funding from the Technology Strategy Board. Read more.
The Question | Extant
The Question is a collaborative and immersive theatre project that explores haptic technology in relation to navigation, perception and knowledge. Currently in a research and development phase, which culminates in a showing in June 2010 at BAC (Battersea Arts Centre), The Question is a collaboration between Extant (the UK’s only professional performing arts company of visually impaired artists), BAC (a space for cutting-edge theatre) and the Computing Department of The Open University. Read more.
Theatre Sandbox announcement
June 3, 2010
Posted by Clare in: Watershed | Innovation | Technology | Bristol | arts | Add a commentiShed is delighted to announce the six recipients of this year’s Theatre Sandbox commissions, supported by Arts Council England.
Each of the six successful recipients receives £10,000 to develop their groundbreaking projects at prestigious partner venues across the country ready for public events and testing in September. This will be followed by a final showcase event at Watershed in November.
Theatre Sandbox seeks to grow an active community of experimentation and learning and includes a structured programme of commissioning and knowledge exchange to grow awareness of technology in the theatre sector. IShed aims to encourage innovation and to leave a lasting legacy as part of the scheme.
The commissions were selected following an intensive application period, during which 275 theatre makers attended nationwide introductory workshops and almost 100 applications were received.
The commissions:
Proto-type Theater
Hosted by Bristol Old Vic
Fortnight is a two-week long performance experience located in the spaces, technologies and occurrences of our daily lives: an unfolding adventure into the limitless 'local'.
Proto-type Theater is a company of multi-disciplinary artists interested in live and digital performance. Proto-type has created demanding, intricately crafted original works, differing in scale, subject and medium for a diverse audience of intelligent, modern humans. FFI www.proto-type.org
Mind the Gap
Hosted by Contact, Manchester
Mind the Gap will make a sonic maze where the audience are moved through a space, attracted and repulsed by sirens. Mind the Gap makes professional theatre with learning disabled people. FFI www.mind-the-gap.org.uk
Analogue
Hosted by The Junction, Cambridge
Analogue will use 21st century connectedness to explore disconnections between ourselves in the present, and the semi-remembered events of our childhood. The audience will navigate through events in May 1985, beginning with a phone call that has long since vanished from history.
Analogue aims to produce challenging, highly inventive via theatrical traditions from the past.FFI www.analogueproductions.co.uk
Ed Collier & Melanie Wilson
Hosted by Lyric Hammersmith
The Observatory is an audio led adventurous fairy tale for children aged between 7 and 10 and their adults. Staged both on a high street and in a theatrical playspace it is about a parallel magical world that exists alongside the city. It can be heard only by those who want to hear it and glimpsed through keyholes and cracks in the pavement by a lucky few. The Observatory will be made Ed Collier of China Plate and award winning theatre and sound artist Melanie Wilson.
FFI www.chinaplatetheatre.com / www.melaniewilson.org.uk
Tin Bath
Hosted by mac, Birmingham
Sophie Woolley and Gemma Fairlie of Tin Bath are developing a new comedy called You’re So Happy I Want to Die. The project experiments with dynamic, evocative captioning that responds to the live nature of theatre. Tin Bath produces exciting interactive theatre that is accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. FFI www.tinbaththeatre.com
Duncan Speakman & Uninvited Guests
Hosted by Soho Theatre, London
Duncan Speakman is an artist who creates experiences in public spaces, often using mobile audio technology. He is collaborating with Uninvited Guests, a Bristol based company whose recent work blurs the line between theatre and social festivities. Together they are exploring how audiences can collectively imagine utopian futures in real locations using performance and networked maps
FFI www.duncanspeakman.net / www.uninvited-guests.net
Theatre Sandbox is originated and produced by iShed, part of Watershed. It is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and delivered in partnership with Bristol Old Vic, Soho Theatre Lyric, Hammersmith, mac, Contact and The Junction.
Social media and broadcast event - BBC
March 25, 2010
Posted by Clare in: Events | Innovation | Bristol | Add a commentAfter finishing up the Augmented Reality demo on BBC Big Screen (a collaboration between The Sancho Plan, Pervasive Media Studio and Arts Council - more here), I rushed up to BBC Bristol to chair one of their 'New tools, new ways of working' events, open to BBC employees and Bristol Media members.
It was a bit of a tough panel - I didn't want it to be too BBC centric and there wasn't much action on the #newtoolsbristol twitter hashtag, so here is what we tried to cover and some links:
The panel: Roo Reynolds, BBC Social Media Executive Vision, Jem Stone, BBC Social Media Executive Audio and Music and Garret Keogh, Cross Platform Director at RDF Digital.
Some of the questions covered:
To what degree do broadcasters need to own social media campaigns and to what extent should they let the conversation happen elsewhere in a more emergent way?
What are the differences between using social media as a promotion tool and using it as a way to source/develop content etc? What are the design challenges of the two approaches?
How do you define success and impact in the use of social media?
What happens when it goes wrong?
The good and bad examples:
Dell: Worldwide community has more than 3.5 million people across the social web. IdeaStorm alone, which crowd-sources ideas for new products, has received 13,749 ideas and 89,000 comments.
Nestle – demanded YouTube remove a video posted by Greenpeace against them, then answered growing dissatisfaction on their Facebook page with insulting comments. Read more.
#Cashgordon: The Conservative Party's use of a twitter hashtag displayed on their homepage that went badly wrong. Read More
The Virtual Revolution a TV series by BBC which used social media to crowd-source content
Being Human - includes fan fiction, blogs and online spin off CENSSA
Save 6 Music social media campaign
Ben Folds Chatroulette Piano Improv
BBC Question Time's back channel
Tweeture - a social media robot
and some stuff we didn't talk about but that the Twitter world pointed me to:
ChartJackers - a cross-platform project which challenged four Youtube vloggers to write, record and release a pop song in ten weeks through crowdsourcing.
Come dine with me Home Made - Host a dinner party. Take loads of snaps. Connect with Facebook and use your photos to create a Come Dine With Me slideshow of your party.
Four weddings social media campaign - Combined format with a live rating gadget, which also pulled in the twitter stream, which put viewers into the brides shoes.
There was lots of talk about where the BBC are doing things well and some discussion on some of the difficulties around commissioning social media campaigns. I am sorry there wasn't more examples and discussion of broadcasting using ARG-like mechanisms (as Heroes did) to co-produce narrative and characters with audiences. But there we go, people were worried about more pragmatic issues like where the boundaries lie between personal and professional tweeting.
PM Studio is looking for an adventurous, collaborative, creative technologist
February 23, 2010
Posted by Shirin in: Watershed | Innovation | Recruitment | Bristol | pervasive | Add a commentCreative Technology Research Associate (one year fixed term)
Grade: 2 £27,000
"Everyone at Watershed has a passion for doing a job properly. Often doing a job properly involves creativity, innovation and a lot of thought: being encouraged to do those things, and working with others who do too, every day, is what makes Watershed both a great place and a great place to work." Oliver Humpage, Watershed ICT Coordinator
The Role:
This one year research post will play a key role in developing collaborative, publicly-facing projects and ideas in The Pervasive Media Studio.
The role will provide residents and collaborators with technical inspiration, collaboration and support. It has a broad remit: sometimes you will be exploring cutting-edge research, sometimes you will be coding an artist's project, sometimes (but less so) you will be re-setting the router.
About you:
You will have the ability to understand and inspire, listen and communicate and then make brilliant ideas happen. You need to know your stuff and have a flexible, adventurous and collaborative approach to work.
About us:
The Studio is part of Watershed. We have a formal partnership with UWE's Digital Cultures Research Centre. We are a multi-disciplinary lab exploring and producing pervasive media content, applications and services. We work within a brilliant community of artists, creative companies, technologists and academics. Our projects include gaming, projections, location-based media, digital displays and new forms of performance. Some are commercial, some are cultural. We test our projects as early as possible and iterate. We have a great workspace, an open ethos and a can-do attitude.
This research associate post is supported by funding from the South West Regional Development Agency.
How to apply:
To visit the Studio Website to download the job description and application form click: here.
