We have lots of exciting news to report from the last couple of weeks, including the winner of this year’s Playable City Award and details of the exciting experiments conducted as part of the latest Being There lab…

This autumn, a playful pack of wild beasts will appear in unexpected places across the city of Bristol, waiting for people to play with them. This is all down to the Playable City Award, which challenges artists and creatives from around the world to produce artworks which engage with the notion of cities as playable, malleable, and idiosyncratic public spaces. This years winners, Polish design company LAX (the Laboratory for Architectural Experiments), will be developing their project, Urbanimals in the Studio over the summer. The project kicks off next week, when they will visit the Studio for a couple of days to meet the team and start exploring different ways to bring these playful critters to life. We can’t wait to work with them. 

This week, Bristol saw an unusual emergence of breathing crisp packets, whirlygigging coffee cups and wriggling robotic beetles in its city centre. These strange thingamajigs can all be attributed to the 4 day Being There lab which brought researchers and creative practitioners together to explore how cutting-edge robotics might impact upon our experience of public space and bridge the gaps between the ways we communicate in person and online. The Being There cohort worked on several projects and experiments in the Studio and Watershed’s café bar, including developing a special indoor positioning system (and designing experiences using the system as a platform), creating pulse-sensing brooches that give away a sense of the wearer’s emotional state, exploring telepresence through the use of a NAO robot, a kinect sensor and an oculus rift. There are blogs for each day of the lab on the Being There website. Below is a vine of a NAO robot being controlled by resident Pete Bennet from the room next door...

Tim Kindberg (Matter 2 Media and NthScreen) and Rik Lander (uSoap Media) have been working on Time For Rights, a commission for the 1215 today project, exploring the relevance of the Magna Carta now, 800 years since it was sealed. Tim has written a play for 4 voices called Doing Time, where he used Nth Screen to notionally transport prisoners from cells around the globe to Lincoln Castle, to talk about how it felt to be locked up with no rights. The play was a call to action, urging young people to send in their own 6 second videos in which they make a statement about human rights. Tim and Rik are organising a global video event on 12 August (International Youth Day), and are building a bespoke Nth Screen style app for the occasion, so that everyone, no matter where they are in the world, can film themselves in synchrony.

Ken Eklund and the DCRC held a workshop in the Studio last Saturday, where they worked with 12 UWE Students to design 'authentic fiction' projects for Bristol, exploring the theme of climate change. The participants' dreamt up online platforms, games and events that encourage people to contemplate the future through playing out possible or impossible futures. There will soon be a blog on the DCRC website, about the workshop, documenting the projects. We are very sad that it is Ken's last day in the Studio, but we are holding on to the hope that he will be back in the not too distant future! 

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Studio residents Simon Johnson and Simon Evans of Slingshot have just launched their breathtakingly exciting Kickstarter for Hyde - The world’s first bio-activated maze game. ‘Crystal Maze meets Portal in a dynamic real-world environment synced up to your senses.’ We are sure we don’t need to write any more to get you to watch their kickstarter video and find out more….

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