It’s been a fantastic week with a very magical test performance, an award ceremony, a trip to The Story conference and Bristol’s very own Games Hub opening! Read on to find out more about the Hub, awards and what our wonderful community of residents have been working on:   

We are excited to share that the brand new Bristol Games Hub, founded by Studio alumni Debbie and Tomas Rawlings from Auroch Digital and current resident Ben Trewhella from Opposable Games, is now up and running in the heart of Stokes Croft. Bristol Games Hub is a non-profit organisation that provides working space in Bristol where game developers and academics come together under one roof to create and study games. Bristol Games Hub has been set up as a sister studio to the Pervasive Media Studio and, like us, is based on an open and collaborative model of participation, which means residency in the Hub is about being part of the wider gaming community. We are really looking forward to continuing to work with them on lots of exciting projects and sharing, scheming and supporting one another in the coming months and years. For more information including how to apply for a desk at the hub visit their website here.

This week tickets have gone on sale of Give Me Back My Broken Night, a theatrical guided tour, not of the historic past, but of the future of your city. Originally developed as part of Watershed's Theatre Sandbox Programme the show returns to Bristol for its UK premiere following performances as part of the European City of Culture programme in Guimaraes, Portugal. Presented by FUEL, Uninvited Guests and Circumstance, the show is part of a series of Bristol Temple Quarter commissions. You can find out more and book your tickets on the Watershed website.

You can now also book tickets for our Craft + Technology showcase for March 28.  Come and hear about a music memory box for people with dementia, a flying lampshade that communicates feeling, and coins that trigger invaluable experiences, at the close of our pioneering Craft + Technology Residencies -tickets are available from Watershed.

The Books&Print Sandbox projects are now well underway - From new ways to publish biography to the use of behavioural psychology to gather local news, the successful projects include a rich and fascinating mix of ideas and topics. All the projects have been blogging about their progress and you can keep up to date with them here.

On Tuesday we held an informal half way point discussion with Helen White our Communicating Science resident. Helen entered into this residency keen to explore her fascination with the aurora and investigate whether it would be possible to translate solar wind data into something beautiful. Now approaching the half way point of her residency she’s been trying to narrow down and chose a way to visualise the data to take her project further. You can read a post Nicola wrote about Helen’s half way progress event: Work Solar Flares, Sublime Auroras & Data Visualisation and read Helen’s blog here to keep up-to-date with her progress.  

On Wednesday and Thursday The Raucous Collective showed a live test of their show The Stick House. The Stick House is a narrative-driven, text based piece for theatre that fuses live performance, music, projection and pervasive media/digital technology. It has been created with pervasive media embedded into the story rather than being an adjunct to it. First developed as part of our artist's residency programme, The Stick House is a hauntingly beautiful theatre piece inspired by Angela Carter and Otto Dix. The testing went really well, and we can’t wait to see what happens next with the project -you can find out more on their website here.

On Friday Verity, Matt, Jo and lots of Books&Print participants headed to London for The Story Conference. The Story is a one-day conference about stories and story-telling, held at The Conway Hall, London. The Story is not about theories of stories, or making money from stories, but about the sheer visceral pleasure of telling a story. Highlights from the day included a fantastic reading by Laura Dockrill, from her new storybook for children Darcy Burdock, and Rob Manuel co-founder of B3ta who spoke about the bottom half of the internet. You can find out more, and read some blogs about the conference here.  

In the Studio on Friday Peter Bennett from the Bristol Interaction and Graphics group at the University of Bristol joined us to talk about his tangible timeline project, ChronoTape. Combining rolls of paper, a wooden box and spinning reels, with methods of digital annotation and recording, Peter demonstrated how this device offers a new way to interact with computer data using real physical objects. Nicola has published a write-up of the talk, which you can find here.

Then on Sunday, Studio residents danceroom Spectroscopy and Guerilla Dance Project received an award for Best Digital Innovation at the Royal Television Society Awards, for their hugely successful dance show Hidden Fields. Opposable Games were also nominated in the Best Companion Content category for their connected screens game, Clockwork Racers. So a big congratulations to both of them, you can find out more about the awards here.

Lastly join us today at 1pm where writer, creator and Professor of Creative Writing & Digital Media at Bath Spa Kate Pullinger, will be talking about her interactive story Inanimate Alice. In 2006 Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph were commissioned to create a series of interactive stories for a marketing campaign for a feature film that didn’t exist.  From that inauspicious beginning, ‘Inanimate Alice’ has gone on to become one of the most popular digital stories for educators around the world, from primary to doctoral level.  How and why did this happen?  Kate will discuss the story’s unique and on-going progress.