After a lovely long bank holiday weekend everyone returned to the Studio fresh faced and ready for another busy week talking at conferences, planning workshops and running awesome events. Read on to find out more...

At the beginning of the week our lovely creative technologist Dan headed to The Mapping Festival in Geneva to talk about ‘Life through the eyes of machines.’ After decades of R&D, machine vision is now commonly deployed in our digital everyday. Machines are making sense of the world around us and this increasingly affect our individual and social behavior. However, such technologies are also repurposed by artists and designers, leading to intriguing productions and subtle critiques of their frightening potential. The session addressed the creative potential of such phenomenon and how it currently leads to a new aesthetic. You can find out more on The Mapping Festival website and have a look at a round up of tweets about the talk here.

Studio resident and documentary maker Mandy Rose is demonstrating her latest work as part of Bristol’s Festival of Ideas. Fifty years ago people on the streets of Paris were asked: Are you happy? in a documentary experiment with the new film technology of 1960 – hand-held sync sound. Searching for Happiness takes advantage of a new era of creative technology to ask the same question today. In a documentary first, producer Mandy Rose has brought those recordings together with live feeds from the web to create a documentary experience which never plays the same way twice. Searching for Happiness is a meditation on culture, values and the meaning of life. Mandy Rose will present a live demo of the project, and will be in conversation with Executive Producer Jon Dovey. Make sure you book your ticket from the Watershed site here.

Auroch Digital are looking for women interested in developing their technical and/or creative skills as game developers. Want to create games but don't feel you have the technical know-how? Interested in becoming a games developer but unsure how to go about it? Then the XX Workshops might be the answer. The XX workshops are a series of four free 2 hour sessions where experienced game developers work with you to make the crossover from your discipline into creating games. This initiative is about encouraging more women into the games industry, as there are currently only 6% of female developers. The session are in the evening on the 14/15 and 21/22 May, find out more and book a place here.

Earlier this month Stand + Stare Collective lead Watershed’s annual Grundtvig workshop with older learners from across Europe. This year’s workshop, Digital Dishes used the participant’s relationship with food and the memories it evokes to create a new collection of food-related stories for the Theatre Jukebox. Working with Stand + Stare, the workshop gave participants the unique opportunity to learn about new technologies while exchanging stories and meals with new friends. You can come and listen to the stories they created on the Jukebox which has be installed in the Watershed café/bar until the 16th May.

After the success of the first Good for Nothing Bristol weekend the team are back to help food charities, and we’re very happy to be hosting them in the Studio. So mark 31 May-1 June in your diaries as It’s a chance to get involved with the local community and do something great for Bristol based charities needing a helping hand. It’ll be an intense weekend but they’ll be music, food and lots of fun so it’s a brilliant chance to meet like minded people in Bristol, and help to do something good. They’re currently looking for Bristol based do-ers, makers, coders and general all rounders so get involved here.

With less than a week to go until Mayfest’s Launch Party at Bristol Old Vic we’re super excited for all the exciting shows there are coming up. Mayfest is Bristol’s unique annual festival of contemporary theatre running 16-26 May. Make sure you book your tickets to see the four wonderful shows below that our residents are involved in as tickets are flying out:

The Memory Dealer - Rik Lander. Somewhere between theatre, game and out-of-body-experience, The audience enter that world and become part of a story which is revealed by headphone audio, media installations and encounters with live performers. Turning the Page - Stand + Stare Imagine if your well-thumbed, outdated guidebook could talk. Through this intimate installation you are invited to investigate a series of clues hidden within a guidebook that magically come to life as you turn the pages. Temple Songs is an a-cappella chorus led by composer and director, Jennifer Bell, and a Bristol Temple Quarter Commission. To mark the end of a series of flash close-harmony concerts in Bristol Enterprise zone during Mayfest, they are inviting all comers to an intimate, one-off performance in an empty office. Finally in Mask Boy, James Wheale uses poetry to retell his harrowing time in Sierra Leone where he faced suicide and malaria, experimented in time travel with a witchdoctor and created a superhero alter-ego to rescue himself from madness. Studio Residents Splash and Ripple are producing the event so it’s sure to be a corker! You can find the full programme of events, and book tickets for all the shows on the Mayfest website here.  

Then today at 1pm we had a very special Lunchtime Talk from Mitch Altman and a demo of the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift. Mitch is the founder of the Noisebridge Hackerspace in San Francisco and is a major figure in the global Maker movement. He’s also the inventor of such excellent gadgets as the TV-B-Gone and Trip Glasses. After the talk we were joined by Bristol games developer WormSlayer who was demo-ing an Oculus Rift, a very cool prototype Virtual Reality headset that has been taking the tech world by storm. Look out for a write-up of Mitch’s talk next week.

Finally a reminder that the lovely folk at Bristol Hackspace are running a public workshop with Mitch this weekend. Mitch and Jimmie Rodgers (inventor of the Lots-of-LEDs Arduino shield among other kits) have been in the UK since the Maker Faire in Newcastle on 27 and 28 April touring a few Hackspaces, this week we’re lucky enough to have them in Bristol. Mitch and Jimmie will be running a public workshop at Bristol Hackspace on Saturday 11 May at 12pm. You can book your tickets for the workshop on Saturday 11 May at 12pm here if you’re interested in taking part.