This week, we catch wind of more stunning work coming from residents Circumstance, we marvel over new iterations of Di Mainstone’s wearable musical devices and ‘bridge dongers’ for the Human Harp project and we raise a congratulatory toast to Chloe Meineck, who has been selected to got to Tokyo at the end of the month, to explore and re-imagine childhood play.

Circumstance have been working on ‘my world is empty without you’, the latest iteration of their real world experience adaptation of Wim Wender’s film, ‘Wings of Desire’. This project holds a special place in our hearts, as it was the first piece they made at the Studio when it opened in 2008. The work will be shown at Bergen International Festival, where they will be working with Norwegian performers and musicians to create a dream like set of scenes across the city.
In March, they will be creating a bespoke audio work for a new tram system in Guangzhou, China, called ‘sitting-still-moving’. Using the windows of the tram as cinema screens, they will create a poetic document of the passing cityscape. As well as stories from the lives in the visible city, they will be pulling ambient sounds into the audience’s headphones so that they can hear through the glass windows.

Di Mainstone has been working with Roland from Arup, designing a mechanical device that will strike Clifton Suspension Bridge’s cables, as part of her hugely exciting Human Harp project. The device will be controlled by retractable chords attached to holsters, which will be worn by ‘movicians’ (players of the bridge). Resident Seb Madgwick has been updating the design of a digital player which will be used to control characteristics of the cable such as tone and reverb. They are working towards a summer demo, where local dancers and musicians will play between 15 and 20 cables of the bridge. Di is working with filmmaker Jesse Lawrence to document the progress of the project. Here is a video of Roland and Di testing the ‘mechanical donger’:

Rotating donger experiment at CSB Jan 2015 from Jesse Daniel Lawrence on Vimeo.


We are stoked that Studio resident and Play Sandbox participant Chloe Meineck has been invited to join a brilliant cohort of creative practitioners on a trip to Tokyo as part of a British Council Innovation Camp. The Scheme, called ELEVATE StartWell, will encourage the exploration and re-imagining of methods of play for 0-8 year olds. Joining Chloe, will be our friend Ben Barker, who co-developed inaugural Playable City Award project, Hello Lamp Post in the Studio in 2013.

REACT’s Play Sandbox teams have a month of workshops left before they will share their working prototypes, and come to the end of the sandbox process. A few more brilliant blogs have been posted on the microsite, exploring our instinctive sense of magnitude, material and immaterial play, and why we fall in love with characters in documentary and fiction. Amy and May been creating different structures with Tom Metcalfe for their Teleportation Tent project. Yesterday morning, we had a great conversation about the way that when designing playful objects, it is important to remember that ambiguous shapes can be interpreted differently by different people, inspiring imagination and encouraging storytelling.

Digital Bristol Week is fast upon us - Covering everything from games to tv, and immersive theatre to virtual reality, this week of free events will feature some brilliant speakers from the Studio and around the world, shining a spotlight on Bristol as a capital for digital culture. Verity will be on a panel called ‘What Are the Digital Skills Needed for the Future?’ and chairing ‘The Story - New Immersive Storytelling’. Mandy Rose will be chairing a panel called ‘Immersive Ethics - Dream or Nightmare?’. Have a browse through the full programme here.

Last Autumn, Strange Thoughts worked with Alt-J to create an app allowing people to stream their new album before its official release, provided that they were in one of the specifically chosen locations dotted around the globe. The locations ranged from parks, to museums, to our very own Watershed. Over 50,000 people used it in the run up to the release, and the Mercury-winning three-piece's global sales are now fast approaching half a million. An article has just been written about the success of the app, featuring an interview with resident Seth Jackson, founder of Strange Thoughts.

The DCRC brought a group of brilliant creative practitioners and researchers into the Studio over the weekend to explore the design of physical-digital artefacts for public space. The group were working with Joe Morrison, a PhD Researcher in Urban Interaction Design, who got the group to test out some theories that she had been developing, and facilitated a range of activities to help them reflect on their own practise.