Week commencing 12 November:

It’s been a wet and blustery week in the studio, but no one is letting that dampen their spirits! Last week REACT announced the projects that will receive pump priming funding, Calvium and Charlotte have been preparing for App launches, and we have a very exciting new collaboration in the Studio. Read on to find out more!    

This week REACT announced the two recipients of their new Pump Priming Fund. The Fund is designed to support academics and creative economy partnerships in developing new collaborative ideas. The first, Sex and History: Playing with objects brings together experts in the history of sex and sexual knowledge with game makers to change the face of sex education. The second, Turning the Page: Memories of Travel opens up individual and shared stories of far-flung places to armchair travellers in the heart of Bristol, bringing the best of TripAdvisor and travel blogs to the dog-eared pages of the travel guidebook. By inserting touch technologies into the guidebook, stories come to life by triggering listings, images, and maps. REACT will support these projects to develop their collaborations and to become part of a dynamic network of academics, content producers, clients and commissioners. Calls for the second round of Pump Priming are now open and close on January 31 2013. Visit their Pump Priming page for more information.

Charlotte Croft has been busy preparing for the grand opening of The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park app. The app is a locative audio tour that features 13 cinemas in and around Castle Park. Come and celebrate over 100 years of cinema going in Bristol City Centre on the anniversary of the Blitz that destroyed one of Bristol’s finest 2000+ seater super cinemas, The Regent.  The app extends Charlotte’s work with the Curzon Memories App in exploring how locative media can celebrate cinema going and its heritage at precisely the moment that digital projection is transforming the exhibition of film. Due to bad weather the app launch has been delayed but we’ll let you know the new date when it's been announced.  

Designer Natasha Lawless is in the studio, collaborating with Studio Resident Joanie Lemercier from AntiVJ. They are developing The Captivate Project; a beautiful animated wallpaper that will be installed in a shop front in Broadmead throughout December. You can find out more about their collaboration here: http://natashalawless.co.uk/Captivate-Project

Meanwhile Tom at Calvium has been preparing for the launch of Missorts, which is a permanent public artwork for Bristol. An urban soundwork delivered directly to your smartphone as a mobile app, Missorts combines ten location-triggered stories by ten writers set to a newly composed soundtrack. The immersive soundwork is by writer and novelist Tony White with design from Victoria Forrest, the project has been produced by Situations and developed using Calvium’s AppFurnace platform. You can find out more and download the mobile app here: http://www.missorts.com/

On Thursday we had an artists in residence work in progress event to find out how their projects are developing. MrUnderwood and Timothy X Atack explained they have been exploring three different possibilities for their Geiger-Müller Sound System, and gave us a great insight final concept. They are blogging on their project page here, so make sure you check back to find out all the latest developments. Working alongside them, Juneau projects spoke about their project journey and have just placed an order for the components to build a robot arm. They are also blogging on the iShed website here, and Nicola will be posting a blog soon about the progress event so check our news page regularly to stay up to date.  

Will Luton was away for the week, on Tuesday he spoke at LAUNCH: Future Gaming & Digital Conference which is an industry focused conference in the Midlands, featuring speakers and demonstrations from the games industry for nearly 300 people as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. You can watch a video of the panel Will was on here. Then on Thursday he headed to Montpellier in France to be on a panel at the Digiworld summit: Game changers: Mobile, Cloud, Big Data. The DigiWorld Summit is a unique forum in Europe for assessing the consequences of changes taking place in the DigiWorld and has earned its reputation as a cornerstone event for taking stock of the changes at work in the Telecom, Media and Internet industries. You can find out more about the summit and upcoming events here.

On Friday we had a fantastic Lunchtime Talk from Fred Deakin who spoke about interactive spaces. Fiasco Design who came to the talk have written a blog here and we will be publishing one early next week. To find out about all upcoming Lunchtime Talks and events sign up to our newsletter here and check out our events page.