Weekly Blog 21-25 October

This week, the Studio has been full of youthful curiosity, as kids have been visiting to learn about conductive ink and digital storytelling, and vistoring students from Taylors University in Malaysian have been in for workshops exploring Playable Cities and Interactive Documentary. We welcome a new addition to the Studio, Jess, our new Project Coordinator and we announce the winner of the ICSR Robot Design Competition. Read on to find out more:

This week:

This week, Richard and Adam took the AlphaSphere to Music China, an international conference sprawling across ten huge halls, that are packed full of every instrument you could imagine. The AlphaSphere was showcased in the cacophonous Electric Hall. After this, Adam popped over to Japan to support the AlphaSphere’s distributers.

Kieron has set the foundations in place for his open source magic project with a wiki page: makermagic.org. This is all in preparation for our exciting Magic Hack, taking place on 12 and 13 November. To find out more about what Kieron and Stuart, our magicians in residence are conjuring, visit their blogs on the ished website.

We are eager to welcome Jess, our new Projects Coordinator into the Studio. Jess will be playing a key role in supporting delivery of the Studio’s projects and events, and we are all very excited to have her on board.

UWE’s educational partner, Taylor’s University from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia have been visiting the Studio for a Playable City workshop with Clare and Verity and an Interactive Storytelling workshop with Mandy. The students will be documenting their Bristol workshops and collating all the information they have gathered at Bower Ashton next week.

Last week, Vanessa and Hannah headed to the Station with a group of young reporters who investigated what inspires people. The results of this day of investigative journalism can be found on this storify page.

Tim Kindberg’s Nth Screen technology has been used in a new app for the project, “It’s the Skin You’re Living In”, a multi-platform film project about climate and connectedness by Fevered Sleep.

Ad and Verity spent all day at the International Conference for Social Robotics 2013 Conference this week, and at the end of it all, after looking through a wealth of wonderful and inspiring designs, they came to a conclusion: ShidoHeddo, the sociable robot with a plant for a brain, has been crowned the winner of the design competition.

Ffotogallery’s Bedazzled have announced an upcoming event; ‘Welshman in New York’, which will be a celebration of Dylan Thomas’s centenary, for which, excitingly, our resident theatre-maker Ben has been appointed writer. The events will take place next Summer.

It has just been announced that Hide and Seek will be working with No Boundaries to bring playful real world “Tiny Games” to the Conference.

Clare, who aside from being director of iShed is also visiting professor at UWE, delivered her inaugural lecture entitled, 'Bristol, the world's first Playable City' as part of the Arts, Creative Industries and Education Public Lecture Series last night at Watershed.  

Coming Up:

Our Residents Paul (Daredevil Project) and Michael (Pocket Spacecraft) are giving TedX talks in Bristol on 11 November. The whole day of talks will be centred on the theme of ‘Failure’. Michael’s talk; “Failure is not NOT an option”, will be concerning his disposable spacecrafts, and Paul’s; ‘Around the World in 20 Fails” will be on his recent circumnavigation of the globe in a black cab. Book your tickets here. 

A weeklong lab is taking place in the Studio next week for Arts Council Wales Digital Producers. 12 creative digital producers will be working with peers in the Studio, exploring different aspects of creative technology production.

Verity will be doing a talk at Digital Bristol Day, a day of free workshops around innovation, talent and the local creative ecology. The Studio will run a panel at the conference next week on Playable Cities.

Splash and Ripple are hosting a game as part of Cardiff’s PlayArk street game festival on 1-2 November. The festival aims to inspire the public over the two day event with talks and real world games. Rosie’s game, “I say”, which urges people to hunt, sneak, escape and insult, is based around the idea of rival gentleman’s clubs.

Ben Gwalchmai, our resident theatre-maker, is hosting a storytelling workshop that will use both age-old and modern technologies as a means to create narrative. This Saturday as part of the Family Arts Festival. Kids will be making origami fortune-tellers, inventing wonderful characters and immersing themselves in interactive tales that respond to their movements. Find out more here.