We are gearing up for the last Studio week of the year, and have been adorning our tree with musical IoT baubles, and we are looking forward to seeing Circumstance’s mysterious ‘dark and loud’ scifi opera at the Arnolfini tomorrow…

This week, REACT producer Katherine Jewkes and our Creative Technologist David Haylock have been working on a festive Studio side project, hand crafting conductive Christmas baubles. These aptly named IoT ‘audibaubles’ (!) will play various Christmas songs when touched. Here’s hoping we don’t end up shuddering at the very mention of Mariah Carey or Slade by the time Christmas actually comes around…

The six REACT Play Sandbox project teams have posted some brilliant blogs recently, exploring topics like Huxley’s dystopian game ‘Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy’ and how children would like to store their most precious objects. Visit their project pages to read them.

This week, Amy, May and Mandy held a workshop with 32 8-9 year fives from Hotwells Primary School to help them develop their Flatpack Cinema project. The class were in the Studio for an hour and a half, playing with different elements of the project, and giving their opinions on different kinds of narrative structure. Amy and May have recently been trying to find a balance between creating an engaging narrative and leaving room for agency. They are currently writing a blog about their recent research and where they are with the project, which will be on their project page by next week.

Studio resident Chloe Meineck is working on the Play Sandbox Curio Keepsake project. She has made treasure chests to give to the young coaches (a group of 7-12 year olds who are working with the teams) and asked them to fill them with meaningful objects and stories. Chloe has made a working prototype of a Curios Keepsake box, which uses RFID to enable young people to record their own stories on to different objects. They can listen back to these stories by placing the objects on a certain point in the box. The young coaches will be bringing in their treasure chests and playing with the prototype at the next Play Sandbox workshop.

On the subject of the Play Sandbox participants, we are delighted that both Chloe and Silas (who is working on the ‘Mighty Minis’ project) have been selected for RIFE’s list of Bristol’s most influential people under the age of 24.

Circumstance have created a visceral sci-fi performance about terraforming, called ‘When There is Only Us’, which they will debut at the Arnolfini tomorrow evening at 8pm as part of the BFI SciFi: Days of Fear and Wonder season.

The British Council and The Korea Foundation invited Studio resident Tom Metcalfe to run an idea generation workshop at the Korea-UK Catalyst in Seoul. The event invited 25 korean startups and 10 UK start ups to get together to develop project ideas, encouraging Korean and British creative economies to work together more closely.

Tim Kindberg and Rik Lander have just finished a promotional video for Tim’s Nth Screen app, which allows for synchronised filming across multiple devices. Tim will be beta-launching Nth Screen early next year, so make sure to get in touch if you have any interesting ideas about the kinds of multi-angle/multi-location films that could be made with it.