This week, the Studio was a-fizz with excitement as we announced the shortlist for this year’s Playable City Award. We had a wonderful response to the call out, with ideas flooding in from no less than 60 countries across the globe. It has been hard, but we have whittled these down to a shortlist of seven project ideas. The winning project will be developed over the summer, and installed in Bristol this autumn. Will Bristol be conducting an orchestra of city lights or skipping with kangaroos? Playing with music and light on interactive benches or jamming with strangers at street crossings? Talking to each other via friendly, illuminated clouds or perhaps happening across magical sonic interactions in historical locations around the city? You can read more about all of the wonderful shortlisted projects here, and let us know your thoughts in the comments section. The winning project will be announced next week.

As if the Playable City shortlist wasn’t enough, we also bear the wonderful news that creative coder, technologist, sound artist and electronic musician, Ashley James Brown will be joining us as Watershed Artist in Residence this summer. Ashley will be exploring the relationship between digital code and shared, physical environments. We can’t wait to see his project ideas unfurl over the course of his residency here. Read more about Ashley here.

Di Mainstone has just released a beautiful trailer of her project, Human Harp. The film gives an inkling of what it might be like to play a giant suspension bridge like a musical instrument. Di and the team have been working with the Clifton Suspension Bridge Trust, conducting experiments on Bristol’s iconic bridge in order to create a system for amplifying and controlling the resonance of the bridge’s cables, using the movement of the body. The film features ‘movician’ (bridge player) George, and was filmed by local independent film-maker Jesse Lawrence. Have a look:

Human Harp #PlayTheBridge from humanharp on Vimeo.

Circumstance’s beautiful pedestrian speaker symphony, a Folded Path has been going down a storm at Bristol’s annual alternative theatre festival, Mayfest. There are still tickets left for tomorrow night, and it looks like it will be perfect weather to take a walk through the city at dusk (and this will be a walk like no other…) 

Circumstance’s Sarah Anderson and Duncan Speakman have recently returned from Guangzhou, China, where they were working on a commission for the Young Tram at the launch of the UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange. The work, called ‘Sitting-Still-Moving’ is comprised of a composition for a shifting landscape, along with a documentary mixture of found sounds and stories from the landscape you pass while travelling on the tram. Controlled by GPS positioning using the Appfurnace platform, the sounds and voices resonate with the locations they are heard in, transforming the windows of the tram into a screen, and placing tram-goers into a richly cinematic experience. The work was commissioned by Times Museum Guangzhou with support from the British Council. You can hear extracts from the soundtrack here

Laura Kriefman has been working on the next iteration of her dance project, Kicking the Mic in preparation for her trip to Sweden’s Music Tech Fest. The project fuses tap, looping and live Midi manipulation of sound to create a feedback loop of music and dance. The project also features a fully reactive LED dress, which will light up in response to the layers of sound that Laura creates. Toggle the images at the top to see a sneak peek of a recent prototype of the dress.

Lisa May Thomas has been developing her project, The Touch Diaries, which explores human contact and its impact on physical and mental health and wellbeing. The Touch Diaries film premiere is coming up, which will include a live dance performance, followed by a discussion, taking place at the University of Bath on 9 July. The Touch Diaries team are launching a crowd-funding campaign in the next week or so. We will keep you updated as the project develops.

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