The summer is coming to an end (boo) but there's been a marked influx in Studio activity (yay) possibly due to people returning from holidays but almost certainly because of our cohort of new residents who are providing the space with fresh perspectives. Tracy Bowen, Owen Davies, Joe Blakeston, Lisa Meyer, Luke Raffell, Tanuja Amarasuriya all join us as residents working on new projects, along with newly appointed UWE Professors Jen Stein and Teresa Dillon. We also have announced this year's Artist in Residence as Edson Burton who embarks on his Studio journey from today. We'll have more news from individual's projects to share in the coming weeks.

As a precursor to last Saturday's Mini Maker Faire at AtBristol, a limited audience were lucky enough to get a preview of Understory's crowdfunded Chocolamentary screened in the Planetarium. Seemingly mandatory technical difficulties left James Wheale providing engaging commentary and translation throughout the short film on the topic of rare cacao beans and the impact harvesting has on the climate of Peru. The Dorkbot-organised event culminated in a chocolate tasting (much to the delight of the audience) and drinks and tinkering in the science centre. The documentary will be ready to share with wider audiences later this year.

Our creative crane-choreographer Laura Kriefman has deservedly been announced as a 2016 INK fellow. The program brings together young talent from a variety of disciplines and aims to leverage the impact they are making in their field. Laura seems like an obvious candidate, and we're excited to see the opportunities this uncovers for her and her work.

The iSci team made a playful return to the Studio a couple of weeks ago to test their new Nano Simbox VR technology with our community. The set up involved pitching sensors to create a frame of spatial reference in the virtual world, in which you can manipulate molecular structures in real time. It's clear that the intutive interface of this technology will make for a brilliant education tool.

A number of residents are asking for your help to take them places and champion their work. Open Bionics are currently nominated for the Wired Innovations Awards. This comes at a time when they have successfully utilised a marketing budget of £0 to sell over 100 robot hands internationally.

Bristol Braille Technology have applied for sponsorship from Skipton Building Society and have been shortlisted to the voting round but now needs public votes to win. Please help them out by voting here.

When she's not poking around Bristol Record Office's expansive collection of postcards for a project she's working on, resident Rosie Poebright of Splash & Ripple is pitching a panel for next year's SXSW - please find out more information about the Seeing the world differently with audio games panel and click through to vote! If you could do the same for resident Paul Archer's Storytelling in Brands and Start-ups panel then all the better!

If you find yourself in London at any point between now and October then make sure you pop into Somerset House for the Discord sound installation. A collaboration between artist Caitlin Shepherd and Studio residents Tarim and Yiota Demetriou, the piece is part of the Utopia season on display at the cultural spot, and aims to explore a range of values and views surrounding the ownership, access to, and definition of home.