Week commencing 08 October:

It’s been an exciting week in the Studio as we were joined by some lovely visitors from Brazil, Clare set off to New York, most of the nu desine team have headed over to China, and our newest resident is plotting to send things into space! Just a typical week in the Studio then...

Last weekend JournoDevSwap kicked off in London. Will Luton organised the event with Ukie, Develop and MCV. In a switching of roles four of the UK’s most talented coders took over the website Develop for one weekend, while game journalists (helped by student games programmers) were tasked with making a playable game in just 48 hours. Will said it went brilliantly and he hopes to run it again in the future, so keep your eyes peeled! You can read Keith Stuart’s live blog on the Guardian website here, check out their tumblr, and play the games that were created here.

From Monday to Thursday Watershed hosted a British Council delegation from Recife, Brazil. They spent the week with Vic to talk more about Recife: The Playable City, and to learn more about the Studio, Watershed and Bristol. The project is part of the Transform UK 2012-Brazil 2016 season, a new British Council arts and creativity programme that seeks to develop the artistic dialogue between both counties, enabling artists and professionals to share experiences and collaborate on projects that bring about creative and social change for institutions, individuals and communities. You can find out more about the project here.

Tim has been busy preparing for two very exciting events coming up, on Thursday 25 at 6.30 in Cabot Circus Tim Kindberg and Will Drew will be play testing a new wifi based game called A Scanner Darkly. They’re looking to get as many people testing it as possible, so if you have a wifi capable phone and would like to play please get in touch with Tim on: tim@matter2media.com

Secondly don’t forget to save the date, Friday 9 November 2pm, for Tim’s panel at Afrika Eye film festival. The panel discussion will be held simultaneously in Bristol's Watershed and Nairobi's iHub by live video link. The topic is How Digital can expand the audience for the African moving image. The panellists in Bristol will be Afrika Eye’s Simon Bright, director of Mugabe, and Andrew Mugoya, founder of Afriapps.com. In Nairobi, panellists include Wanuri Kahiu, director of Pumzi, with more to be announced soon! See the Afrika eye website for further information here, and don’t forget to reserve your place through Watershed, it’s completely free to attend so don’t miss out!

This week Calvium and Opposable Games also found out they been selected for the innovation showcase at Venturefest; a business creation networking event. Venturefest is free event that brings together over 1,000 people, from students wishing to learn about all aspects of business, to seasoned investors looking for their next big thing, to entrepreneurs seeking funding, to designers seeking new customers, to people who are seeking solutions to particular business problems. It looks set to be an awesome day so get your tickets here.  

It’s gone quiet over at the nu desine desks as Adam, Del and Kaspar are all in China overseeing some of the AlphaSphere tooling being made, carrying out some testing and exhibiting at musikmesse. You can keep up to date with their progress by reading their blog here & following their twitter account @nu_desine

On Friday we had an awesome Lunchtime Talk from Michael Jonson of JA. He spoke about affordable space exploration, and possible laser fights in space! We’ll be posting a blog up in the near future about the talk so look out for it.

And don’t forget to join us this Friday at 1pm for a talk from the lovely Ad Spiers from Bristol Robotics Lab where he primarily researches haptic technology (which interfaces with a user via their sense of touch) and its application to robotic surgery. Ad has also been (and continues to be) involved in a number of collaborative creative technology projects related to haptics and robotics. These have included shape shifting navigation aids for pitch black installations and moving origami foxes to intrigue (and confuse) ravers. As a recent resident of the Pervasive Media Studio, Ad hopes to use this opportunity to introduce himself via some of his past, present and future work. It’s set to be a corker come and join us for the afternoon. If you haven’t been to the Studio before then why not book yourself in for a tour at 12.30 before the talk, just email Hannah at admin@pmstudio.co.uk

Lastly former resident Luke Jerram has been busy working on his Giant Kinetic Solar Powered Chandelier, this 17ft tall solar powered kinetic chandelier consist of 665 glass radiometers, which shimmer and flicker as they turn in the sunlight has just been installed at the new Bristol and Bath Science Park. Altering their speed with the subtle changes in lighting conditions, the vanes of each radiometer speed up and slow down throughout the day. A smaller chandelier is also on display in Tel Aviv at the Intersections exhibition at the Weizmann Institute. You can watch a video of the beautiful chandelier in action here.