We are Naomi Smyth and China Fish; theatre artists with 20 years experience in improvised, immersive and interactive comedy performance. China is also a singer songwriter, developing her audio practice into live and spatial audio with a DYCP and Naomi is a digital artist and doctoral researcher in digital theatre who has worked with spatial tech like motion capture, social VR, binaural audio and volumetric scanning. We won the first annual Forkbeard Fantasy Award from Bristol Theatre Collection last year, and started a new company 'Smish Theatre'. Our ambitions for Smish are to combine audience participation, improvised performance and responsive technologies. Winning At Life is our first work in progress theatre show. It follows a team of two podcasters and friends as their quest for self-optimisation spirals into a competitive, data-driven hellscape- with darkly hilarious consequences.

In our talk we will share our process, themes and what we have made so far. We will outline our plans for the shape of our practice. Inspired by the Forkbeard Fantasy Archive that spanned 1873-2023, we hope to make Winning At Life a modular 'storyworld' that has many lives in different forms. Our digital characters can live as interactive festival and gallery installations. Our audience interaction mechanisms and spoof social media content can have its own life online. There is potential for separating out elements like mixed reality, spatial audio, audiovisual content and physical projection mapped set designs for different contexts and adapting our performances to those elements, or letting them stand alone. In focusing on flexibility in both tech and performance we hope to extend the viability, accessibility and emphasise the unreproducible nature of our work in a tough landscape for live performance. We are seeking creative technologists, accessibility experts and digital dramaturgs as collaborators and contributors for feedback, prototyping and making funding applications as a team. 

Join us online on YouTube Live, or in the building on Friday 10th July at 13:00 for the talk and to take part in the Q&A discussion afterwards. 

Want to support what we do at Watershed? Please consider donating, so we can bring you more talks like this.

The Pervasive Media Studio is a partnership between the Watershed, University of the West of England and University of Bristol. The lunchtime talks are partly supported by MyWorld, a project led by the University of Bristol to support creative industries in the region. Watershed is supported by Arts Council England.

Address:

Watershed, 1 Canon's Rd, Bristol BS1 5TX

Directions:

The Lunchtime talks take place in the Pervasive Media Studio Event Space. To access the Studio, please go to the Main Watershed Box Office entrance and go upstairs to the Café Bar. Walk across the cafe bar, turn right and walk towards the double doors. Go through into the corridor and walk all the way down until you reach the Studio. A member of staff will sign you in, and check your ticket, if you have booked.

The Studio is wheelchair accessible, and the events space has a hearing loop. The last talk of every month is BSL interpreted. 

For more information on accessing the studio take a look here.

*Please note this is a hybrid event and will be live streamed so please be aware you will be in the live broadcast and recording when watching in the Studio.