First Friday

First Friday is a monthly social event open to anyone. These events are somewhere between the last meeting of the week and the first event of your weekend. You might meet an artist or an engineer, a school teacher or a city leader. It is a place to connect with someone you might not otherwise meet, and hear about stuff you didn’t already know. All are welcome - from inside and outside the city, online or in the Watershed building.

November Event

Our November event is presented in collaboration with Digital Catapult. People joining us in person will have the opportunity to have a look around the Pervasive Media Studio to find out more about some of the work that happens here. There will also be some equipment set up to chat with people joining the event remotely.

As well as the chance to socialise in the Studio, attendees joining the event in person will also get to see a selection of work by some of the teams who were awarded funding through the first MyWorld Challenge and CR&D Calls led by Digital Catapult and also by UKAI, who are visiting from Toronto:

• Larkhall will be sharing Otto, his computer co-performer, who translates musical nuance into stunning visuals that dance in perfect harmony with sound.
• Co-Founder and Creative Director of Meaning Machine Thomas Keane will be bringing a playable demo of their interrogation game – DEAD MEAT.
• Zero Point Motion will be sharing Digibeat, an experiment in simultaneous high-precision fingertip motion tracking and heart function measurement through ballistocardiography (BCG).
• Ashley Gwinnell will be sharing IMPRESS, a multi-faceted marketing toolkit enabling indie game developers to strengthen their online brand presence, discover and reach gaming influencers, and react to high-value community growth opportunities.
• Professor Joseph Hyde will be demonstrating prototype work for MyWorld project Celestial Live, where he has been developing techniques to operate drone light shows interactively in real-time.

UKAI Projects will be also sharing a few projects related to cultural infrastructure for a world of ecological and political volatility including experiments in highly local language models, decentralized collaborative tools, and an ontologically confused AI.

People joining online can participate in short speed networking conversations, facilitated by our chat roulette style software. You will be paired up at random for a series of five minute conversations, one-to-one with other guests. There is an option to take a break between each chat and you are welcome to pop in and out whenever you like. It's fine to join the event late and leave the event early.

The hosted element of the event will finish at 18:00. After that, in person attendees are welcome to continue conversations in the Café & Bar.

About Pervasive Media Studio

The Pervasive Media Studio hosts an international community of over 100 artists, companies, technologists, and academics exploring experience design and creative technology. We are a space for risk taking and early ideas; for the kind of projects and questions that inhabit the meeting points of art, technology, and society.

Our projects span play, robotics, location-based media, food, connected objects, interactive documentary, new forms of performance and more.

We have an open plan studio with a culture if generosity, curiosity, and interruptibility. We believe that by clustering people together from a broad range of backgrounds, with differing skills, experience, and opinions, all of our ideas become better.

Join the First Friday mailing list here.

This event is supported by MyWorld.

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