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The Centre for Creative Technologies and Brigstow Institute are excited to announce the continuation of this workshop series, where we bring together creative technologists, researchers and artists to think together, share their practices and ideas, learn new skills and foster possibilities for future collaborations.

Harry Wilson (UoB) kicked off the series in July with his Placing Spaces Workshop, using 3D scanning and audio recorded conversations to install a series of geo-located Augmented Reality encounters at various outdoor locations. More information about the workshop can be found on our blog.

This series offers free workshops open to University of Bristol staff working with creative technology (broadly understood), and Pervasive Media Studio residents. You have to register to each workshop day separately. Each day takes place at the Pervasive Media Studio Event Space and includes lunch.

Creative Coding with Charlie Hooper-Williams

10-12, 1st October 2024

This workshop takes a hands-on, dive-right-in approach to creative coding. From the very beginning, participants learn by doing, making simple, visual, interactive scenes right away. Using the same software Larkhall (Charlie) uses for his own live visuals , you’ll make things spin, glow, warp, and sparkle as you learn about rendering, lighting, textures and more.

Tickets can be found here.

Speculative Imaginings.

9.30-16.30, 10th October 2024.

Narrative Futuring with Viv Kuh and Bec Gee

Taking inspiration from Ruth Levitas’ Utopia as Method, this workshop uses a combination of visualisation, storytelling, collective imagining and critical making practices to support participants in imagining the best possible future worlds, as a means of critically reflecting on their current practice and how it might be better shaped to move us all towards more positive futures. Participants discover new images, analogies, language and possibilities to shape their lives and work. We will start with a very quick introduction to utopian imagining and its theoretical underpinnings and then get straight to work. We will explore a few key Narrative Futuring creative methods, including utopian visualization, collaborative imagining and creative writing. We will follow these activities with a facilitated discussion on the value and potential for utopian imagining, thinking about not only how this form of imagination can help create more flourishing futures, but also how it can positively impact our practice and wellbeing right now.

Capital Flows with Imwen Eke

The Capital Flows workshop harnesses the power of play to uncover and reimagine hopes and aspirations for individuals and communities profoundly impacted by global ecological and social challenges. Inspired by the concept of regenerative enterprise, this workshop guides participants in understanding and leveraging seven forms of capital: financial, material, social, natural, spiritual, intellectual, and time. We explore how these interact across personal, social, political, and ecological systems. Through engaging activities such as personal capital inventories and system-building exercises, you’ll gain valuable insights into how these capital forms shape our lives, communities, and the planet.Our workshop aims to foster creative problem-solving and collaboration, addressing real-world challenges related to climate resilience, social justice, and community wellbeing. By tapping into the power of play and imagination, we’ll work together to envision, design, and creatively “hack” systems.

Tickets can be found here.

Experiencing VR with Alternative Senses with Eirini Lampiri

10.00-15.00, 6th November 2024.

This workshop will explore the journey of creating a VR experience prototype with physical, kinetic sets and using it to explore how sensory alignment and misalignment alters the participants’ level of immersion and engagement with the medium.

Sharing of findings about the needs of different bodies in XR experiences; how different bodies prioritize different senses and what does this mean when designing for a multisensory XR experience.

Open discussion and knowledge exchange about:

The role of participants when entering an XR multisensory experience in relation to the story, materials and scale.

Bridging reality and virtuality to engage with XR environments with more senses than vision and hearing, combining the wealth and uniqueness of real-life multisensory interaction with the possibilities that immersive technologies and storytelling can unlock.

Collaborative activity: Together, participants will explore sensory alignment and misalignment and the language around describing and communicating sensory related content.

Tickets can be found here.

Interrogating Entanglement Musical Instruments with Steve Symons

12 November, 10am-1pm, Pervasive Media Studio Event Space. Lunch included.

Recent digital musical instruments have questioned the traditional relationship between the individual musician and their instrument. As well as creating opportunities to inter-connect performers’ systems, technology has opened a field of entangled instruments; where the players are so enmeshed as to be considered a single mutually played instrument. This workshop offers a practical exploration of the experience of playing and designing two-person entangled instruments for close mutual participation. Participants will start with a series of collaborative ice-breakers, designed to entangle and lay the foundations of a care-based experience. This will be followed by a period of playing and reflecting on Steve’s existing instruments in pairs and in a group context. Then finally we will conclude within a period of practical instrument making.

There are 12 spaces in the workshop- you will be in pairs or threes with one person in the group knowing either PureData, Max/MSP, Supercollider or VCV Rack2. We encourage both those with knowledge of these softwares and those that don’t to apply!

To sign up, fill in this form by the 14 October. We will confirm your space by 15 October 4PM. 

Please contact CCT for any questions or queries.

Harry Robert Wilson 

Project Context 

Placing Spaces is an ongoing practice-research project I’ve been developing with my 7-year-old daughter Poppy. Together, we are testing a process of intergenerational collaboration, and attempting to use creative technologies to explore intergenerational/technological/place-based entanglements from a child’s perspective. 

In November 2023, Poppy and I moved from the northeast of Scotland to the southwest of England. To reflect on this life-changing transition, in the summer of 2023, I asked Poppy to take me to her favourite places in Dundee, where we lived at the time. I asked her about how these places made her feel, what they made her think of and significant memories she attached to them. I documented our intergenerational father-daughter conversations through audio recordings and photogrammetry scans of these sites.  

At a sharing of the project at the TaPRA conference at the University of Leeds in August 2023 I worked with these documents to install a series of geo-located augmented reality encounters at various site-specific locations around the conference venues. In this iteration, users were able to explore and interact with the 3D scans, whilst proximity triggering our audio conversations. Part treasure hunt, part site-specific performance for one, and part unreliable oral history, Placing Spaces in Leeds aimed to explore the affective potency of photogrammetry, the layering of space and collapsing of geographies, and the ‘productive disruption’ of collaborating with children. 

Placing Spaces, TaPRA, University of Leeds 

The workshop 

On 21^st July 2024 Poppy and I led a Centre for Creative Technologies ‘Alternative Technologies’ workshop funded by the Brigstow Institute and hosted at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. The workshop was designed for intergenerational adult-child participants. We were supported by socially engaged artist (my partner, and Poppy’s mum), Tashi Gore. The aims of the workshop were as follows: 

1. To share the creative process and tech workflows of Placing Spaces with other intergenerational participants. 

2. To understand more about the significance of working with place and creative technologies through adult-child relationships. 

3. To test the concept and process with participants with a view to developing a future iteration of the project with participants in communities across Bristol. 

  

In the workshop we installed the AR scenes of Poppy’s favourite places around the studio and gave each adult-child pair one smartphone device linked to two sets of headphones. 

Following a demo of mine and Poppy’s AR scenes, we then introduced the free photogrammetry app Scaniverse to participants and invited them to try it out by scanning objects they found interesting around the PM Studio. 

Once everyone felt comfortable with how to scan, we sent the pairs of participants out into the Harbourside area around Watershed with the following instructions: 

1. Choose a place or location to walk to within 5 minutes’ walk of Watershed. 

2. Select an interesting landmark or reference point within that location that you think would make a good 3D scan. 

3. Using the Scaniverse app on your phone, make a 3D scan of the landmark (you can try this a couple of times taking it in turns and play with processing if you feel confident). 

4. Find somewhere comfortable to sit or stand in your location. 

5. Start your voice recorder using the Recorder app on your phone and take it in turns to ask and respond to the questions below. 

• Can you tell me a little bit about where we are – what you can see? 

• What can you hear? 

• How does this place make you feel? 

• Why have you picked this place? 

• Did you know this place before today? 

• If so, do you have any memories from here? 

• What kinds of things do you think people do here? 

6. Repeat the process if you have time with another location, don’t worry if not. 

Following this process the group gathered back in the PM studio, shared their scans and fedback about the process and the workshop. We viewed scans of an ice cream van, a concrete block with a face, a statue of Neptune, the wall of a fountain and Bristol Aquarium. 

2 weeks after the workshop I sent participants a QR code which allowed them to view their 3D scan with their audio recorded conversation layered into the scene. 

Outcomes 

Participants reflected that they enjoyed the opportunity to spend one-to-one time with their adult, that they found it interesting to hear the recorded sounds layered on top of the 3D models in the Placing Spaces demo, and that the workshop prompted some interesting conversations about significant places in the participants’ lives, about the limits of technology and how that reflects on memory. 

The CCT workshop allowed me to test a structure and process for sharing the work with intergenerational participants. We were able to test the possibilities of demo-ing freely available tools for 3D scanning (and whether these were user-friendly enough for diverse ages to be able to make something in a workshop context). I was able to learn more about how this model could be used as a method for developing the work with intergenerational participants in the future. 

The workshop has also prompted ideas for how to present the project to audience-participants as a shared encounter that is navigated between two people sharing one device. I found something interesting in how this pairing of audience-participants encouraged a negotiation between adult and child and drew attention to the movement of differently aged bodies in relation to the virtual models. This is an aspect of the work’s presentation that I hope to incorporate into future iterations. 

Unlike artificial intelligence (AI), printing press type-setting can be physically dismantled. There is no trace remaining; it is a one-off occurrence. Yet both the press and AI are formed of parts that can be reconstituted into endless figurations. Remediation reorientates us to new meanings; there is a permanence, a fluidity. One move (click, press, push) can throw meaning into a tailspin.

For this workshop series, myself (Katy Dadacz) and Matilda Hicklin hoped to embrace the differences and complications that appear when writing with machines. We wanted to reorientate our attention to the process, rather than the final outcome, and recognise that each medium offers its own set of possibilities for creative expression.

Remix Poetry Workshop 1: Pervasive Media Studio, 19.05.24

> how do we take the agency back from the machines?

> how do we express who we are in our writing practice?

> how can we work collaboratively?

The first workshop was led by the poet, performer and facilitator Deanna Rodger. Within small groups we began with a cut-and-paste exercise using poems such

> here yet be dragons by lucille clifton

> these things we know by kae tempest

> everyday around the world a woman is pulled into blue by krista franklin

The next phase was silent, line-by-line poetry writing; this was a back-and-forth process as each participant was inspired by and adapted to the previous line. The final stage involved utilising Chat-GPT-3 as a creative collaborator, as each individual fed the interface prompts to develop their own poem.

Rather than using a language model that has been trained on feminist texts, we want to use Chat-GPT 3 as our co-facilitator: its immediacy, accessibility, and adaptability affords us opportunities for this very collaboration and exploration. It is also the everyday experience for most people. Just as the printing press revolutionised communication, Chat-GPT represents the forefront of AI language models and holds a hegemonic position that should be challenged.

Questions that were in our minds as we explored these poems

What are the ways our own creative processes are reshaped once we are fed something back?

Can Chat-GPT offer new meanings? The output is so immediate: how can we make it lag or glitch? How does it respond to one word? to a few? to a line of poetry?

How can we work with a ‘neutral’ system in developing a feminist practice?

Our poetry remixes were inspired by William Burroughs’ cut-up method; a mechanical approach to creativity that detabilises notions of voice and identity. The tactility of the practice encourages an embodied process that we were interested to explore in relation to the (dis)embodied presence of Chat-GPT-3.

Participants noted that the cut-up method drove over-remediation as the lines of poetry became trapped in a feedback loop, constantly reworked in each stage of the writing process; an exhaustive method that pushed ideas of originality to its limits. Some described the mode of writing felt akin to divination practices; an attempt to organise the random that mimicked their experiences of using Open AI sources. The back-and-forth writing technique prompted others to comment on this desire for control and the fear of losing track.

The cut-up method furthers this sense of undoing, promoting adaptation and transformation of source materials. The use of Chat-GPT-3 as a feminist writing collaborator developed this understanding of authorial ambiguity and challenged notions of fixed identity.

Group Reflections on Writing with AI

Can we use AI for the work we don’t want to do? for boring stuff, the drudgery? So we can focus on the things that make us happy and creative? Or is doing the boring stuff an important part of the creative process?

There was a pressure for immediate output (which is what Chat GPT-3 does), to produce something quickly and efficiently (like a machine)- How do I create something good quickly? Do I want that?

Why does the output from Chat GPT-3 always fall flat? It feels…disappointing?

It (Chat GPT-3) isn’t doing what I want it to!

A few weeks go by and we meet again, this time at the Bristol Common Press with a different kind of machine- Albion presses from 1829 and 1843. Shauna Roach from the Bristol Common Press gave us a tour and hands-on introduction of the press.

We began writing some lines of poetry, drawing from the first workshop and Chat GPT-3. We remixed these lines into a larger poem (overleaf) of all the lines from participants, poems and chat gpt-3. who wrote what and whose line is whose was becoming confusing…..which made us think: in what moments does authorship matter?

We each picked a font and size for our typeface, and began setting our lines. we printed the poem once, each one of us rolling the ink and swinging the heavy leaver to press the poem into the paper. The first print contained multiple errors, errors that we sat with and talked through which ones we wanted to keep, what the error adds to meaning and what we wanted to delete.

The mistakes that ended up happening on our first press introduced new meanings, beats and sounds to the words, making us reflect on what meaning we want to convey. The time spent type setting made us feel like we were learning to become automated – sorting things through, classifying things. this learning to become automated opened up conversations around the feminist history of weaving and looming, Ada Lovelace and coding. As we work away, intricately placing each typeface to form the lines of our collective poem, we thought about the visible and invisible labour that upholds artificial intelligence.

Below you can see the first output, and the final one once we made some changes. See if you can spot the differences- does it change the meaning, voice or form?

Thank you to our wonderful participants, Deanna, Shauna Roach, Bristol Common Press and the Centre for Creative Technologies.

Below you can see a quick manifesto for if you are ever writing with machines! Here is the link to the full zine made by myself and Tilly.

The CCT have invited Zach Blas to give a talk at the Pervasive Media Studio (14 June), to launch the Alternative Technologies Workshop Series funded and supported by Brigstow. Zach Blas will discuss his newest work CULTUS, an immersive moving image installation that addresses a burgeoning AI religiosity in the Californian tech industry.

Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction. Currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Blas has exhibited, lectured, and held screenings at venues internationally, including Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Whitechapel Gallery and ZKM Center for Art and Media. Notable works include Facial Weaponization Suite (2012-14) which consists of amorphous masks that demand opacity against biometric facial recognition systems.

Zach Blas will discuss his newest work CULTUS, an immersive moving image installation that addresses a burgeoning AI religiosity in the Californian tech industry, considering the ways in which artificial intelligence is imbued with god-like powers and marshaled to serve beliefs centered around judgment and transcendence, extraction and immortality, pleasure and punishment, individual freedom and cult devotion. 

CULTUS manifests as a techno-religious computational device –a god generator, a holy engine –that invokes a pantheon of AI gods, whose prophets share their divine teachings, rituals, and symbologies. Blas will consider the sociopolitical conditions that drive the research and conceptual framework of CULTUS, and he will also present the ways in which AI and machine learning were creatively and critically utilized to invoke AI gods.

Watch below….

This is a two-part workshop series exploring feminist approaches to creative writing with Open Source AI and the printing press.

Organised by Katy Dadacz (Comparative Literature PhD) and Matilda Hicklin (Translation PhD), in collaboration with Bristol Common Press and supported by the Centre for Creative Technologies.

Unlike AI, printing press type-setting can be physically dismantled – no trace remaining, a one-off occurrence, Yet, both the press and AI areformed of parts that can be reconstituted into endless figurations. This workshop series will be a chance to explore some of these tensions, and disrupt the binary between the digital and analog.

9/05 13.00-15.00 Poetry Writing with Open Source AI

Deanna Rodger will lead a poetry writing workshop exploring themes of temporality, speculative worlds, transformation and glitches as we write with Open Source AI at the Pervasive Media Studio

12/06 10.00-15.00 Printing Collaborative Poems

Together, we will print our collaborative poems and reflect on what this remediation may mean for our writing practices with AI at the Bristol Common Press.

‘Immortality Cultivation’ (xiuzhen 修真) and Neoliberalism ​

in Contemporary Chinese SF and Fantasy

We are excited for a fascinating talk by Future Speculations Reading Group member Echo, followed by a conversation with Dr Edward King

Thursday 6 June, 43 Woodland Road

SF and fantasy as types of literature bred out of post-enlightenment engagement with or critique of reason have a distinctive European origin, yet their global transmission and transmutation with globalization mean that they are also a type of world literature always on the move. This talk will trace Chinese SF’s and fantasy’s global origins in China’s two points of entry into the world in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries respectively and how each genre has responded to China’s social conditions and literary traditions in their localization. The second part of the talk will focus on how a familiar trope in SF and transhumanism, ‘digital immortality’, reincarnates in contemporary Chinese SF and fantasy in various forms of ‘immortality cultivation’. Originally a concept in Daoist alchemy, ‘immortality cultivation’ (xiuzhen 修真) is appropriated by Chinese fantasy and SF as a way to engage with social inequalities in contemporary Chinese society under a neoliberal, capitalist logic.