The Library, including centre members Catherine Dack, Jo Elsworth, Stephen Gray and Tamar Hodos, have been working on a project around 3D scanning, digital humanities, museums and virtual reality.
Below are some updates on the project so far.
The virtual museum project, an AHRC-funded project between Cultural Collections and Library Research support. The project is completed now, but the museum persists and there will be a programme of exhibitions. Catherine Sack had a stand at the Up Late event at SS Great Britain on Friday, part of FUTURES festival to introduce the museum to the public and got lots of good feedback.
A little bit about the project….
The Uncertain Space is the new virtual museum for the University of Bristol. It is the result of a joint project between Library Research Support and Cultural Collections, funded by the AHRC through the Capability for Collections Impact Funding, which also helped fund the first exhibition.
The project originated in a desire to widen the audience to some of the University’s collections, but in a sustainable way which would persist beyond the end of the project. Consequently, The Uncertain Space is a permanent museum space with a rolling programme of exhibitions and a governance structure, just like a physical museum.
The project had two main outcomes: the first was the virtual museum space and the second was the first exhibition to be hosted in the museum. The exhibition, Secret Gardens, was co-curated with a group of young Bristolians, aged 11-18 and explores connections between the University’s public artworksand some of the objects held in our rich collections. The nine public artworks were captured by 360 degree photography. In addition, the reactions of the young people were recorded as they visited each of the public artworks and these are also included in the exhibition.
If you get a chance, check out the museum and exhibition either in person or virtually- it is really fascinating! For more information on that, please see the links below.
The museum and first exhibition can be visited on a laptop, PC or mobile device via The Uncertain Space webpage, by downloading the spatial.io app onto a phone or VR headset, or by booking a visit to the Theatre Collection or Special Collections, where VR headsets are available for anyone to view the exhibition.
Our second recipient of the Alternative Technologies Award has been Dr Richard Cole, Dr Harry Wilson alongside creative practitioners Ruth Mariner and Eirini Lampiri. We were really excited about this project, and invited Richard to write about the event they held. Check it out below!
The VR, Games & Storytelling project is interested in the intersection between games, immersive theatre and VR storytelling, and the principles and frameworks for developing narrative material for immersive experiences. The project team brings together academic expertise in gaming (Richard Cole) and immersive theatre (Harry Wilson) with creative practitioners working in XR (Ruth Mariner and Eirini Lampiri). The project emerged following discussions at the Metaverse workshop, hosted by the Centre for Creative Technologies at the PM Studio, and was generously funded by the Centre’s seed corn initiative.
On Tuesday 25 July, the project team were delighted to collaborate with Jacqueline Ristola on her ‘Platform Cultures’ event and offer the keynote address. The keynote brought together two specialists, both XR Storytellers from different backgrounds:
Jo Mangan, a director coming to XR through a background in immersive theatre
Rob Morgan, who comes to XR from a background in video games.
Jo and Rob were asked to consider the following prompts:
How do the rules of environmental storytelling change when we move from a gaming or immersive theatre environment to a headset?
How do you use interactivity to increase immersion within a story? And, how might approaches to interactivity be different between a VR game, and VR theatre piece?
Our intention was to compare and contrast the different approaches to XR storytelling, and how each form influenced the approach to interweaving story and interactivity. Our ‘North Star’ was to work towards a set of ‘rules’ or principles for telling stories using XR. And although we didn’t reach a full framework, there was agreement around specific themes and issues.
Both speakers touched on the importance of narrative integration in different contexts. Rob spoke about how failure to integrate an audience member’s self-conscious feelings when participating in an immersive experience can be a barrier to immersion. Although a common perspective within the immersive sector is that self-consciousness itself is a barrier to immersion, Rob argued that the player is always aware, and that by emphasising the notion that self-consciousness is permitted, and weaving this into the narrative fabric, audiences can accept the ‘gap’ between how they feel and the role of the character within an immersive experience.
Jo spoke about the need for narrative integration to signpost the audience around the space, and how it is important to let the environment guide the audience in a way that is integrated into the narrative, rather than asking the player to move directly. Referring to immersive theatre, she touched on the example of bad spatial design, where audiences do not know how to inhabit the space, but are moved from one spot to another by stewards. In the virtual space, audiences should be given enough information from the environmental storytelling to know how to interact with the space.
Both speakers also touched on the subject of how to create meaningful choice, as well as feedback systems that immerse the audience by enabling them to feel they can impact the environment. This operates on multiple levels of the experience, from the ‘core’ of the piece and the narrative dramatic structure, to individual audience choices on how to view and experience the work at any given moment.
It was agreed that by making choices within a narrative framework, audience members need to feel that the consequence of their decision has an impact on the narrative. For example, if audience members are presented with a decision that feels serious, they will expect for there to be consequences which impact significantly on the direction of the narrative. If the consequence of their decision is minimised, or doesn’t impact the plot fully, they can feel let down.
On the ‘surface’ layer of the experience, where the audience choose how they experience the work, there is still a lot of agency that can be afforded. In Jo’s production for Irish National Opera, audience members could follow different sonic layers by changing the way that they tilted their head, leading them to explore and experiment with the way that they experienced the work, on a sensory level.
Finally, immersive experiences are closely linked to the 3D avatars of the audiences and/or players. Circling back to the initial theme of the audience’s feeling of self-consciousness, Rob spoke about the construction of the audience’s character in AR experiences, describing it as ‘a light, pliable character, like a silhouette’ instead of a fully fleshed out role. He went on: ‘often, being a protagonist in AR is more like an extra dimension that you augment on to the player’s own identity.’ This gives more freedom to the player, enabling them to enact in ways that are perhaps more dangerous or risky than they would opt for in everyday life.
Our sincere thanks to Jo and Rob, as well as to Jacqueline for the simulating discussions that followed the keynote and carried on throughout the ‘Platform Cultures’ event.
Dr Richard Cole and Dr Harry Wilson, alongside creative practitioners Ruth Mariner and Eirini Lampiri, were recipients of the Creative Technologies Seed Funding Award by the Centre for Creative Technologies. Dr Richard Cole specialises in ‘in the history and culture of classical antiquity and how this intersects with new media, in particular video games, virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI)’. Dr Harry Wilson researches at the ‘intersections between immersive technologies and intimate performance’.
We invited them to speak more about their event, which you can read below!
The VR, Games & Storytelling project is interested in the intersection between games, immersive theatre and VR storytelling, and the principles and frameworks for developing narrative material for immersive experiences. The project emerged following discussions at the Metaverse workshop, hosted by the the Centre for Creative Technologies.
On Tuesday 25 July, the project team were delighted to collaborate with Jacqueline Ristola on her ‘Platform Cultures’ event and offer the keynote address. The keynote brought together two specialists, both XR Storytellers from different backgrounds:
Jo Mangan, a director coming to XR through a background in immersive theatre
Rob Morgan, who comes to XR from a background in video games.
Jo and Rob were asked to consider the following prompts:
How do the rules of environmental storytelling change when we move from a gaming or immersive theatre environment to a headset?
How do you use interactivity to increase immersion within a story? And, how might approaches to interactivity be different between a VR game, and VR theatre piece?
Our intention was to compare and contrast the different approaches to XR storytelling, and how each form influenced the approach to interweaving story and interactivity. Our ‘North Star’ was to work towards a set of ‘rules’ or principles for telling stories using XR. And although we didn’t reach a full framework, there was agreement around specific themes and issues.
Both speakers touched on the importance of narrative integration in different contexts. Rob spoke about how failure to integrate an audience member’s self-conscious feelings when participating in an immersive experience can be a barrier to immersion. Although a common perspective within the immersive sector is that self-consciousness itself is a barrier to immersion, Rob argued that the player is always aware, and that by emphasising the notion that self-consciousness is permitted, and weaving this into the narrative fabric, audiences can accept the ‘gap’ between how they feel and the role of the character within an immersive experience.
Jo spoke about the need for narrative integration to signpost the audience around the space, and how it is important to let the environment guide the audience in a way that is integrated into the narrative, rather than asking the player to move directly. Referring to immersive theatre, she touched on the example of bad spatial design, where audiences do not know how to inhabit the space, but are moved from one spot to another by stewards. In the virtual space, audiences should be given enough information from the environmental storytelling to know how to interact with the space.
Both speakers also touched on the subject of how to create meaningful choice, as well as feedback systems that immerse the audience by enabling them to feel they can impact the environment. This operates on multiple levels of the experience, from the ‘core’ of the piece and the narrative dramatic structure, to individual audience choices on how to view and experience the work at any given moment.
It was agreed that by making choices within a narrative framework, audience members need to feel that the consequence of their decision has an impact on the narrative. For example, if audience members are presented with a decision that feels serious, they will expect for there to be consequences which impact significantly on the direction of the narrative. If the consequence of their decision is minimised, or doesn’t impact the plot fully, they can feel let down.
On the ‘surface’ layer of the experience, where the audience choose how they experience the work, there is still a lot of agency that can be afforded. In Jo’s production for Irish National Opera, audience members could follow different sonic layers by changing the way that they tilted their head, leading them to explore and experiment with the way that they experienced the work, on a sensory level.
Finally, immersive experiences are closely linked to the 3D avatars of the audiences and/or players. Circling back to the initial theme of the audience’s feeling of self-consciousness, Rob spoke about the construction of the audience’s character in AR experiences, describing it as ‘a light, pliable character, like a silhouette’ instead of a fully fleshed out role. He went on: ‘often, being a protagonist in AR is more like an extra dimension that you augment on to the player’s own identity.’ This gives more freedom to the player, enabling them to enact in ways that are perhaps more dangerous or risky than they would opt for in everyday life.
Our sincere thanks to Jo and Rob, as well as to Jacqueline for the simulating discussions that followed the keynote and carried on throughout the ‘Platform Cultures’ event.
Dr Jacqueline Ristola is a recipient of the Creative Technologies Seed Funding Award by the Centre for Creative Technologies. Dr Ristola is a Lecturer in Animation (Digital) in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Bristol. She received her PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, Montreal. Her research areas include animation/anime studies, media industry studies, and queer representation. We invited her to tell us more about her event on Platform Cultures!
On July 26th, 2023, Platform Cultures, a day for networking and exploration around how platforms shape culture and creativity. The event brought together academics, practitioners, and maker-scholars from Bristol and the greater Southwest UK to share insights and experience around different platforms, their affordances, and their limitations.
This event was inspired by recent developments in streaming platforms. In my own research, I’ve examined how the streaming platform Max (formerly known as HBO Max) curates content, an example of how platform design shapes consumption. Platform elements, from interface design to copyright policies, shape the production, distribution, and consumption of so much of the creative arts today. More broadly, the intersection between platforms and cultural production has been the subject of an incisive article and subsequent book by Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy. With the preponderance of platforms penetrating nearly every aspect of everyday life, it felt right to bring people together across disciplines and sectors (from academic to industry) to compare and contrast research and experiences to better understand the political, social, and cultural contours of making media on platforms today. Thus, this event was part networking to bring people across disciplinary borders to talk about this enveloping object that are platforms, and specifically how they intersect with creativity. It was also part exploratory, to give people time to try out and gain crucial experiential (phenomenological) work with these platforms.
The event began with a plenary panel co-organized with Richard Cole on creating with VR & AR featuring Jo Mangan, Director at The Performance Corporation, and Robert Morgan, Creative Director at Playlines and a Visiting Fellow at King’s College London. Jo and Robert talked about their own work and creative process, touching on topics such as sustainability, working with locations, and whether self-consciousness truly is the enemy of immersion in VR.
After the panel and a quick coffee break, we started the microtalks. These were 5, 5-minute microtalks examining how particular platforms shapes creativity and culture. One participant discussed music creation battles on Twitch, while another discussed the differences between working in the TV industry and the affordances and limitations of making content for YouTube. Also discussed was the use of locations in building walking tours and other similar interactive games, and the games industry’s (lack of) positive climate change narratives. In the case of the latter, as video games historically disavowed itself as art to avoid criticism around depicting violence, one speaker argued this has hampered the games industry in considering its impact on others, and how positive narratives about fighting climate change is a sorely needed contribution. I discussed how TikTok’s “Duet” feature seems to create a second screen experience already within its app. Instead of viewers switching their attention between a television and their phone, TikTok presents multiple frames at once within its app, creates what seems to me something akin to a second screen experience right within your phone. After these talks, the room came together for a robust discussion.
After lunch, we shifted to our next activity, a hands-on session making media with Horizon Worlds, TikTok, and Instagram. The goal of this session was to try out these different platforms ourselves, and experiment with each platform’s affordances and limitations. There was also a Playstation 5 set up with the free game Astro’s Playroom, a game that teaches the player all the affordances of the PS% and its new controller, as well as the history of Playstation as a platform. In short, it was a platformer about a platform, which was a perfect compliment to the day’s proceedings.
[Caption: Two participants discuss while one holds a Meta Quest 2 headset. Taken with a filter from Instagram to experiment in how the app encourages different forms of image manipulation.]
While many participants tried out the VR headsets and experimented with Horizon Worlds, most media was created with Instagram and TikTok. When asked in our final reflection and wrap up section, some participants mentioned that they hadn’t tried TikTok before, and were curious to try it out. The event gave space for people try our different technologies and apps that they might not have been able to try before, particularly VR headsets, which can be quite pricey.
[Caption: A participant tries on a VR headset at the Platform Cultures event, while another participant captured it on TikTok.]
Some key insights soon emerged as we experimented and made media with these different platforms. One question that kept coming up was “Why did the algorithm do that?!” In the case of one TikTok, a participant took a photo, used an TikTok filter that generated the participant as a bronze statue, and autogenerated the background, and then TikTok autogenerated a description of the resulting image, stating it showed a “bronze statue, wearing luxury clothes, on a pedestal, modelshoot.” The description got more removed from reality the further it went a long (where is this pedestal?)
Another insight that emerged was how TikTok and Instagram automatically recommend songs to accompany your posts, to curious results. In another case of “Why did the algorithm do that?!,” I selected the first song that TikTok proposed for this video, adding a treacly soundtrack.
To see the media produced during this exploratory session, please go the @platformcultures pages on TikTok and Instagram. If you have access to Horizon Worlds, try going to the “Platforms Cultures” world to see some of the formal experiments there.
Finally, the event wrapped up with a robust discussion and reflection on everything we had talked about and experienced. Key topics included the sustainability of digital media. As one participant pointed out, we literally don’t have enough lithium in the world to preserve all tiktoks and other forms of digital media for the future. A key question then is: Are we ok with losing (digital) things? Will we truly lose anything of value if all TikToks are erased tomorrow? This discussion topic also coincides with concerns and questions around archiving and curation strategies. Some suggested that perhaps some digital media is preserved, but such preservation relies upon careful curation strategies to demonstrate value and the need for permanence.
The event was a success in its aims of connecting people and exploring the different platforms. Discussion was constant as people connected and discussed during breaks. In the final reflection and wrap up section, it felt like we could talk for another hour, despite it being 5 o’clock! The event was impactful in provoking new perspectives in platform studies, and connecting academics with practitioners, and vice versa. In our discussions throughout the day, one suggested that a similar event could be created as a one-day symposium. I hope that this event can serve as a proof-of-concept for further platform creativity research and events to come.
In the summer term, the Centre for Creative Technologies put out a call for the Creative Technologies Seedcorn Fund. This funding was designed to enable researchers in the field of creative technologies and non-academic partners to work together to address industry, civic or social challenges and grow future collaborations. We are pleased to share those who have been awarded this fund. Some of the collaborations arose from the connections made at the Alternative Technologies workshops!
We would like to congratulate:
Dr Richard Cole (UoB), Dr Harry Wilson (UoB), Ruth Mariner (Creative Director and Pervasive Media Studio Resident) and Eirini Lampiri (Creative Director and Pervasive Media Studio Resident) for their VR, Games & Storytelling project. This project is interested in the intersection between games, immersive theatre and VR storytelling, in particular where interactivity can enhance or obstruct storytelling, what the different forms could learn from each other, and how we might define the ‘rules’ of storytelling within these mediums.
Dr Jacqueline Ristola (UoB) and Martin O’Leary (Pervasive Media Studio) for their Platform Cultures event. Platforms have reached the point of ubiquity in our culture. Indeed our lives are increasingly platformitized, and this extends to creativity as well. The intersection between platforms and cultural production is an emerging site of interest for both investigators. The event will be a chance to explore the potentials and pitfalls of these technologies, which can be brought into productive discussion to produce new methodologies for platform research and creativity.
Dr Hemma Philamore (UoB) for their project called Robotic Echoes: Enhancing Remote Connections through Dual-Location Mixed Reality Experiences. The aim is to deliver a functional prototype of a novel dual-location mixed reality experience using Oculus Quest 2 Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. The prototype will enable two players in different physical locations to each experience a blend of their immediate physical environment and a virtual environment, within the same headset experience. This prototype will be achieved by integrating motion-tracked 360° camera-equipped robots with a custom-built VR app, allowing simultaneous shared experiences across two separate locations.
Dr Camilla Morelli (UoB), Sophie Marsh (MungoMarsh Production), Rous Condori (animator), Marta Lucia Triana (Director of Muestra de Cine Indigena) and Oscar Antonio Tamayo Hoyos, Director of Colegio Selvalegre for their project Animating the Future in Colombia: Promoting Creative Skills and Digital Inclusion in Amazonia through Animation Co-Production. This will be a one-week workshop on animation co-production for Indigenous students at the II Muestra de Cine Indígena (Indigenous Film Festival) in Leticia, Colombia. The workshop will teach local students how to produce animation and use it to document endangered Indigenous heritage. The aim is to promote creative skill transfer and digital inclusion amongst Indigenous youth who remain largely cut out from global uses and circuits of digital technologies.
All the projects look really exciting and we will be updating on each project via our blog
Dr Francesco Bentivegna and Katy Dadacz have organised an exciting (and successful!) two-day event called Queer Methodologies in Creative Technologies. on the 29/30th June.
On our first day, we invited MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr) to run an online workshop.
MELT study and experiment with shape-shifting processes as they meet technologies, sensory media and critical pedagogies in a warming world. MELT currently builds projects along four different research tracks: ACCESS SERVER, The Meltionary, Counting Feelings and Zeitgeber. Their arts-design research cooks up practices that generate material and infrastructional transformations that intersect Trans* feminism and Disability Justice. Working with change and MELT(ing) as a kaleidoscope their work engages multiple topics at once: climate change, the potential for political reformulations, critical technical practice and access making. Check out their work and follow them on instagram.
We first learnt about MELT’s new project on wedges- door wedges as ways to rethink who can enter into a space and how we can visualise this. We thought about queer time, did an activity where we listed everything we heard in the room, and then thought about what kind of ritual practices we can have online. In small groups, we thought about things we do everyday that make us feel good, and thinks that happen everyday that don’t make us feel that great. What rituals can we create to ease the everyday?
On our second day, we had a series of micro talks by creative technologists, researchers and artists from the Pervasive Media Studio, the University of Bristol and the University of West England. Each talk finished with an activity for each table to do, rather than a Q&A, which made the process really fun and allowed for more reflections on each of the topics.
Our first speaker was Dr Jacqueline Ristola, who shared with us her work on queer phenomenology and platform cultures- what do the filters we use on apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat do for our sense of self? Do the filters give us a way to experiment with our identities? Or do they reproduce the norms and conventions of gender and sexuality? At the end, we used our own platforms to play around with filters and shared them with the group.
Our second speaker Chloe Meineck shared their incredible work as a queer designer who focuses on co-design and equitable design, with a focus on community building, activism and design justice. Their practice ranges from personal object making, painting to making queer zines. Inspired by queer ecology, they run workshops for their newest project Dictionary of Missing Words. Each table had to do a creative free flow writing exercise or drawing to respond to themes like ‘queer elders’, ‘reciprocal relationship’, ‘we don’t like in a binary world’, ‘queer bonds’, ‘neuro queers’.
Dr Rosie Nelson was our third speaker, who shared with us what queer creativity means, the queer digital and queer methodologies in their own practice; sociology. We thought about digital architectures, digital communities and the way we experience the digital. What kind of things do we need in mind when we create a queer methodology? Rosie suggested principles like emancipation orientated, reflexive and considerate approaches, and being open to novel and creative methods.
We took a break for lunch, and then had two more talks to go!
Harriet Horobin-Worley, a creative software engineer and artist, runs Queer Tech a monthly meet-up for queers who work with technology. They shared their work on low tech solutions, DIY feminist servers, HTMI poems and queer ways of coding. In the activity, we thought about the way we can create our own networks.
Our last talk was by Marcin Gawin, an MA student and artist in Virtual Reality at UWE, on their upcoming project which explored how we can visualise our organs. We thought about the ways in which we can reconfigure the body digitally, and how virtual reality is a way to explore how our organs can be ‘outside’ our body. We speculatively imagined if we had another organ what would we like to have.
Francesco and I (Katy) are also excited to announce that we have received the Seedcorn Funding Award, where we will organise a larger event that will kickstart a standing series of workshops and meetings framed around Queer Resilience through Arts and Creative Technologies. Our idea is to develop regular, affordable, playful, and critical workshop-based meetups and a standing hub to share ideas, trajectories, and strategies for resilience!
Here is a picture of the second day, with Marcin giving his talk,
Dr Francesco Bentivegna and Katy Dadacz (PhD) are running a two-day event on Queer Methodologies in Creative Technologies.
This two-day conference and workshop on the 29-30 June will be an opportunity for methodological reflection and collaboration around queer practices in creative technologies.
What methods do queer researchers and artists use when they engage with creative technologies such as virtual reality, creative computing, and animation?
What identities are privileged when technologies are imagined, narrated, designed, and used?
How can practices be queered (using methods and processes that resist binary and hierarchy, and subvert heteronormative structures)?
Participants will re-think and recalibrate research methods to not only understand the complexity of queer approaches but to imagine alternative creative technology practices.
This project blossomed from a long-standing interest in creative collaboration between humans and technologies which has been explored at the Future Speculations Reading Group run by Francesco and Katy at the Pervasive Media Studio. Beginning in October 2022, academics, artists and creative technologists from the University of Bristol, University of the West of England, Pervasive Media Studio, Control Shift Network and Queer Tech Meet Up discuss texts exploring themes such as artificial intelligence, algorithmic creativity, machine learning and feminist hacking. The reading group critically engages with artist practices, as well as film and literary responses. (If you would like to sign up, please email katy.dadacz@bristol.ac.uk)
The event is in collaboration with artists-in-residency at the Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio and creative technologists at Ctrl Shift Network and Queer Tech Meet Up. The interactive workshop will explore queer metaphors and materials that can help to expand creative technologies, as well as teaching low-tech solutions such as DIY servers. The symposium invites creative technologists at the Pervasive Media Studio and researchers at UoB and UWE from a range of disciplines to share their work, and a ‘thought experiment’ or question set. After each presentation, the participants, in small groups, will have time to engage with what has been proposed.
Thank you to the University of Bristol for providing the Research Initiative funding for this conference to happen!
Dr Jacqueline Ristola, a lecturer in Film & Television and a member of the Centre for Creative Technologies, has been awarded a funding from the Centre!
She is organising an event called Platform Cultures. Check out the call for participants below!
The event is on the 26th July at the Pervasive Media Studio.
‘Platforms have reached the point of ubiquity in our culture. Our lives are increasingly platformitized, and this extends to creativity as well. The intersection between platforms and cultural production is an emerging site of interest for both researchers and artists. Both groups are interested in the potentials and pitfalls of these technologies, and can be brought into productive discussion with each other to produce new methodologies for platform research and creativity. The goal of this event is to bring people together to produce such a discussion, building connections between researchers and practitioners, and encouraging further collaboration in the future.’
The Platform Cultures 1-day event is part-networking, part-workshop for artists and researchers based in the (Southwest) UK working broadly at the intersection between platforms and creativity. This event will be a space for interested researchers and/or practitioners to examine how different platforms encourage and shape the creation of art, culture, and creativity. The aim is to build interconnections between research and practice, and encourage further collaboration down the road. The event will be catered, and travel funding exists for those travelling into Bristol for the event.
The Activities:
Microtalks: Researchers and practitioners are invited to share their insight through brief, 5-minute talks examining how particular platforms shapes creativity and culture, followed by discussion and reflection.
Making Media: Participants are invited to make media on bespoke platforms such as TikTok, Horizon Worlds, and Instagram (subject to change due to availability of tech). Participants will be split up into groups toward collectively on producing media for a specific perform imparting some knowledge from the workshop itself.
For more information- email jacqueline.ristola@bristol.ac.uk
We are extremely excited to announce the Alternative Futures Seedcorn Funding Award open to centre members and PM residents.
This funding will enable researchers in the field of creative technologies and non-academic partners to work together to address industry, civic or social challenges and grow future collaborations.
Projects should be co-designed with non-academic partners from the start. Funding can be used to build the earlier stages of collaboration, for example:
for scoping, planning and development work prior to a larger impact funding application;
to engage with creative industry professionals or communities;
for exploratory meetings, conversations and workshops to develop mutually beneficial ideas.
If you would like a form, or if you have any questions please get in touch at artf-cct@bristol.ac.uk
If your questions concern eligibility and application process please contact Robert Duerr, Impact Development Officer Robert.duerr@bristol.ac.uk.
The deadline for applications is Friday 14th April at 12.00 p.m.
All applications should be discussed with your pre-award costing specialist to discuss your costs. All applicants should discuss their application with their School Research Director.
On Thursday 1 December 2022, the ‘soft’ launch of the Centre for Creative Technologies took place at the Watershed’s PM Studio. Alongside this, Edward King, the Centre’s co-director, had launched his new monograph, Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures (Bloomsbury 2022), with Rayna Denison, Professor of Film and Digital Arts, as the respondent.
Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures explores the role of twins in contemporary culture – from post-war science fiction to social media ‘twinfluencers’. In this study, Edward King demonstrates how twins are a means of exploring the social implications of hyper-connectivity and the compromising relationship between humans and digital information, their environment and their genetics. Drawing upon the literary and filmic works of Ken Follet, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bruce Chatwin, Shelley Jackson, Brian de Palma, Peter Greenway and David Cronenberg, as well as science fiction literature and the television series Orphan Black, King illuminates how twins are employed across a range of disciplines to envision a critical re-conception of the human in times of digital integration and ecological crisis.
