Introducing our Winter Residency Artists 2025

The two residencies will run from February to March 2025. Both artists will be responding to the theme of Actual Reality. The artists will receive support to develop their work and will share their progress via blogs on our website. Our annual Winter Residencies are a brilliant opportunity for artists to develop early-stage ideas at the Pervasive Media Studio, which is our creative technologies research space.  

About the theme 

When Pervasive Media Studio was founded in 2008, we were excited about the possibilities of mobile technology, taking computing and media beyond the computer screen. We imagined "pervasive media" delivered to people out in the physical world, via sensors and location-based tech.

Nearly two decades later, many of these technologies are now part of our daily lives. But instead of being liberated from our computer screens, we are tied more to our individual devices than ever before. So, this year we sought artistic ideas that proposed to take computing out of the computer and into the real world, asking what "pervasive media" could look like that combines the dreams of 2008 with the technology of 2025. And how those dreams need to shift and grow, to include those voices that were left out, and reflect a new understanding of growth, wealth, consumerism and progress.  

We were delighted to receive a huge response to the call. 

Martin O’Leary (he/him), Studio Community Lead at Watershed says:  

We're excited to support artistic work that breaks free from the screen and gets out there into people's lives. We want to revisit some of the ideas that were so exciting when the Studio was founded, and to question some of the assumptions we made back then about what mobile computation could do for the world. Most of all, we're thrilled to welcome two artists who are thinking deeply about how art and technology can help us connect more deeply to our world, our stories, and each other.

Meet the artists

Natalie Whitney (she/they) is an audio-visual participatory artist. They are intrigued by social interaction and how instant communication has affected our connections to one another in everyday life. Natalie will investigate the evolution of communication technologies alongside imagining and prototyping what future interfaces of communication might look like. 

Natalie says: 

I am intrigued by the ways technology is transforming our face-to-face communication and how a potential shift away from the screen as an object of connection might influence how we communicate in the future through more tactile human experiences. Building on an initial prototype of two interactive talking beings, I hope to question how approaches to connecting with ourselves, our surroundings and each other are evolving in the digital age. 

I am excited that this residency with Pervasive Media Studio provides a supportive environment, alongside new perspectives, to fully explore, pull apart and reimagine playful, participatory spaces for connection.

Geraint Edwards (he/him) is a self-taught, interdisciplinary artist. He is interested in how our perception of individual lives and communities are influenced by the layers of tales that we tell about ourselves and each other. He will use this starting point to create a series of experimental works in everyday places, ranging from plug holes to hilltops. 

For a while now, I've been thinking about ways to put ideas and stories, big and small, out into the world as layers, along with all the other narratives that we live amongst, without the medium getting in the way. A sort of non-linear story space distributed around a town that you can experience in any order to build a picture of a place/time. 

Through the Winter Residency, I'm looking forward to exploring different practical ways to do this, creating opportunities to encounter curious, thoughtful or playful moments that altogether form a layer of fictions that sit alongside us: weird little houses for ideas.

We recruited for this year’s Winter Residency using a process of partial random selection. If you would like to know more about this process, you can read our random selection how-to guide here.  

Watershed’s Winter Residencies are made possible with the support of Arts Council England and MyWorld.