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. All are welcome.

September 2024

Come have a look around Pervasive Media Studio and discover more about some of the work that happens here.

As well as the chance to socialise in the Studio, attendees joining the event will also have the opportunity to see a selection of work by some of our Studio community. This month's First Friday is part of Other Minds, a season of work exploring different kinds of intelligence: animal, mechanical, collective.

Throughout September we're sharing projects that ask what it means to work with minds that are utterly unlike our own, and how AI* can be part of a wider conversation about intelligence, labour, and creativity.

Residents and Studio Community Members sharing work include:

• Liam Taylor-West is a composer and audiovisual artist. He creates interactive environments using generative lighting and sound. Liam will be demonstrating his latest piece Crossing Paths, a collaboration with mathematicians at the University of Bristol. This artwork of music and light explores random behaviour and unplanned meetings.
• Artist Axenia Raulet aka Octopus Odyssey, creator of Other Minds artwork, will present a selection of original hand cuts of animal-mechanical engines. Event guests can also take part in a hands-on collage poetry session, fostering connection with and participation in a wider intelligence.
• Performer, composer and creative technologist Craig Scottis building instruments that are simultaneously played by improvising human musicians and mechanised digitally, to explore the disquieting tension between human and machine made music. Craig will showcase his Semi AutoMated Electric Guitar - a project that aims to explore new relationships that merge acoustic, electric, digital and ML/AI environments.
• How will AI change audience behaviour towards audio content by 2030 and beyond? Artist, designer, researcher Dr Rosie Poebright has been developing speculative designs to answer this question as part of their MyWorld funded fellowship with Bauer Media. With their 'Future Radio' participants will have the opportunity to experience the design fictions Rosie have come up with.
• Elinor Lower is a writer and director working across multiple disciplines which orbit theatre and performance as well as non-live art forms. Eli will be sharing their prologue prototype for their playable theatre game We Meet in the Woods, which explores collective storytelling and more-than-human intelligences. This project was developed as part of the Pervasive Media Studio’s 2024 Winter Residency.

*AI: Afield of computer science that allows machines to perform tasks that previously required human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, and problem-solving.

Join the First Friday mailing list here.

This event is supported by MyWorld.

Booking info

There is no need to pre-book. Head to the Café & Bar, buy a drink if you want to, and then follow directions down to Pervasive Media Studio.

About Pervasive Media Studio

The Pervasive Media Studio hosts an international community of over 150 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.

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