DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

Since relaunching this website at the beginning of September the DCRC team haven't stopped! Director Jon Dovey has been striking ground on the South West AHRC knowledge exchange hub REACT, Sam Kinsley has been conducting British Academy funded research fieldwork in California, and Constance Fleuriot has been working on the Pervasive Media Cookbook with Jess Linington as well as concluding research at Knowle West Media Centre for our Connected Communities project 'Keeping in Touch'.

We should highlight that we have new DCRC researchers: Jess Linington, is developing the online resources for the Pervasive Media Cookbook, and Jeanette Monaco, is in the thick of fieldwork for our Connected Communities project 'Measuring Value Networks In The Cultural Industries'.

The broader DCRC network has been very busy too. In September the DCRC made significant contributions to two international conferences: the ISEA and DiGRA international conferences. The DCRC participated in the Watershed programme of events to mark the centenery of Marshall McLuhan's birth. Dan Dixon has been awarded AHRC/NESTA funding to work with Punchdrunk theatre company and the MIT MediaLab. Constance Fleuriot spoke on a panel at the StoryWorld conference in San Francisco (there's a good write-up on Mark Wallace's blog). Tomas Rawlings and the Red Wasp team, based in the Pervasive Media Studio, are creating a new game: 'Call of Cthulhu: The wasted land'. Patrick Crogan has recently been participating in the prestigious bilingual Second International Colloquium of the Permanent Seminar on the History of Film Theory: "Impact of Technological Innovations on the Theory and Historiography of Cinema", at the University of Montreal.

As already touched on above, the DCRC has been conducting a significant amount of research under the auspices of the AHRC Connected Communities theme, more details are available on the project page. In particular, the 'Keeping in Touch' project has produced findings that are being made available for discussion, you can read the discussion document in our publications section. Additionally, 'Keeping in Touch' has spawned a further grant proposal, 'Bonds of Care', concerning inter-generational everyday technology use.

Last week saw the Pervasive Media Studio, our home-from-home, say good bye to the Leadworks and move into a new space (formerly FutureLab) within the Watershed building. We are already having exciting conversations about what we can do with and in the new space, so keep an eye out for more news. This also means we have new contact details, please visit our contact page for details.

Finally, as Sam Kinsley returns from his fieldwork investigating the spatial imagination of future technology use within research and development, Dan Dixon recently highlighted the most recent 'Future Vision' video by Microsoft's Office Labs. The video, as an object and through its content, represents some of the many issues the DCRC studies and problematises through its research into Pervasive Media and the Attention Economy: