DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

Preparations are underway for the launch of the Lost Cinemas of Castle Park App, happening next Saturday 24 Nov, 2pm in the Bandstand in Castle Park, Bristol. Brought to you from the makers of the Curzon Memories App, the app features 13 cinemas in and around the park, celebrating over 100-years of cinema going in Bristol city centre, from the first moving pictures screened at the Tivoli in 1896 to the present day.

DCRC Senior Research Fellow Mandy Rose has offered the following commentary, initially posted on her CollabDocs blog, on the statement of intent offered by the new Director General of the BBC, drawing upon her own open letter to the incoming DG, 'Breaking the chains of linear programming', posted as part of openDemocracy's "Our Beeb" site.

Building on the success of her research in context-aware heritage, DCRC researcher Charlotte Crofts has been successful at winning one of six commissions as a part of the REACT Heritage Sandbox scheme, the first sandbox held by the South West Creative Industries Knowledge Exchange Hub.

Fifty guests crammed into the Pervasive Media Studio on Feb 29th for the launch of the Pervasive Media Cookbook. The Cookbook is a Hackspace meets Jamie Oliver mash-up where art and engineering mix to inspire entry level producers to get involved with the new world of location based media experiences. It promotes the emerging field of Pervasive Media by showing how 12 innovative experiments were made. 

At the end of October I crossed flightpaths with fellow DCRC researcher Sam Kinsley. He was heading back from carrying out field studies in California as a follow up to his doctoral work, while I headed toward San Francisco for the first Storyworld Conference and Expo.

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'.

Pearl and Dean have given permission to use the Asteroid ident for the Projection Hero installation.

Pervasive media is neither a sci-fi pipedream or an exotic research agenda in a secretive corporate research lab. Media has, for the developed (and mostly Western) world become something like pervasive by virtue of the significant expansion of the global internet infrastructure. We have come to assume the presence of this infrastructure as an unseen, and taken for granted, substrate of everyday life.

In July 2010 the DCRC held the first intensive five day course for producers of pervasive media projects, held at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol. The summer school was aimed at those who have some experience working in digital media and want to explore using context aware platforms to deliver a project.

As we close another week of busy activity, DCRC marks the culmination of a stimulating and really productive Creative Producers Summer School. This second Summer School (the first being in 2010) ran here at the Pervasive Media Studio in partnership with iShed. The 2011 summer school was supported by Arts Council England.