Last night we spent the evening at Tine Bech’s + DCRC’s + PM Studio’s tracing light event.

The event was designed to carry out a public consultation using play. So, no never-ending online forms, questionnaires with leading questions and ratty ladies in the street. Basically, get a load of people together, tell them to think about what the space around means to them, then go out and draw it in fun light shapes. Which… was really fun!

Here’s some of team PM Studio’s pics from tracinglight.co.uk,

Smokers

Watershed cinema

It was also a pretty jammy’ night, a great chance to chat with great Bristol artists, business people & photographers. Never mind heading to the golf course for business, Thought Den do it next to the bar, create some art and do research on new media practices too. Bloody brilliant.

Here’s some more things other groups made, and to find out more, contact Tine Bech

Almost 1000 people have registered to take part in Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob project – and we’re having great fun being his technical support team. The project has featured in The Guardian, Grazia and the Evening Standard to name but a few… Our server almost crashed last night as hundreds of people attempted to download the 50MB audio file for London, but fear not because Rackspace Cloud Files

Cloud Computing came to the rescue! We thought our original provision would be sufficient, but it wasn’t, so now the MP3s are hosted on a dedicated whatsit up in the cloud somewhere and are screaming down the thingamajiggers faster than mustard. This is what they say “Cloud Files from The Rackspace Cloud is an offering which allows users to store data on the Rackspace infrastructure, from 1 byte to 5 Gigbytes.”

Subtlemob site

The Twittersphere is slowly catching on, so all you tweeters make sure you use the hashtag #subtlemob and spread the word. We’ve still got London, Bristol and Liverpool coming up. Download the audio file, grab partner and get on board for a magic piece of crowd theatre.

And as Dan Course himself said after the pioneering Bristol subtlemob earlier this year “Suddenly the world seemed rosier, I was wrapped up in a bubble for 20 minutes, and, um, fell in love with a complete stranger…”

Yup. The moose are currently de-camping at the Studio, brilliant!

We now can’t wait for this weekend. The whole of Bristol will be descending to play at igFest. This is the 2nd year running and it’s already over-booked again!

Check it all out at http://igfest.org/

We’re having a mini-crisis in TD towers, can’t seem to find the board rubber no-where! Instead Ben’s been creative and made use of his sock…

Beef did have an awesome moving in party last night with plenty plenty plenty of drink and all cool people from Bristol. As with all good parties, there were a few funny rude drawings & messages left on all the white-boards this morning I image they’ve got one spare now… =)

Know anyone invited to go to the MIA awards and win something? We do, us! The Pervasive Media Studio, where we’re currently residents, scooped the ‘outstanding contribution to innovation’ award.

The sexy awards night showcases the best in the South West’s talent through a wide spectrum of Media categories.

I found some of the best pieces were, Scayrecrow a dark and twisted animation that scared the cr*p out of me in the screening.

Moose Hunt, which let loose ripples of giggling from all tables as Simon from Simon Games meandered through the New forest with nothing but a moose costume on….

Finally, we were honored to be the guests for the University of the West of England’s table, red-wine included. It’s was very warming to see all their School of Art, Media and Design staff talking so passionately about their job roles. Lots of chatting about how they’re making their MA the best, discussions about maximizing students employability and the direction of their courses. Even better however is how much fun they all are, comments about ‘interesting’ Satin dresses, the 2 course Dean and school photos… What goes on tour, stays on tour.

Let’s see what Thought Den can win on their own next year!

We know! So if you’re looking for something free and fun to do, like Alton Towers with no ticket booths then the ‘igfest – come out and play festival’ is making a grand opening at the Bristol Harbourside from the 19th – 21st September.

igFest (Interesting Games Festival)

Taking place around the Harbourside in Bristol, igfest is the first festival in the south west to invite people to discover and re-discover the city through playing games in the streets.

There are tons of games over the weekend, too many for anyone to play them all, but we hope you’ll love them all so much you will want to try as many as you can.

Here’s a few you’ll enjoy that weekend…

Moose Hunt

Moose will be making his autumn migration from the deepest Forest of Dean to Bristol over the week before the festival. Your mission is to find him and photograph him. Text ‘moose’ to 60300 to receive a map of the moose’s current location. But be careful, the moose will be told your location and if he ’shoots’ you before you ’shoot’ him you are out of the game. Prizes for photographs in various categories including first sighting.

Holla Lu Lu

Fill the night with your sound. Find members of your team across the city by hollering your unique cry.

Koreanlazerball

Korean Lazer Ball is the newest sport of the 21st Century.

Teams of lazer gladiators battle it out, scoring goals by bouncing the lazer beam from hand-held mirrors onto a super high-tech spot on the wall.

I personally suggest the Comfort of Strangers, a street game which was created in the media sandbox 07.

All the games’ start times can be seen on their Schedule and the only cost for you is your time (and the bus into town obviusly), ‘cos everyone & anyone in Bristol can play! For free!

See you there at the igLounge by the Watershed.

IgFest is organised by The igLab (Interesting Games Lab).

Had a great session this Wednesday at the OpenCoffee in Starbucks on Park Street. The morning is centred around breaking business issues and opportunities for the Bristol digital scene.

It started at 8.30, early bird catches the worm an’ all, and continued till around 9-10′ish. There were some very good chats with some interesting new Bristol people, somehow we managed to cover Bluetooth (more…)

A strange thing happened outside the office last Wednesday. Oceana runs an under 18 night, and out of the blue came hundreds of kids shrieking and laughing.

So rather than commenting on the youth of today, the price of cheese and other such things, we tried out some Bluetooth gopping with out the support of any Pervasive Relations (P.R). The test also had some different variables to our last gopping experience when we were chased by fanny in town, (more…)

Sunday was absolutely beautiful! There were surprisingly few hangovers among us so we took the plunge (literally – Leigh Woods is near vertical!) and went for bike ride to Pill. I highly recommend it. Not difficult, very beautiful, and there’s lovely little boozer at the end, where you can watch the funny locals play with their out-board motors (ooh-er missus) It’s Bike Route 41, if anyone’s actually interested in pursuing this decidedly non-digital activity…though who knows, perhaps there’ll be some Happy Packages waiting for you if you give it a whirl in a week or two

Wow, what a lovely day it was Wednesday the 30th!

So not a good day for Thought Den and Mobile Pie to stay in, and as such we headed out into the big wide “real” world to do some initial Gopping tests.

We mainly focused on a few areas around town Fountains, KFC, Galleries and the Watershed (for drinks) in the hope all these areas would pull in splendid results like, every-one accepting the file we bluetoothed to them and then bought us drinks ‘cos we were so clever.

How-ever, (more…)