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

Hold up… I’ve just started this blog post and realised it’s Tuesday? Where did Monday go? I have a feeling I’ve just come down from riding from an AWESOME wave of awesomeness’ we got from playing at igFest.

The festival, igFest (interesting games festival) was conceived by Simon (more…)

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).

Below is the moment, captured in glorious 3D hi-definition technicolour, that Thought Den took the stage at Cineformation’s Film and New Media event, held at the Watershed. The session has been written about before, but for those of you who missed it, watch the vid.

Our section of the event aimed to encourage the users to participate in the debate by hosting an open brainstorm after a brief run down of the current relationship between Film and mobile platforms such as mobile phones. The results were a little bizarre, but we uncovered some pertinent issues all the same…

It’s been hard-core few months, as you might tell from the other blog posts and mediasandbox…a lot of fun, inspiring, challenging, and more than anything this project has opened hundreds of doors for everyone involved. A realisation dawned this week that we really are operating at the forefront of the pervasive media industry…things break, people don’t understand, it’s new NEW stuff!

Our stand looked beautiful, as did Tom’s face beaming out from the 42″ plasma screen. People milled around, took the Happy Packages GPS demo for a test drive, asked us what on earth we were talking about and nodded knowingly when we explained the difficulties working with pervasive convergence in multi-platform content distribution systems.

At around 3 or 4 it was time to deliver the 6 minute presentation and face the judging panel, who were:
(more…)

Wow, what a brilliant night we all had at the Cineformation event last night!

The talk had varied speakers from Dr Tom ‘have you read this book’ Abba and Rik ‘new internet tv ideas’ Lander who both rocked out with their own projects. The lovely host Vicky ‘wonky’ Brophy chaired a great night and judging from the comments (some in French!), people loved it.

Thought Den were invited to chair a discussion on the Distribution of Video to Mobile and explore the current scene, but no one had hair nearly as good as Ben’s last night… (more…)

What do you know about the distribution of Video content over Mobile Devices?

We’re chairing part of the interaction to uncover everyone’s thoughts this Thursday (27/03/08) at the Watershed 7PM. It promises to be an interesting night and we’ll be utilising some of our Bluetooth technologies so we’d love you to come. As always, there’ll be drinks in the bar afterwards!

For more details, see the Cineformation site.

Thought Den are still hanging from the Soco Social knees up in London last night (guests of honour, of course – here’s why) and from the dirty-early coach journey back this morning to meet our very special guest, Mr Alistair Darling! He came to open the Pervasive Media Studio and dutifully cut the digital ribbon with an HP iPaq!

Both Clare and Dick from the Watershed lay down some inspirational speeches, waxing lyrical about the fantastic creative and computing industries currently booming in the west country. Roll on world domination. View the rest of the pics here

Great news! We finally got word from Clare at iShed that our Pervasive Media pitch has been accepted. So in the new year we’ll all be putting our heads together, brainstorming, exploring and canvassing the opinions of any one who’s interested, ready for the coming 3 months. Soon enough we might even be able to answer the most important question – what is Pervasive Media!?

During the final pitch session we were introduced to Gill from Plot and John from BDH who have also been commissioned to complete a Pervasive Media project. As it turns out both groups have chosen to explore Pervasive Media using the theme of ‘happiness’, so we look forward to the discussions we will have and to discovering the ways our projects will influence each other over the coming months.

What a great way to start the New Year!