This two-day workshop held at the Blast Theory studio in Brighton demystified the process of app creation and explored the roles apps can play in contemporary art. The two days gave a comprehensive overview of mobile development for artists and creative professionals without assuming any experience in the field, whilst also providing a forum for attendees… Read more »

As part of the EU funded project PARN (Physical and Alternate Reality Narratives) we partnered with Time’s Up, Lighthouse and FoAM to host a two-day forum to discuss key issues such as: What are the unique design challenges of working in public space? How can we push the language of interaction design? What are the… Read more »

The Invisible Hand Economist Adam Smith used the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ to describe how the market virtuously provides for all. Today the state and private enterprises are focused on discreetly gathering exponential amounts of data about their citizens and customers. In the context of PRISM, Facebook, Google, and the supermarket loyalty card the… Read more »

Taking place from November 2012 – June 2013, a series of workshops and mentoring sessions were held across the South East of England in Oxford, Faversham, Brighton and Portslade. The sessions provided briefings about different funding streams, case studies of successful bids and offered development work on some proposals brought to the sessions.  The sessions… Read more »

The cluster is comprised of several practical projects and troubadour studies. Blast Theory is involved in the Riders Have Spoken project, which aims to explore the challenges involved in recording and replaying distributed interactive experiences so as to enable new creative practices and also better support interdisciplinary research. Using Blast Theory’s recent work Rider Spoke,… Read more »

PARN (Physical and Alternate Reality Narratives) took the communication systems that have been developed within cinematic and stage situations, with their assemblies of language and assumptions, semiotics and semantics, structures and norms, and developed comparable structures for storytelling within physical spaces. (Creating contemporary forms of storytelling and developing new ways to express the complex network… Read more »

Collaborations between artists and researchers to create interactive performances raise interesting ethical issues in areas such as the framing of experience; the nature of consent; the treatment of personal and scientific data; deliberately causing discomfort; engaging bystanders in public settings; and safety and risk management. Dealing with such issues can become particularly challenging when a… Read more »

Introduction Blast Theory, the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and Somethin’ Else conducted an investigation into a range of ubiquitous technologies such as mobile phone cameras, webcams and camcorders. The project looked at how these might be integrated into an accessible platform for online video broadcasting that could offer a low cost,… Read more »

Pervasive games are games that extend in time, space or social effects. They might last days, weeks or months and therefore occupy a different place in the lives of players than traditional games. They might be played across whole cities or countries: the rise of mobile devices and location technologies such as GPS has driven… Read more »

Trials In a series of trials and events, coordinated by experts in education, broadcast and online services, we engaged with the general public and a network of schools to capture and contribute information about their local environment. The resulting user generated content was used to augment professionally created media to help build a picture of… Read more »