Voices of Avonmouth

Judith Aston is talking about her collaborative work in Avonmouth at Pervasive Media Studio on Friday 23 October. It's a lunchtime talk, so it's one of those things you can drop into over your break rather than committing your whole evening.

Aston is an Associate Professor in Film and Digital Arts at UWE Bristol, an interactive documentary specialist, and a practising anthropologist. She also co-founded i-Docs, an international research network that brings academia and industry together to talk about emerging forms of interactive and immersive documentary practice. In this talk, she's presenting her ongoing collaborative work in Avonmouth, and the focus is on how interactive and spatial storytelling is made with a community rather than about one.

She draws on the principle of polyphony — a musical style where two or more independent melodies play at the same time — and uses the interactive media platform Stornaway.io as a catalyst for dialogue about the area's possible and preferred futures. She maps the project onto the Three Horizons framework, a visual tool for navigating complex change and building a shared vision of the future, which was pioneered by Pervasive Media Studio co-founder Bill Sharpe. The Studio itself is a partnership between Watershed, the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol.

The talk is at 13:00 in the Pervasive Media Studio Event Space, Watershed, 1 Canon's Rd, Bristol BS1 5TX. It's free and open to all, and it's being run as a hybrid session, so it'll be live-streamed on YouTube Live if you can't make it down in person.