The projects supported by the Pervasive Media Studio are diverse in both their mode of practice and their projected outcomes. A long terms partnership between HPlabs and the University of Western England was concerned with the development of software allowing for the production, distribution and consumption of ‘mScapes’ or mediascapes – They were also central in the development of an ongoing conference series exploring and demonstrating the potential of mScapes. An m(edia)Scape is essentially a mixedmedia production that uses GPS to both record and playback audio, video, or augmented reality style graphics (mapped images on a smart phones camera/video input – dependent on position) as the basis for a particular ‘text’. Most of these mScape were audio centric allowing for recorded audio to trigger as a user moved through a space. In more recent times the ubiquity of phones with gyroscopes, GPS and compass, has allowed for the real time overlay of graphics on a video image- allowing a user to view an augmented reality through the phones camera. The latter development has seen AntiVJ – one of the Pervasive Media Studio’s residents – working with the HPlabs and the University of Western England on the potential for/feasibility of identifying and tracking a plane in 3 dimensions. The facility for mapping and tracking a plane in 3D space supports the mScape project by allowing the augmented/imposed image to move beyond ‘simple’ two dimensional infomatic style augmentation and toward the potential for ‘architectural’ augmentation in 3 dimensions.

The mScpae project has largely fed into the launch of Calvium – a ‘startup’ aiming at the commercialisation and continuing development of the mScape production and playback tools.

The facility for automatically mapping and tracking a plane in 3 Dimensions also serves the project being developed by Anti-VJ as part of their PM Studio Residency. That project involves the development of a ‘Mapping’ Suite of Applications based on the demonstrated potential for projecting a ‘keyed’ image onto a 3-Dimensional object providing for seamless projected live augmentations of architectural space. At present  AntiVJ projects depend on laborious keying of an image or video to a necessarily static surface or plane. Automated identification and tracking of planes would allow for the mapping of projections to dynamic/mobile surfaces effectively allowing a new form of augmented reality (augmented virtuality??). This potential is further extended by another of AntiVJ’s projects stereoscopic projection – the idea here is that keyed projections on a tracked plane in 3 dimensional space would allow for 3D ‘holographic’ projections.

The PM Studio has also supported research into the use of POV cameras in theatre productions. The ‘Extended Theatre Experience’ has explored the potential for attaching cameras to actors and to objects/props provides for a better or extended experience of recorded theatre although increasingly this has led to the development of new modes of mediated performance.

The SubtleMobs project developed by Duncan Speakman as a residence of the PM Studio is a variation and development of the rather tired/dated concept of Flash Mobs – The SubtleMob projects move away from the simple realisation of a social spectacle that became the standard for flashmobs to explore the more interesting performative affordances of that practice. In the simplest terms this has meant ensuring that the ‘mob’ maintains the form of subtlety that ensures the experience of the ‘mob’ – both between members and for the unsuspecting public – retains its submersion-in and subversion-of the everyday. SubtleMobs participants are told not to bring cameras or other recording devices that might subvert the grounded subtlety of the ‘performance’. The participants of one SubtleMob were instructed to download two sets of recorded instructions to an mp3 player. The recorded instructions were to be played only at the site of the SubtleMob performance and carried out with a partner listening to the alternative/paired recording. The ensuing performance emerges between partners, between couples, between the mob and the public – a kind of purely emergent performative practice.

Their are a number of other  interesting projects and collaborations supported by the PM Studio. The Street Art Dealer project is a collaboration between C6.org and Steal From Work – both groups concerned with public and street art and its marginalisation by market driven art practices and cultures. The project use QR codes (the form of barcoding that allows for embedding and collection of metadata via mobile phone cameras) to allow street artists to sign their work and for ‘consumers’ to then locate work identified by artist (or any other applied taxonomy) – it is suggested that this could lead to a form of commercialisation supporting the work of street artists (perhaps via commissions).

The PM Studio also supports; a CyberTherapy project (collaboration between HMC Interactive, Drake Music, and bibic) looking at the development of simple software that provides synaesthetic feedback (voice to visual feedback) as a form of Therapy for autistic children, a project enabling simple browser based recording and sharing of audio between schools students (Audio Enable), a number of augmented reality and cross media narrative projects, development of the IndieMobile social media campaign engine (Complaint Generator) in collaboration with Indie Mobile (an UX agency).

The PM Studio is supported by The University of Western England and their Digital Cultures Research Centre, Hewlett Packard Labs, and the Southwest Regional Development Agency and is part of Watershed @ Bristol.

The centre includes five research groups – Scientific Visualisation, Information and Geo Visualisation, Computer Graphics and VR, Structural and Civil Engineering and Visual Learning and Communication.

It should also be note that the Centre for Medical Image Science and Visualisation is based at the university teaching hospital and works closely with both VITA and the Norrköping Visualisation Centre.

Research projects include but are not limited to: Volumetric visualisation of large datasets, Data visualisation and Augmented Reality, Haptic Interaction with Deformable Objects, Visual Analytics, Photorealistic computer graphics for virtual and augmented reality, Town Planning, Civil and Structural Design, Learning through Scientific Visualisation.

The Centre for Visual Information Technology and Applications, along with the Centre for Medical Image Science and Visualisation worked in collaboration with the Interactive Institute on The Virtual Autopsy Table project.

Sub_scape is a series of projects by Australian artists Kate Richards and Sarah Waterson that explores the potential of (and for) noisy intersections between datasets, archives and maps to produce emergent and deeply reflective topologies that upend the desire they express for a controlled and instrumental ‘sense making’. In the original 2004  iteration produced for ISEA Baltic (held on a Baltic ferry) sub_scape took the form of a submarine periscope that allowed the user to explore a datascape synthesised from environmental datasets from the Australian Desert and the Baltic Sea. The aim of the work was to explore the isomorphic characteristics and relations between these two widely differing landscapes as similarly affecting/reflecting deeply inscribed  metaphysical, aesthetics, and political intensities. The second iteration of Sub_scape. sub_scapePROOF (2006) used the same periscope interface used in the previous iteration to synthesise a landscape of political and rhetorical sensemaking to explore the relations between truth, discourse and affect. The third and final interation of sub_scape, subscapeCYCLE, used a recumbant cycle as the interface for navigating a virtual landscape terraformed in real-time by data mapping ‘contemporary, technological, economic and cultural ills – some pre-cached some streaming in real-time from the web.’ In this iteration of the project the user navigates a landscape deformed (and deforming) by manifestation of human folly, idealism and agency. The user’s interaction actually reforms this twisted topology so that the input of energy, the user’s very attention, becomes the basis for a sustainable ecology.

He is currently working with the Game Studio @ SICS and is the principal developer of the commercialised pervasive gaming platform ‘The Creator’. He was also involved with the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming.The ‘game creator’ project developed as part of that project is the original  implementation of ‘the Creator’.

Massumi is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard‘s The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali‘s Noise and Deleuze and Guattari‘s A Thousand Plateaus.

Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with the Society for Art and Technology. They also co-edit a book series at MIT Press entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction and are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation.