Creative tech brings new tools to Bristol’s heritage

Tech and heritage collaboration helps conserve creatively, encouraging people to engage in the historic environment in new ways

If you want to explore Bristol, you’d do well to start with 80 by 18 — a website created by Bristolians for young Bristolians to prompt them to have 80 experiences in the city before they turn 18. Over the course of 2013 there was an open invitation to anyone in the city to share ideas for activities that should go on the list. 600 ideas were shared. Academics, cultural and heritage professionals reached out to get input from the public, and helped whittle the list down to 80. “It’s a set of prompts for the imagination. It’s a challenge. It’s an adventure offered by the city.” The list includes many heritage sites and invokes many stories of Bristol’s past.

The listing, hosted on the 80 by 18 website, should itself be seen as an act of preservation. It prompts the next generation of Bristolians to share a common set of experiences. And it presents the entirety of the city as a landscape in which to take action, play, and add interpretation.

Going far beyond digital listings, Bristol’s creative sector has collaborated to develop new approaches which capitalise on the potential of technology to enhance our engagement with the physical environment. Several applications specifically address the historic environment. ‘Pervasive media’ is a term which one Bristol studio uses to describe a world in which tech devices respond to their context in order to deliver “the right media, in the right place, at the right time”.

Examples include Theatre Jukebox which is an object display device which adds digital elements to traditional media such as archive documents, adding sound and video projection — and potentially other sensory stimulants — to respond to the object chosen by the viewer.

Other projects have created an app to explore community oral history inside the historic Curzon cinema, in the seaside town of Clevedon. Such approaches hold promise for historic spaces in contemporary use with rich intangible heritage, such as grassroots music venues.

Another project of the Pervasive Media Studio created a smartphone treasure hunt at the Tower of London, aimed at teens who often shun traditional audio tours; participants smuggle virtual contraband to help the escape efforts of some of the Tower’s most notorious inmates through history. Such apps illustrate the potential to embed and deepen the engagement with historic sites prompted by Pokemon Go.

Bristol is investing in the next generation of technology to allow digitally-enabled mass participation. Bristol is Open is a joint Bristol University and Bristol City Council endeavour, leveraging funding from multiple sources. As managing director Paul Wilson clarifies:

“Our network doesn’t connect to the internet…it’s a playground where people can start building the next version of the internet.”

. The value of associated infrastructure is £75m. The first few miles of a new 30GB/s fibre-optic network has been laid, partly in unused cable ducting. A ‘mesh’ wifi network has been plugged in to 1,500 lampposts in the city centre. A bespoke city network operating system is open for partners to run experiments.

One early application has been Urbanimals, with 3D projections in public space responsive to passing citizens. Heritage applications could include real-time augmented reality at scale, such as theatrical re-enactments and the recreation of vanished environments such as building interiors or the running of Bristol’s pre-war trams.