The Bristol + Bath Creative Industries Cluster [(B+B)XR+D] is a new partnership designed to improve the performance of the Creative Industries in the Bristol & Bath region. The partners are UWE, Bristol, Watershed, and the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Bath Spa, working with a range of industry partners from Television, Theatre, and Computing. The Bristol + Bath Creative Industries Cluster will support its business partners in finding new ways to engage the audiences of the future in new market places. Our R&D-led productions will lead the cluster into the future, engaging with emergent technologies, boosting inward investment and developing a new talent base to lead the cluster's creative industries in the next ten years. Our core proposition is partnering with industry in understanding user engagement in new platforms. Next generation content delivery methods must preserve the immersive properties of content as perceived by humans when transmitted over bandlimited networks. We will mobilise the cluster research base to support businesses in improving their performance through projects that exploit the new relationships between content type, acquisition format, format parameters, coding artefacts, user environment and engagement.The (B+B)XR+D programme is designed to offer many points of contact and collaboration for industry partners that will produce several different kinds of impact for a range of different service users, participants, companies and individuals. Our goal is to lay the foundations for the Bristol + Bath cluster to be internationally successful by 2030.

This transnational study explores histories and representations of wet-nurses, migrant domestic workers and sex workers in Latin(x) American photography, film, literature and digital culture from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It explores the similarities and differences between these kinds of work by analysing them as forms of immaterial labour, which is work that creates immaterial products, including social relationships, emotional responses and bodily feelings -- also termed 'affects'. This project is the first to ask: what does an analysis of Latin(x) and Latin American cultural productions featuring these workers contribute to our understanding of the links between these forms of labour, and to a public appreciation of these kinds of work, which are often marginalised or denigrated. To answer this question, it responds to the following four interdisciplinary research questions: 1) Which creative techniques do artists use to explore the challenges faced by Latin American and Latinx migrant workers employed in these forms of affective and immaterial labour? 2) How does an analysis of these creative works enable us to compare and contrast between different forms of affective and immaterial labour, such as wet-nursing, sex work and domestic work? 3) How can artistic depictions of affective and immaterial labour raise awareness of exploitative employment practices and contribute to a public understanding of the economic, social and cultural value of care work? 4) How can artists, academics and activists collaborate effectively and ethically with individuals involved in forms of affective and immaterial labour? It is the first study to trace the historical, geographical and thematic continuities (and differences) between artistic representations of archetypal forms of immaterial labour in Latin(x) American culture including wet-nursing, domestic work, migrant labour and sex work. The research comprises four strands, which analyse: (1) photographs and paintings of Afro-descendant and indigenous wet-nurses produced in Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) documentaries and a literary testimony that record the experiences of Latin American women working as live-in nannies and domestic workers in modern-day Europe; (3) several films, documentaries and a novel that portray the experiences of female sex workers from across Latin America from the 1940s until the present day; and (4) a film, documentary and digital artworks that explore the invisibility and immateriality experienced by Mexican and Central American migrant workers in the US. These research questions will be answered by the following six outputs: 1. An open-access book that addresses the four research strands identified above and draws on my own analysis of the chosen primary texts, as well as on interviews with the artists who produced them. 2. A peer-reviewed journal article - authored by the PDRA - that analyses a series of photographs of Afro-descendant and indigenous wet-nurses taken between 1879 and 1913, which were found at an archive in Lima. 3. A video essay - made in collaboration with an experienced video artist - that explores and illustrates the connections between visual representations of Latin American wet-nurses, nannies and domestic workers from the late nineteenth century until the present day. This output will be submitted to a peer-reviewed open-access video essay journal. 4. A policy advisory document that serves as a blueprint for effective, ethical forms of collaboration between academics, artists and activists and paid domestic and sex workers. This will represent the key output of an online workshop that unites these stakeholders. 5. A series of public film screenings and expert Q&As on the theme of 'Labour in Latin American Film' held at Watershed cinema, Bristol (subject to Covid-19 regulations). 6. An online platform featuring blogs, photographs and the video essay.

A 2020 survey of creative and cultural organisations across the South West of England, led by Dr. Tarek Virani and funded by the AHRC's Bristol and Bath Creative R + D Clusters programme, showed that between 18% and 22% of organisations were either not affected by, or became more productive than prior to, the pandemic. Further analysis shows a number of shared characteristics across these respondents. The aim of the proposed research is to ask what resilience, and subsequent recovery and rebuilding, might look like for the UK's creative economy. By testing the accuracy of the survey findings across the UK, we will design as well as assess the efficacy of a resilience framework and toolkit for creative micro-businesses (CMBs) across the UK as a way to aid CMBs, policymakers and other stakeholders with respect to sectoral recovery and rebuilding from the Covid 19 crisis.

The UK and global research and development communities have made tremendous strides in electronic device prototyping. Platforms that support conventional electronics have become well established, and the emerging potential of printed electronics and related additive technologies is clear. Together these support fast and versatile prototyping of the form and function of digital devices that underpin novel interactive data-driven experiences, including the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable technologies and more. However, challenges remain to realise their full potential. Interactive devices prototyped in labs and makerspaces implement novel capabilities and materials which require holistic manufacturing capability beyond simulation of conventional electronics. Even for conventional bench designs, to make the transition from prototype to product they need to be suitably robust, safe, long-lived, performant and cost-effective to deliver value as products - whether as a series of one-off mass customised devices, low-volume batches, or mass-produced artefacts. Unfortunately, the transition from prototype to production is not a natural one for end users; many ideas with potential don't progress beyond the first few designs. Democratising access to device production is the key next step in underpinning scalability and entrepreneurship in digital systems. We propose a Network+ of universities, research organisations and commercial enterprises who share the common goal of improving the transition from prototyping to production of digital devices. The Pro2 community will build upon the design and fabrication expertise of its researchers and practitioners to facilitate a deep synthesis of established principles, techniques and technologies and develop new concepts that span computer science, engineering and manufacturing. We will complement the on-going global investment into a variety of 'digital manufacturing' topics - including the UK's Made Smarter initiative - by tackling the challenge of progressively and cost-effectively transitioning from unconventional and single digital device prototypes, through tens of copies that can verify a design and validate utility, to batch production of hundreds to thousands of units. In prototyping, as additive manufacture and printed electronics converge further, in unconventional fields such as soft robotics and 4D printing, we need to identify how to integrate and optimise tools into workflows that support digital behaviour across materials, scales and functionalities. In production, smoothing the path from one-off microcontroller prototypes to scale-up is a significant challenge, and requires new processes and tools as well as reconfiguration of business models and services. Our vision for 'organic scaling' from prototype to production will allow faster exploration and exploitation of these digital device concepts and applications. This will accelerate the adoption of IoT, the growth of new consumer electronics markets, and more generally underpin the data-driven digital transformation of many industries. It will enable new research directions, create new business opportunities and drive economic growth.

Digital technology is everywhere, from the cinema to the living room, from the classroom to the shopping precinct. Our children have digital phones with cameras attached, and iPods that can store their school calendars so that they can listen to their music, anywhere, anytime whilst finishing their homework. Shopping precincts and underground stations, airport lounges and urinals all now carry methods of display to bring the digital world home to us - wherever we are. These technologies are now central to how we live our lives.\n\nLarge media corporations, whose success depends on introducing new commodities into the world, have begun unveiling a new range of high resolution equipment which is the vanguard of much higher levels of resolution. This current technology has fundamentally four to five times the resolution of preceding broadcast technology which means that a viewer can no longer see the line structure inherent in the video image when projected on a cinema screen. This apparently simple, and apparently inevitable, technological development makes the gold standard of feature film production / 35mm film / far more widely available than ever before. It also brings in its wake image resolution which is finer than the eye can perceive. Thus the context and the nature of moving image making has the potential to change fundamentally. \n\nWe are already witnessing the beginnings of a sea change in the nature of film production on one hand but also the beginnings of the change of domestic production in which more and more people are enabled to produce and circulate very high quality images.\n\nThe aim of this two year project is to transfer the practices and theories researched by Terry Flaxton, previously a professional cinematographer, in his completing three year Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Research Fellowship in high resolution imaging at Bristol University, to the image making sectors of the South West of England.\n\nThis project will encompass a series of strategies to transfer this knowledge, using conferences, workshops, surgeries, articles and also with visits with young film-makers of the region to centres of excellence of image capture and data processing.\n\n\n