The Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) aims to magnify research, engagement and discourse surrounding the theoretical, practical and commercial frameworks that embody the arts, media, or creative industries.
Illustration: Alex Williamson
Through our outstanding array of interdisciplinary projects, public engagement events and research publications, we seek to challenge and redefine what it means to be creative.
How does Bath Spa equip its students with creative media skills?
In this podcast, director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Kate Pullinger, discusses how our involvement in the Southwest Creative Technology Network will create a wealth of new opportunities for Bath Spa students.
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Centre Director, Professor Kate Pullinger, hosts a research seminar for Bath Spa's Institute for Education about her interactive novel, Breathe, and the work of The Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries.
In March 2019, CCCI joined a panel of writers, publishers and future-thinkers and examined ways in which books are attempting to compete, re-imagine and revitalise storytelling in the digital age.
The panel explored new partnerships developing between writers, tech and the book publishing industry and discussed how new audiences are being introduced to the work of emerging and established writers through advances in digital technology.
The Centre co-hosts, sponsors and supports research conferences and symposiums at Bath Spa and within the UK. We host a wide number of talks, conferences and workshops, to support the creative industries across the Southwest.
Our upcoming events are listed on Ticketsource and some of our past events are shown below.
Mitchell and Lilly from virtual and augmented reality consultancy Layerable deliver a free one-day creative workshop at The Studio in Bath to experiment with writing for augmented reality.
For more information, please visit the event page.
Creative Quarters: how cities, universities and cultural organisations can work together to accelerate social change, with Dr Maria Balshaw CBE.
For more information, please visit the event page.
The Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries’ successful practice-based research symposium returned in February 2021 to offer further discussion and exploration of practice-based and action research. The 2021 symposium was tailored to benefit academic staff and PhD students whose research regularly engages with and/or produces creative outputs.
For more information, please visit the event page.
In March 2021, starting with an Art and Science approach, where the limits of exploration and knowledge play a key part, this discussion considered the realisation that we effect the Ocean, and that it also affects us. The panel discussed elements of the Anthropocene Ocean, and its vulnerabilities that raise environmental questions. Particularly in terms of the Deep Sea they considered the ‘unknown’ and ‘invisible’, both in terms of Art as well as in Science.
Ghislaine Boddington, Creative Director, body>data>space and Reader in Digital Immersion at the University of Greenwich, has worked for many years at the forefront of embodiment and technology. In June 2021, she joined us for the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries Annual Public Lecture.
The Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries’ successful practice-based research symposium returned in February 2020 offering further training, discussion and exploration in creative practice research. The 2020 symposium was tailored to benefit academic staff and PhD students whose research regularly engages with and/or produces creative outputs.
The day-long event included short presentations from Bath Spa staff engaged in creative practice as research, a keynote by Dr Lyle Skains (Manchester Metropolitan University) and a workshop led by Dr Catriona Ryan (Scriptor Cube), which explored the art of creative thinking as a way to enhance research and its multi/interdisciplinary potential.
What are the risks and rewards of integrating digital technology into our built environment?
Around the globe, digital technology is an integral part of city life. It has the power to bring people together, connecting us in new and more exciting ways. However, it also has the potential to alienate and disconnect us from our surroundings.
For many, the idea of the ‘Smart City’ is problematic – it paints a picture of a dystopian future where sensors, big data and artificial intelligence dominate our environment and interactions. On one hand, we risk creating culturally void spaces dominated by intrusive marketing and ‘surveillance capitalism’. On the other, citizens are provided highly efficient, safe buildings and well-planned city systems.
Can the Smart Digital City be reclaimed for the people?
Leading French-Brazilian architect and urbanist Elizabeth de Portzamparc explore her plan for a visionary high-rise tower in Taiwan, with Jeff Risom, (Partner, Chief Innovation Officer, Gehl) who provided a fascinating insight into his work within people-centred design. Chaired by Stephen Hilton (Bristol + Bath Digital Placemaking Fellow).
The SWCTN was proud to host Bath Girl Geek Dinners, a group of female and non-binary earthlings who meet regularly to talk about tech and tech related topics and how they affect us, and how we can help and support each other.
Reality Starts Here. Building Fictional Futures to Change the World
Bristol and Bath Creative R+D was proud to support this year's Richard Gregory Memorial Lecture, which featured speaker Alex McDowell, an award-winning visionary designer and storyteller, working at the intersection of emergent technologies and experiential media.
Alex explained how collaborative and distributed storytelling can literally change the world as a container for multiple narratives that accumulate, weave and provoke unique multi-faceted insights.
In November 2019 Bristol+Bath Creative R+D welcomed Leticia Lozano to Bristol to talk about placemaking in Mexico City. Leticia is co-founder and director of MACIA Estudio, a transdisciplinary practice challenging the boundaries between architecture, experience design and applied research. This talk was hosted by Digital Placemaking Fellow Roseanna Dias.
After the success of the last four MIX conferences, MIX 2019 returned to the beautiful surroundings of Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court Campus this July.
This year’s conference was a more intimate, single strand version, curated for a smaller audience to give time and space to instigate conversations around digital writing with a focus on experiential storytelling, including immersive technologies and new forms of publishing, from transmedia and poetry film to virtual reality to AI in storytelling.
For more information and a list of our speakers, please visit the Mix Conference website.
On 22 May 2019, Making Books and the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries held a seminar in collaboration with the Literature Between Media research centre at Aarhus University, Denmark. This seminar looked at the impact of digital technology on reading, including looking at new forms of literature designed for mobile phones.
Bath Spa's Alastair Horne presented his research on new forms of fiction and publishing for mobile phones, and Professor Ian Gadd presented a paper on reading as an ambient, situated practice.
CCCI’s successful symposium returned in 2019 to seek answers to the question ‘When does Creative Practice become research?’
This all-day event welcomed a multi-disciplinary panel:
CCCI joined a panel of writers, publishers and future-thinkers, and examined ways in which books are attempting to compete, re-imagine and revitalise storytelling in the digital age.
The panel explored new partnerships developing between writers, tech and the book publishing industry, and discussed how new audiences are being introduced to the work of emerging and established writers through advances in digital technology.
On Wednesday 24 April, Michael Morris joined Kate Pullinger in conversation as part of the the Bath Spa University Public Lectures Series, where they discussed the extraordinary work of Artangel, the London-based powerhouse that has been supporting artists to create site-specific installations and events since 1985.
Described as ‘the guardians of modern art’, Artangel’s commissions range from Rachael Whiteread’s House (1993) to, most recently, Taryn Simon’s An Occupation of Loss (2018), with former clients going on to win the Turner Prize and Academy Awards.
Reader in Creative Writing Lucy English has been invited for a second year to run a spoken word creative writing workshop at the Alpbach European Forum in Austria in August. Last year Lucy took three Bath Spa MA students to help her design and deliver the week-long seminar.
This year she will be accompanied by another student, who will help her organise a number of events, including 'Spoken word poetry – how to express yourself in front of people' with Austrian performance artist Anat Stainberg.
The Creative Corporealities Research Group (CCRG), Research Centre for Environmental Humanities (RCEH), and The Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) hosted this brilliant evening with dance artist Rosalind Crisp, who shared her practice in a performance lecture about DIRt (Dance In Regional disaster zones), a collaborative Australian project that asks how dance might embody, understand and connect to the extinction crisis in Australia.
This solo performance lecture was immersive and participatory, including film and choreography, its intimacy drew the audience close to the pertinent issues explored.
This was an inspiring event with 40 participants, who included Bath Spa academics, students, local and regional arts practitioners. The discussion afterwards was very stimulating, and it was enlightening to hear about Ros's choreographic practice and themes of ecological disaster.
The Making Books Research Centre hosted the Digital Humanities Travelling Roadshow, which comprised demonstrations, workshops and a public performance by theatre group Zoo Indigo.
This is a AHRC-funded collaboration between Professor Gabriel Egan (Director, Centre for Textual Studies, De Montfort University) and the universities of Oxford, Leeds, Strathclyde, Liverpool John Moores and Bath Spa.
Launch of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) at Bath Spa University, with a reception, followed by the Centre’s first annual lecture given by Sir Peter Bazalgette.
Watch: Sir Peter discusses the importance of the Creative Industries as part of his inaugural speech.
Our Marking the Space symposium explored the issues surrounding the relatively recent emergence of work made for live performance with digital creative technology.
Co-hosted by the Making Books Research Centre, Reading the Data brought together a diverse set of speakers – Dan Franklin (Pottermore), Claire Squires (Stirling Uni), and Søren Pold (Aarhus Uni, Denmark) – to address how data links the production and consumption of literature in new and often unexpected ways, changing how we think about the status of reading in contemporary culture today.
Yiota Demetriou (Bath Spa University, Bristol University) and Dr Paul Geary (University of Birmingham) co-led this workshop, drawing from their experience as artists and academics. The session mapped out practical strategies for tackling the complexities, idiosyncrasies, and particularities of researching through creative means, whether through writing, performing or designing.
This was the third meeting from the international partnership project Elastic 3D Spaces, with Concordia University. The purpose of the symposium was to share practices from people already in the project and expand awareness and participation to other Bath Spa University colleagues and additional external colleagues. The event ran over three days and included presentations and workshops.
Co-hosted by CCCI and the Empathy Research Group, this session featured One Thousand Mindreaders, a year-long collaborative artwork during which artist, performer, and creative technologist Stuart Nolan will train one thousand new mindreaders.
Through empathic touch and sensing the small subconscious movements of another person's hands, individuals will be able to ‘muscle read’ and recreate drawings that someone else is merely thinking of and find objects they have hidden. This workshop functioned as a way to both network and find new ways of thinking about interdisciplinarity, empathy and creative research.
Seeing Sound was an informal practice-led symposium exploring multimedia work which foregrounds the relationship between sound and image. It explored areas such as visual music, abstract cinema, experimental animation, audiovisual performance and installation practice through paper sessions, screenings and performances. Visit the Seeing Sound website for more information.
This interdisciplinary study day was a partnership between Bath Spa University, the African Musics Study Group UK branch (AMSG-UK), affiliated to the International Council for Traditional Music, the Afrika Eye Film Festival, Bristol, and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.
The event intersected with research, exposing the multiple challenges presented by video documentation of African music, including the contexts in which they perform, both in their own cultural settings and around the world, and the range of approaches to film, from indigenous and traditional settings to contemporary popular musical forms.
It brought together academics, performers, filmmakers and videographers and included a MediaWall commission and an evening concert in the Michael Tippett Centre.
Transmedia UK: Sector by Sector begins to map the ways in which different UK media sectors are now responding to ideas, concepts and pressures of transmediality. This academic-industry workshop aimed to identify the strategies and principles that now make up the transmedia practices in and across online gaming, publishing, mobile media, digital marketing and beyond, examining which practices operate across these various sectors while exploring what it means to distinguish between storytelling, publishing, interactivity and marketing in today's transmedia environment.
Curious to learn more? Thinking about doing a degree with us? Get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.
To apply for a PhD with us, or to become a member, please send an email to: CCCI@bathspa.ac.uk.
To see what we're up to, follow us on Twitter: @CCCIBathSpa
The Value of Artists
Culture West
City of Imagination
Forest of Imagination
MIX Conference
Ambient Literature