Bath Digital Festival – Residents’ Showcase
As part of this year’s Bath Digital Festival, we’re delighted to announce the following Studio Residents will be showcasing their incredible work from 9.30 to 11.30 on Thursday 21st May.
Philip Sibson — Animotion Technologies www.animotion-tech.com
Animotion Technologies helps animation studios work faster and more efficiently without compromising creative control. By automating the most labour-intensive production steps, including inbetweening, clean-up, and stop-motion frame generation, their AI tools give animators the time and energy to focus on craft and creative vision. Compatible with 2D hand-drawn, hybrid, and stop-motion workflows, the technology is built to disappear into existing pipelines. Now a resident at The Studio, Philip brings genuine artist-led AI to a community of creative technologist, expanding what’s ambitious and achievable without ever diluting the craft.
Charlie Hooper-Williams — Play & See charliehooperwilliams.com
Play & See turns musical exploration into something you can see. Sit at a piano, play anything, and handcrafted algorithms translate your performance into visuals in real time. Melody, harmony, dynamics, and structure made visible without AI, without filters, without noise. It’s an honest, direct conversation between player and instrument, open to anyone regardless of experience. The Hospital Edition, developed in partnership with the Royal United Hospital Bath and Designability, brings this same spirit of discovery into inpatient wards, reaching people who might need it most. Supported by The Studio Innovation Fund, Charlie has created a quietly radical tool for musical curiosity and human connection.
Benjamin Winstone — Octopus Immersive octopusimmersive.co.uk
Octopus Immersive creates interactive installations that blur the line between digital and physical and make that blur feel completely natural. The Bristol-based studio combines robotics, engineering, and creative design to build experiences for festivals, heritage sites, arts institutions, and live events that surprise and linger. Every project is grounded in a belief that technology should serve genuine human experience, not overwhelm it. Supported by The Studio through the Create Growth programme, Benjamin has developed a practice that brings real technical ambition to some of the most engaging and inventive work in the UK’s creative technology scene.
Nigel Fryatt — Polymathic Agency polymathic.agency
Polymathic enables cultural organisations to engage live audiences using creative technology, whether that’s a surround sound vinyl DJ set at the Roman Baths or a generative art installation at a film screening. Based in Bath and award-winning, they design experiences that transform cultural spaces into something extraordinary. Alongside their event work, their innovation hub builds web applications, such as: Culture Key, an arts audience analytics platform developed with Bath Arts Collective. They also co-run Bath Live Visuals Community, a free monthly meet-up open to all. With the support of The Studio, Nigel has grown a business that makes arts and culture genuinely accessible and relevant.
James Bickerton – Advance Scout nocaps.biz
What if the idea you keep coming back to is the one? Most creative business ideas die quietly — not from being bad, but from never being tested. nocaps.biz turns that private “what if” into a public signal in under an hour: a real landing page, real ads, real strangers clicking or not. Built on frameworks from d.MBA and two decades of service design with companies including Google, Coca-Cola, and HSBC, it’s a quietly radical proposition — that the gap between dreamer and founder is mostly evidence. A new project from Advance Scout, nocaps.biz invites festival-goers to test an idea live during BDF26 and walk away knowing whether it deserves their next year.
Michelle Marie Forrest www.michellemarieforrest.com
Michelle Marie Forrest works where systemic pressure meets personal experience, processing “matters” as “matter.” Her psycho-techno-archaeological practice translates forces like financial instability and existential uncertainty into physical and digital form. In c0de to Home, she confronts the broken housing market through a subverted digital sampler. An unproductive algorithm ensures the house-puzzle never resolves, its Respiratory Engine producing an audio-visual stutter where information refuses to cohere. Accessed via a browser, each viewer encounters a uniquely unfinished pattern. A new resident at The Studio, Michelle’s work is a rigorous and unsettling meditation on the tensions of contemporary life.
Gaz Lawrence gazlawrence.art · themosaic.uk
Gaz Lawrence works at the intersection of oil painting and digital modelling, finding that each discipline sharpens his understanding of the other. Supported by an Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice Grant, he spent 18 months building a hybrid practice using Unreal Engine and Blender to generate 3D reference imagery that directly informs his paintings. The result is a working method that feels simultaneously traditional and experimental. Digital tools used not to replace the painter’s hand, but to expand its reach. Technical training provided through The Studio proved integral to the project, which Gareth completed in April 2026.
Bashart Malik & Helen Farmer Frank Conversations Collective
What if the digital future belonged to everyone? This collaboration between Frank Conversations Collective and the University of Bristol’s ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures brings a youth lens to some of the most pressing questions in tech today. Lead curator Bashart Malik’s mini-documentary, Caring for Futures, draws on a 2-to-3-year project involving young people from diverse communities across Bristol, alongside artists, technologists, academics, and researchers. The result is a piece of work that asks who gets to shape AI and virtual reality, and whose voices are missing from that conversation. Supported by The Studio, Frank Conversations puts story owners at the centre.