Thursday evening, most of the artists made it to Budokan for a meal to meet up before starting today at the Watershed, Bristol. It was good to start off in this informal way – everyone got a bit of an idea about each others interests.
Friday kicked off with a few collaborative exercises, working in pairs or threes, we were initially presented with a practical challenge of making the longest spaghetti bridge across the room – good for setting the collaborative cogs in motion…! We then went off in the same groups to come up with an idea for a piece of work based on ‘Gesture’ – to then present to the rest of the group.
This was a great opportunity for a more in depth exchanging of ideas and concepts surrounding nip’s main area of focus – Gesture and movement as a means of interacting with other media. After 45 minutes thinking and exchanging time, we presented our ideas to the rest of the group. It seemed to have been a fruitful use of time – many shared issues and concerns were raised – where is our common ground as a group? In what ways do our approaches differ? – how can we help each other? How can we question and challenge each other? Some of the ideas presented were conceptual, others became open discussions, some had a real focus on ‘material’ and techniques, others were lo-fi experiments with the nature of human interaction.

After lunch – each artist presented their work in three different sessions of public talks at the Watershed – which were attended by a steady stream of interested members of the public. Artists were grouped together to allow each session of talks to explore a particular area of research.
Session 1 – Body as interface
Session 2 – Material worlds objects, site and sound as primary source
Session 3 – Emergent and sensory connectivity.

These talks gave the public an insight into what NIP is about - and also each of the NIP artists were able to get an overview of each other’s work. This accelerated what was already happening between the artists – the exchange of ideas, techniques, working methods, uses of technology, hardware, software, shared enthusiasms, swapping contacts/links…. After a short break for a tasty pieminister pie, the final sessions of talks merged into ‘Random Function’ at the watershed – by this point, we were all chatting away, enthusing about this that and the other, having a few drinks and getting excited about the next few days…