YouSmash: A coding platform and immersive entertainment event to connect users to live, real-time environmental events unfolding on Earth

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Bristol is a global centre for nature filmmaking. An event at Bristol's 2022 Wildscreen Film Festival (supported by MyWorld & Invest Bristol+Bath), called the 'Future of Natural World Storytelling', demonstrated that there is huge audience appetite and market potential for new technology-based encounters with nature.Mechanimal is a multi award-winning performing arts company in Bristol, critically acclaimed by The Guardian and New Scientist, and with a touring profile across the UK and 9 international countries. We create experiences inviting audiences into fascinating encounters with our changing planet.We're innovating to make a new data coding platform. This helps us to create a new kind of immersive technology experience that offers people fascinating new relationships with a fast-changing Earth. Live actions of a user in an experience (e.g. placing items on a sensor) create data sets which are then combined with live data from our changing climate (e.g. weather data, mining extraction data). This creates the possibility for unique new immersive experiences that connect people to the 'liveness' of climate change unfolding in real-time.We propose to test this platform within an installation called 'YouSmash' - a participatory experience that augments spaces (at museums, galleries, events and festivals) with immersive projection. It explores the future of sustainable mining and technology use.During YouSmash, users will enter a dark room filled with projections of shifting maps and images. They will be invited to playfully (and safely) explore the many metals inside unwanted technology such as laptops and mobile phones. Placing them on different sensor trays creates different data sets, which are then combined with real-time data from mining maps, resources flows and stock market data. These are then translated into 'data sculpture' - multiple visual pathways projected around the space, centring the user within an emerging, dynamic, real-time worldmap of mines, metal resource flows and production processes that lead to our everyday tech.Mechanimal has a strong, pre-existing partnership of geology researchers (Natural History Museum), creative technologists and venues, developed through a previous award-winning theatre production, Megalith, (2022). The company identifies an opportunity to expand beyond theatre and create fascinating, interactive, immersive technology experiences about our changing planet. Building a data coding platform, and testing it within the YouSmash installation experience, Mechanimal identifies an outstanding opportunity for strong, immediate business growth through touring and selling both the coding platform and the live, participatory immersive events that can be created from it.