Doing Together 26

Introductory Talk: What Are We Doing Here?

Introduction to the two-day practice-research symposium.

Group Activity: Community of Consequences

Delivered by Abigail Branagan and Victoria Norcross, all attendees are invited to explore collective authorship through creative play. Inspired by childhood games such as Consequences and Exquisite Corpse, the session transforms these collaborative principles into a large‑scale making activity. Working in small groups, you will respond to a series of prompts using a curated mix of materials allowing an unexpected, shared narrative to emerge.

Join an interactive, story-led workshop exploring the making of the forthcoming exhibition Drawing Together: The Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court, which will tour to the Young Gallery in Salisbury (September), Chippenham Museum (November) and BSU’s Michael Pennie Gallery (March 2027). Working with artworks from the University Collection, this session invites you to explore the stories behind exhibitions - from historic artworks to the hidden processes that shape how they are displayed and understood. 

Expect close looking, creative prompts, and playful group exercises, including creative writing and visual responses inspired by real museum documentation. 

This workshop invites participants to explore how simple acts of folding and repetition can grow into shared, inhabitable structures. Working with paper, participants will collaborate to create forms that can be sat within or gathered under.

Starting at a small scale, participants will individually experiment with folding, joining and repetition to explore rhythm, pattern and material behaviour. These explorations will be brought together with the group collectively selecting and developing one or two systems to scale up.

The workshop focuses on collective making, attention and care, allowing time for pause, adjustment and reflection. It offers an opportunity to experience how structure, space and shelter can emerge through collaboration and embodied, hands-on activity.

This workshop uses participatory brush-making as a space to explore mindfulness and making as relational and embodied practice. Through the slow, tactile process of binding natural fibres into simple hand-made brushes, you will be guided to notice rhythms, bodily sensation, and the subtle negotiations of working alongside others. Parallel demonstration, periods of quiet making, and moments of collective reflection will frame the making experience, alongside simple somatic practices that open and close the session. Emphasis is placed not on technical skill or outcome, but on the process and experience of how things are made, through listening, cooperation, and care, and inviting participants to consider “doing together” as a practice of quiet reflection and shared embodied wellbeing.

Session Zero is an experiment in emotionally and culturally conscious collaborative practice inspired by tabletop role-play games. In RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons, session zero provides a creative space before the game begins for players to co-envision the world they will inhabit together. Players establish ground rules, formulate individual and collective backstories, and build a shared ethos that balances comfort and safety with creative risk before entering game worlds of intense relational connection. Session Zero is interested in the potential this process holds for building trust and shared understanding among collaborators. In this workshop, we will create our own envisioned world, imagining ourselves as a newly formed ensemble preparing to devise a production together. Through a series of participatory activities, including self-reflective mapping, breath and scene work, we will explore what a collaborative process rooted in emotional access, shared embodied knowledge and consent might look and feel like.

This workshop combines the independent research of Rae Howard (textile design) and Tim Vyner (illustration) who use visual arts as a means of improving the wellbeing of young people in hospitals and empowering marginalised communities around the world.

In this workshop you will be invited to use your imagination to make a series of guided images, starting with a bold life-size outline of your head and shoulders. Approach this workshop with an open mind and a willingness to express yourself through the medium of drawing. Starting with a series of gentle conversations and real-time reflections, drawing will be used as a method for thinking together, listening to each other and responding. 

Fieldworks is a live research and making space exploring how digital and cloud technologies can both enrich our lives and extract from us - personally, collectively and from shared resources like water.

The Centre for Creative Technology and Kaye Dunnings, Creative Director of Shangri-La, present two playful prototype machines based on learning from four years of collaboration with Shangri-La and a recent Innovation Lab. Together they invite ‘festival-goers’ to reflect on participation, exchange and the hidden costs of our digital interactions. 

Through this one-hour workshop, you can add to our ‘field site’, displaying past projects, sharing methods and inviting you to contribute thoughts and ideas for a future festival.

Originating in Doing Together 2025, this participatory workshop builds on an ongoing RIBA-funded, multidisciplinary research project titled The Spatial Diet: An Architectural Framework for Creative Flourishing. The research explores how the spatial ‘ingredients’ of the environments we inhabit influence creative thinking, and the value of being more intentional about nurturing a healthy balance of spatial experiences.

The session will begin with a short presentation of emerging insights, drawn from interviews with thought leaders across design, education and innovation, alongside building case studies and literature review. You will then reflect on these findings before undertaking a collective creative wander around Locksbrook Campus. Working in small groups, you will map moments of cognitive nourishment, constraint and possibility. Returning together, we will synthesise insights and co-imagine spatial interventions that could enhance creative flourishing.

Combining short talks, skills exchange, and speculative provotyping, this collaborative workshop explores our material relationship with Creative Tech and AI across Identity, Community, and Nature. Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s idea of “intangible, ghostly” data and the ecological critique of Kate Crawford’s Anatomy of AI, lead artists Megan Broadmeadow, Sam Wilkins, and Simone Einfalt ask if Tech + AI could become a ‘Vibrant Matter’ (Bennett, 2010) as a nonhuman collaborator in a playful worldbuilding group activity. Can we build extraterrestrial communities using reimagined AI artefacts? How does data transform our collective identity and place-based rituals? Can we ‘grow’ Digital Things? 

In this session, you will form teams to create lo-fi physical-digital artefacts—objects, video, audio, performance, or games. Outcomes will be shared in a hybrid interactive exhibition and dialogue during Doing Together 26, with plans to let Vibrant Matter grow across the regional creative community.

This hands-on workshop invites participants to explore modular synthesis and make new music together, regardless of prior experience. The session will cover the basics of module functions, signal flow and patching before opening into group experimentation and play.

Working with racks provided on the day, you will collaborate to develop and shape sounds collectively, culminating in a group jam presented to fellow Doing Together participants at the close of the session.

The workshop also introduces ways to continue working with synths beyond the session, including online tools such as VCV Rack.

In this workshop we will explore Creative Sensemaking—a term that expands creative thinking to acknowledge creativity as a multisensory process rooted in the body as a complex, dynamic system. The workshop will explore how movement is not separate from thought; rather it is a form of thinking that is multimodal, embodied and deeply connected to how we make sense of the world. Through short, playful exercises and simple movement tasks, participants will experience how actively engaging the body can generate new conditions for creativity to emerge. No prior movement experience necessary.

Reluctant Performer is an ongoing collaboration between Adam Gillam, Anna Lucas and Alice Walton, playing with the idea of being reluctant performers, appearing (and disappearing) in their image making. In this session, we are extending this triangular improvisation by inviting participants as co-conspirators/makers/disrupters, to intervene, bother and disturb a work in progress, staged within the photographic studios.

You'll contribute to the ramshackle staging of the space; the action, re-enactment, equipment and bodies, constantly framed and reframed through shared activity and live capture. You may find yourself being asked to respond to an instruction, invited to make a prop to hide or add to a live foley soundtrack. The reciprocity of this act seeks to generate new possibilities, exploring a pedagogy of generosity and exchange. The spirit is one of non-hierarchical collaborative image making. A process of playful interaction realised through inexplicable but serious intent.

B.R.Q. is a workshop inspired by the perilous demand for financial frugality at the Jewson's Western Premier Divisions', Ironmould Lane. Produced from spare remnants from around the ground, Richard & Steve produce unassuming objects/sculptures/ball hooks to retrieve balls that have exited the field of play.

B.R.Q will playfully replicate the matchday collaborative creative problem-solving and enact the urgent B.R.Q. spectacle, akin to mountain rescue or apple picking, in that order.

Louisa Clark, Leonora Oppenheim and Maria Silvia Carderelli-Gronau

Embodybuilding offers an alternative and playful interaction between the body and the building, inviting unexpected moments of pause, movement, and connection. A series of cards with prompts for simple embodied practices will be placed around Locksbrook Campus for discovery as you move between spaces and conversations.

Bringing awareness to the body in space, the felt-sense, and the more-than-human world around us, these found invitations will whisper out from walls or the floor or the back of a chair to those that happen upon them, encouraging an individual or possibly shared embodied experience in that moment. You are invited to seek out the prompts, let the body respond, and collect the cards for a spontaneous connective plenary!

Keith Harrison, Jerome Harrington, Karen Richmond, Isaac Stacey (Material:Making Research Group)

Transmission is the first live test broadcast for Static FM, the proposed Locksbrook campus radio. The broadcast will consist of commissioned jingles, sound clips made in the Recording Booth, along with a curated programme of sound works including a broadcast of the sound of Locksbrook workshops, studios and stairwells and a live performance from Copper Sounds.

Tessa Cobb

Do you love picturebooks? Ever fancied making your own? Tessa Cobb, picturebook maker and all-round happy book lady, invites you to put your joyful ideas to life in this hands-on book making station.

Tessa's practice centres on the art and craft of the picturebook,and is excited to share her wealth of experience, skills, and knowledge with the local creative community. If you'd like to help shape and co-create Bath’s first ever Happy Book School, come and post your creative education desires in the Jolly Postbox.
                                                                         
Drop in to make, talk, and collaborate. Tessa and her studiomate, baby Edwin, look forward to meeting you.

Ava Berriman, Benjamin Thapa and Conrad Moriarty-Cole

All attendees are invited to contribute to the Doing Together Yellow Pages, a co-created Directory that gathers reflections on the symposium experience while functioning as a practical, physical networking tool for our community. In this interjacent activity, we will explore the nature of social engagement in contemporary life. Through play-based, participatory methods, we will experiment with facilitating human connection via the unusual, the curious, and the absurd.

Introductory Talk: What Are We Doing Here?

Introduction to the two-day practice-research symposium.

Group Activity: Community of Consequences

Delivered by Abigail Branagan and Victoria Norcross, all attendees are invited to explore collective authorship through creative play. Inspired by childhood games such as Consequences and Exquisite Corpse, the session transforms these collaborative principles into a large‑scale making activity. Working in small groups, you will respond to a series of prompts using a curated mix of materials allowing an unexpected, shared narrative to emerge.

Reluctant Performer is an ongoing collaboration between Adam Gillam, Anna Lucas and Alice Walton, playing with the idea of being reluctant performers, appearing (and disappearing) in their image making. We are extending this triangular improvisation inviting participants as co-conspirators/makers/disrupters, to intervene, bother and disturb a work in progress, staged within the photographic studios.

Participants will contribute to the ramshackle staging of the space; the action, re-enactment, equipment and bodies, constantly framed and reframed through shared activity and live capture. They may find themselves being asked to respond to an instruction, invited to make a prop to hide themselves or someone else or adding to a live foley soundtrack. The reciprocity of this act seeks to generate new possibilities, exploring a pedagogy of generosity and exchange. The spirit is one of non-hierarchical collaborative image making. A process of playful interaction realised through inexplicable but serious intent.

Terminal invites participants to consider the hidden consequences and costs of the technology that mediates ordinary workplace activities, and to honour the materiality that is embodied within that action through the making of an offering. We look behind the shiny design, convenience and engineering marvels of digital tools, and uncover the messy, decaying, metabolic substrate and processes which make them possible. 

Terminal is a moment in a simulated ‘zoom’ style business meeting with a mysterious remote colleague, who will invite you to consider and honour the material realities of your digital actions.

This workshop offers a confidential and collaborative space to share and examine experiences of rejection in the creative sector. Creative work is uniquely subject to judgement — and when creative practice is so central to identity and sense of self, rejection can be particularly difficult to navigate.

The session presents early findings from a new research project into rejection in the creative industries, organised around four questions: How does rejection make us feel? How do we cope with it? How does it shape our work? And what might best practice look like?

Participants are invited to sit with these questions and respond creatively — through photography, drawing or writing — exploring the dimensions and nuances of rejection as a creative (and very human) experience.

Being with Colour is a joyful, hands-on workshop that invites people to explore colour together. The session offers a relaxed and welcoming space to notice colour more closely, experiment freely, and enjoy making alongside others. 
 
You will mix and explore colour in response to feelings of joy, wellbeing, calm and hope. Individual contributions are gradually brought together to form a shared colour display – a series of painted paper ‘flags’ that can be moved through and around. Colour is approached not just as something to look at, but as something that shapes atmosphere, experience and how people come together in space. 
 
The workshop creates space to enjoy colour, exchange ideas and see what can emerge when colour is made collaboratively. 

Batman Buys Milk invites participants to reimagine unexceptional everyday activities as an opportunity to communicate an unspoken truth or desire in the form of a graphic narrative. We’ll begin with a series of individual writing and drawing activities before bringing the group together for a game of Comic Consequences. We’ll finish by producing a print zine for each participant to take home. 

We will take an autoethnographic approach to the workshop activities, exploring how the veil of fiction can allow for increased authenticity and honesty in autobiographical comics. Through the co-creation of a single graphic narrative, we will explore ideas of ownership and authorship in collaborative practice.

This hands-on workshop invites you to explore creative making through a shared, unconventional material: donated 3.5 × 3.5-inch carpet squares. Rich in colour, texture, and finish, these modular pieces become the starting point for playful experimentation and design thinking. Using simple joining techniques such as stitching, folding and combining, participants will discover how soft surfaces can be transformed into decorative forms and structures.

Open to all disciplines, the workshop encourages participants to interpret the material through their own interests, whether fashion, product design, architecture, art, or beyond. The session begins with individual experimentation and prototyping, before moving into collaborative making that culminates in collective outcomes. These may take the form of structures, wall pieces, wearable objects, vessels, or entirely unexpected creations.

The workshop promotes sustainable, resourceful approaches to making while fostering curiosity, conversation, collaboration, and reflective discussion in a supportive, exploratory environment.

This interdisciplinary workshop explores how researchers, creative practitioners and critical thinkers might re-imagine the "peepshow" as a cultural, aesthetic and political form. The session continues work begun at Doing Together 2025, though no prior attendance or experience is required.

The workshop opens with an introduction to the Screening Sex research project, revisiting early image technologies, questions of representation and the shifting politics of sex on screen. Initial findings from 2025 will be shared and discussed before we collaboratively consider exhibition strategies and representational methodologies. 

The practical core of the session invites hands-on experimentation in image production, narrative and conceptual frameworks suitable for short-form installation. The workshop welcomes anyone curious about representation, visual culture and collaborative making, regardless of background or discipline. Together, we will interrogate how creative practices can critically engage with taboo or contested topics while fostering an environment that is open, reflective and supportive. 

A swipe or tap on your phone might allow you to do something joyful and intentional, habitual and pointless, or resentfully necessary. Each digital act is one tip of a mysterious chain of digital happenings that somewhere touch the earth, ecologies, soil, water, people, politics, economies, wealth and power. Digital experiences feel, and are presented as abstract, placeless and weightless, but are they really?

We will explore the lifecycle, and material reality of these digital chains beginning with the metaphor (which we may break) of a garden and its hidden ecosystems, forces, seasons and labour that it takes to harvest a desired fruit. We will use mark-making, objects, the space and ourselves to collectively build a story behind these abstract actions, where they make contact and what the consequences might be.

How provisional is our interior visual world? How much do we share and influence one another in what we imagine and what we see in our minds eye... do we see anything at all? 

In this workshop, we will work in two small groups to create collaborative images from a collection of prompts, using a range of tools and media. While we do this, we'll be asking: How does the choice of tools impact our approach and what influence do those around us have on the images we are making?

This is an experimental participatory session that brings together shared studio practice and performative exploration. At the centre of the session is a travelling interactive sculpture, 'The Apothicarium', which holds a curated mix of found objects and artist-made sculptural works used as prompts to explore mishaps and memory.

Participants are invited to recall personal experiences then draw, cut out, and write onto a paper object that resonates with their story. Working side-by-side in low-pressure ways—drawing, writing, cutting, hanging, and discussing—participants engage through co-presence, shared handling of materials, and collective attention rather than performance or verbal fluency.

Through prompt-based reflection the session explores how mishaps and memories can be reframed as generative experiences, fostering empathy, openness, and connection through shared vulnerability and play.

What Matters is an innovative arts-based approach to participatory research. The workshop involves free-ranging exploration of ideas through creating art, followed by collaborative interpretation and sense-making. 
  
Designed to be highly accessible, What Matters has been developed by disabled researchers at We Are the People as a way to meaningfully include disabled people – and other marginalised communities – in the research process. 
  
The workshop is open, dynamic and yields unexpected results. It will appeal to those interested in learning new ways to engage with marginalised communities as well as those interested in novel ways of community-building. Artistic skills or experience are not necessary – just openness and curiosity! Previous participants have found the workshop to be inspiring, positive, and revelatory. 

This workshop uses participatory brush-making as a space to explore mindfulness and making as relational and embodied practice. Through the slow, tactile process of binding natural fibres into simple hand-made brushes, you will be guided to notice rhythms, bodily sensation, and the subtle negotiations of working alongside others.

Parallel demonstration, periods of quiet making, and moments of collective reflection will frame the making experience, alongside simple somatic practices that open and close the session. Emphasis is placed not on technical skill or outcome, but on the process and experience of how things are made, through listening, cooperation, and care, and inviting participants to consider “doing together” as a practice of quiet reflection and shared embodied wellbeing.

What if the present moment doesn’t really exist?

In this hands-on workshop, participants will explore how our sense of “now” is created by building and playing with a simple cardboard flipbook machine. Using a short tutorial, you’ll construct a small device and create your own flipbook animations from drawn or printed images.

We’ll experiment with tiny movements, repetition, pauses, and loops to see how motion appears and disappears. When the flipbook starts moving, something surprising happens: the feeling of movement and time only exists while the images are flipping. Stop the machine, and the “moment” vanishes.

No technical skills are needed. This workshop is about curiosity, play, and noticing how time works. Through making, watching, and sharing, we’ll turn big ideas about time into something you can see, touch, and experience together.

Utilising Jan Tschichold's page design techniques to crowdsource an exhibition.

Swiss graphic designer Jan Tschichold developed a method of dividing a page — or double page spread — into a harmonious arrangement of proportional spacing and content blocks. Drawing on medieval manuscripts and Villard de Honnecourt's geometric techniques for dividing lines without measurement, his approach remains one of the most elegant systems in typographic history.

In this workshop, participants learn to construct Tschichold's grid by hand using only a pencil and straight edge, before reflecting on what that structure means and how it might inform creative practice. The grid then becomes a springboard: participants are invited to abandon planning entirely and respond intuitively, producing an A3 work led by instinct rather than intention.

This workshop uses plant infusions as a research tool, inviting participants to attune to where and how plants are experienced in the body. Through individual and group organoleptic inquiry, the session investigates herbs not as fixed material structures but as active, dynamic matter — co-collaborators in a shared investigative process.

Rooted in methods drawn from herbalist training, the workshop draws on sensory feedback and felt experience to explore the interconnections between plants and human processes. It brings together medical herbalism, environmental archaeology, primary care mental health and artistic practice in a shared experiment that situates embodied knowledge at the centre of creative research.

The session engages with questions of materiality, care, ecology, distributed agency and the space of dialogue — considering how herbal practice might offer new frameworks for practice-based research.

All plants used in this workshop are readily available in supermarkets and considered safe for consumption under Food Standards Agency guidelines.

Louisa Clark, Leonora Oppenheim and Maria Silvia Carderelli-Gronau

Embodybuilding offers an alternative and playful interaction between the body and the building, inviting unexpected moments of pause, movement, and connection. A series of cards with prompts for simple embodied practices will be placed around Locksbrook Campus for discovery as you move between spaces and conversations.

Bringing awareness to the body in space, the felt-sense, and the more-than-human world around us, these found invitations will whisper out from walls or the floor or the back of a chair to those that happen upon them, encouraging an individual or possibly shared embodied experience in that moment. You are invited to seek out the prompts, let the body respond, and collect the cards for a spontaneous connective plenary!

Ava Berriman, Benjamin Thapa and Conrad Moriarty-Cole

All attendees are invited to contribute to the Doing Together Yellow Pages, a co-created Directory that gathers reflections on the symposium experience while functioning as a practical, physical networking tool for our community. In this interjacent activity, we will explore the nature of social engagement in contemporary life. Through play-based, participatory methods, we will experiment with facilitating human connection via the unusual, the curious, and the absurd.

The symposium will culminate in a reflective discussion on the event as it evolved, facilitated by external guests Dr Nicky Sim and Jo Addison who have been invited to attend the symposium as observers, participants, and writers.