Clicking to Connectivity was a fantastic techie and arts event held on Thursday, 29^th October as part of the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas. Our partners at Great St Mary's Church on the Market Square very kindly hosted the event for us, with FREE 'drop in' activities from 2pm to 7pm, followed by the launch of the technology involving singing and history at 5pm with Abbey Meadows School children and a Bluetooth beacon talk given by our ARM collaborator Jonny Austin from 5.30pm. Our Bluetooth beacons were live throughout the event and volunteers were in situ within the Church and at the Marketplace to help the public navigate the topics and the tech!  

Children and their families also created some beautiful pieces of art at the art table, captured their work in the camera booth and tested out the new heritage touch screens before the real geek action started!

The Abbey Meadows School children who had worked with us on the project, also had the opportunity to proudly showcase their video art installations the general public and their families, which were displayed in interesting spaces around the church. In addition, Abbey Meadows children and families were offered free trips to enjoy the amazing view from up the Church Tower and to see how their community connects to the city centre! 

Clicking to Connectivity is an experimental public art project using digital technology with the art subjects inspired by local history, using new Bluetooth beacon technology to host a trail of creative pieces, including poems and films, and thumbnails of quirky and unique historical topics to give audiences fresh insights to view the Cambridge Market Place and the long history of Cambridge 'town' and 'gown' located at Great St Mary's Church on the Market.

Children and their teachers from Abbey Meadows School have been working with Historyworks in the run up to the event to co-create poems, songs and more for this new technology pilot, which will subsequently be extended from the Market Place all the way back to Abbey Meadows as a 'scavenger trail' in a future project.  

All the history and art works have been co-created with the team at Historyworks starring the rap artist, Inja Hue, singing teacher, Mario Satchwell, and primary education advisor, Tizzy Faller.   Film and Photography and Audio have been captured by all team members, but especially by Helen Weinstein, Jon Calver, and Ross Casswell.   Much of the historical research would not have been completed without the excellent resources at the Cambridgeshire Collection at the City Library and the team work from the Doctoral Training Programme at the University of Cambridge, whose students are rising to the challenge of learning how to translate their research skills for mass audiences.

The aim of the project is to allow a new method of place-making, by sharing historical stories specific to an area, and to inspire a visceral connection to these locations by supporting young people to co-create artworks in film and sound, words and voices which are then edited into sound files and films which can be coded for the public to enjoy and 'bump into' public art and local history as a Bluetooth beacon trail.  We hope you enjoy the experiment!  

A number of people interested in innovation and creativity, then went along to 'Makespace' off Silver Street, for more tech chat from 7pm to 9pm, where a bunch of engineering creatives showcased 3D printers, laser cutters and their own inventions! 

We had a fantastic evening showcasing this upcoming technology with techie geeks, museum staff and families alike, with many people enjoying trying out finding the Bluetooth beacons using their phones and discovering local history and art in a quirky, new way as part of this techie experiment!

We would like to thank the Festival of Ideas team, Great St. Mary’s Church and ARM for enabling us to host this event.

For more information about the Festival of Ideas at the University of Cambridge, visit: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/

For more information about Great St. Mary’s Heritage Education work, visit: http://www.gsm.cam.ac.uk/visitors/heritage-project/