One day: Day One began in 2012 as a performance artwork, where Sara Zaltash worked together to explore human aspiration and, projected futures. She created intimate pop-up participatory environments in festivals and exhibitions, in which the public could offer their ‘one days’, their dreams and aspirations.

Inspired by Bristol’s year as European Green Capital and the theme of ‘resilience’ she created an inflatable pop-up structure where the people of Bristol could enter and imagine their own Green Bristol. Their visions could be documented in audio and video, collected and represented online and in public spaces, while the structure itself could move daily and weekly around the greater Bristol area. An ipad app was developed that allowed a conversation to occur between people in different locations and times – connecting them in new ways. Each person could answer a question by recording themselves on the app, and then pose a question to the next visitor. The project sparked hours of ‘conversation’ between the citizens of Bristol.

This project will build on this work, possibly incorporating Beacon technology, so that people might be ‘invited’ to engage in city conversations as they walk through the streets of Bristol via their mobile phones. In particular, we would be interested in exploring how people ‘feel’ about change in the urban environment, using this as a revolutionary tool to engage and consult with people around new infrastructural developments. Finally, some work must also be done to make the data capture manageable and useful in the long term – given the large volumes of video data.

This research is being carried out by Professor Antonia Lanyard from the Bristol Law School and artist Sara Zaltash from One Day:Day One.