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All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Jonny Martin Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs London Improvisers Orchestra #39 28 September 2025 London Improvisers Orchestra #38 9 July 2025 London Improvisers Orchestra #37 8 March 2025 SKRONK #178 16 September 2025 ImproVox #10 30 June 2025 Load More Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Paul Shearsmith Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs SKRONK #4 19 July 2016 SKRONK #5 9 August 2016 SKRONK #1 31 May 2016 SKRONK #2 21 June 2016 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Erik Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs SKRONK #4 19 July 2016 SKRONK #5 9 August 2016 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Jason Alder Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs SKRONK #4 19 July 2016 SKRONK #5 9 August 2016 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

All Improv Perfomers All Improv Gigs Saulius Bendoraitis Electronics Performer Bio (Max 1000 characters) London and South East improv gigs ImproVox #09 19 May 2025 ImproVox #04 28 October 2024 Performer notes, message or style description http://Website or social media email or phone number

< Back The UKRI funded Responsible AI UK (RAI UK) Announces First Round Impact Acceleration Projects Partners: Universities of Oxford (lead), Nottingham and Warwick, Fourth Portal, Albino Mosquito, Computational Foundry, Swansea University), The National Archives, UK, EvoMUSART 24, Horizon Digital Economy Research UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub. University of Nottingham 27 Nov 2023 Academics from the University of Nottingham have received funding to research how to ensure Artificial Intelligence (AI) is safe to use, in a new project alongside the Universities of Oxford and Warwick. The UKRI funded Responsible AI UK (RAI UK) has announced its first round of Impact Acceleration projects, investing £1.8M to ensure AI is safe, and that it will be responsible to the needs of society, addressing topics such as Generative AI in teaching and learning. Dr Alan Chamberlain, in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, said: “Starting to examine how people understand and apply responsible AI in their work is important. It will help us to approach the design of responsible systems together. Involving the public is fundamental, its vitally important to enable people to participate and have input into research. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/responsible-ai-funding For more: Algorithm, AI, Security, Design Previous Next

The Versatility of Paper call out took place in July 2023 and generated a fantastic response from artists across Gravesham and the country, leading to a papermaking workshop and a printed newspaper. Versatility of Paper Summer < Back 1 July 2023 The Versatility of Paper call out took place in July 2023 and generated a fantastic response from artists across Gravesham and the country, leading to a papermaking workshop and a printed newspaper. Previous Next About the event The Versatility of Paper drew on the long history of papermaking and printing in the Gravesend, Northfleet and Purfleet areas of Kent and Essex. Paper produced in these mills had a multitude of purposes, demonstrating the versatility of paper, including, Newsprint paper for newspapers, comics and magazines (also printed in this area) Tissue paper for toilet rolls, nappies and sanitary products (and still being made today) Paper sacks for the transport of commodities such as tea, flour, sugar, potatoes, chemicals and minerals. Cardboard for packaging and packing cases Paperboard for the linings of plasterboard In an edition of The British Printer 1953, an article entry was sent in by Bowater, who had a paper mill in Gravesend. The Bowater competition for art students The chairman and directors of the Bowater Paper Corporation are sponsoring a competition among the students attending art schools in the United Kingdom. Illustrations to be submitted are for the Bowater desk calendar for 1954. Competitors are invited to illustrate The Versatility of Paper and its Importance in the World Today, and they can interpret this theme in any way they choose… 70 years after this article was published, and in collaboration with artist Dawn Cole, Fourth Portal invited people to partake in The Versatility of Paper. Participants were given a small piece of antique paper which they could use to make an artwork that celebrates the versatility of paper. The paper could be used to print, paint, pulp, sculpt, fold, engineer, play, shred, glue, and dye, in fact, the possibilities with paper are endless. The only rule was that the finished work must contain, in some way, the original piece of paper. The provided paper varied in size, weight, shape, colour and age. The only information provided was the name of the papermill, its weight and the type of paper if known. Artworks were exhibited on the Fourth Portal website and displayed in an exhibition held in the autumn of 2023 at the Fourth Portal Lab. The call was open to all ages. Those interested could collect a piece of paper in person or send an email to info@fourthportal.com with The Versatility of Paper as the subject line and were sent a piece of paper in the post. The deadline for return of the paper was 31 August 2023 Fourth Portal Lab @ St Andrews Art Centre, 19 Royal Pier Road, Gravesend, Kent, DA12 2BD. Participants were asked to include their name, the title of the work and a brief statement about the piece. An extension to the call-out was made possible with the kind support of the Essex Culture Diversity Project. This event has ended Visit Event Page MORE ON THIS EVENT BELOW Previous Next Event Documentation Previous Next

Gravesend Innovation Showcase 2024 events, locations, talks, speakers and times. < Back Polaroid Workshop Start Time FINISHED Running Time 4 Hours with lunchbreak Location FINISHED Event Type Workshop About the Event Introduction In this hands-on workshop, participants will use Instax ‘Polaroid’ cameras to explore and photograph urban spaces. The session will begin with a discussion on ‘visual urbanism’ and how this once outdated technology has regained popularity among artists and professionals. We’ll work on a brief focused on urban materialities - buildings, surfaces, and objects - and participants will also be encouraged to photograph people encountered during the session. The workshop coincides with the Gravesend Christmas lights switch-on, drawing many residents to the town centre. After returning to Gravesend Fourth Portal, we’ll edit the images, which will be part of a pop-up exhibition on Wednesday, 20 November 2024 facilitated by the Fourth Portal for the Innovation Showcase 2024. More on the event lead Paul Halliday is a visual artist trained in photojournalism, fine art film, social anthropology, art history and archaeology at LCC, Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He is a former Channel 4 film director, British Refugee Council Media Advisor, public relations and branding research consultant, Third Year BA Photomedia Leader, and MA Photography and Urban Cultures Course Leader for over 20 years at Goldsmiths, University of London. Paul has developed many long-term photographic archives working with 35mm rangefinder, Polaroid 190, Rolleiflex TLR and 6x9 medium format cameras. He taught spatial research for cinematography and directing at the Norwegian National Film School for several years. Event Information Meeting location: 10:30am, start 11.00am, Fourth Portal, Royal Pier Road, Gravesend, DA12 2BD A 30-minute lunch break will take place from 12:30 – 1:00pm. Total Time: 4 hours All Materials, including Polaroid cameras provided. __ Tickets Full Price £35.20 - (Ticket price: £32.00 + Booking fee: £3.20) Concessions £29.70 - (Ticket price: £27.00 + Booking fee: £2.70) ___ Even more information ___ His website is: www.paulhalliday.com Buy Tickets Here Background Before mobile phone cameras, the Polaroid camera was the only affordable equipment available to the average person to capture and instantly share a moment in time. "The company was founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land, a young scientist and inventor who had a passion for photography. In 1947, Polaroid introduced its first instant camera, the Model 95. This camera used a unique film and development process that allowed users to produce a finished print in just 60 seconds." (read more on Analogue Wonderland ) Previous Next

Gravesend Innovation Showcase 2024 events, locations, talks, speakers and times. < Back Mini Jam with Tiny Synths Start Time 11:00 Running Time 5 hours Location 9, 15-17, Popping Up Event Type Participation About the Event Introduction Join Felix X Tigersonic for a relaxed interactive session where you'll explore the world of tiny synths. This hands-on session invites music enthusiasts of all levels to experiment and collaborate in a silent, headphone-based setting. Featuring Felix's magic suitcase collection of instruments, including Pocket Operators, Monotrons, and Atari punk consoles. More on the event lead TIGERSONIC My name is Felix X Tigersonic Space Bass – Sound Artist music, videos , art objects, performances and residencies. I also record and produce other artists. I make something everyday, music or video. Sometimes I post it on Instagram or Bandcamp, but often its just for me I have been told there is a “dubby vibe” to my work. __more___ Tigersonic (aka Felix Macintosh) has been described as “dub minimalist”, with 2 albums where dub-influenced future bass meets ultra-short tracks (under 2 minutes). Short is BEAUTIFUL! She makes beats on her phone on the way to the studio then adds bass, mixing tunes quick and dirty – when the idea is done, so is the track. Her day job is working as a protools engineer at her underground Isington studio, where she makes everything perfect in the digital domain for other musicians. But with her own music, she wants to embrace all the dirt, grit and mistakes in her work (because “humans are analogue”). influences include King Tubby, Adrian Sherwood, Denis Bovell, Eno, Asian Dub Foundation and Space Jesus, and current releases include Blipcuts (on the Linear Obsessional label) and TIGER GRRR (on Artmix, her own label only available via Bandcampl). Linear Obsessional called Blipcuts “groove based abstractica for the restless and the curious” and compares her style to early ACR, On-U Sound and PIL, with a post-punk energy and willingness to experiment.” Honest Music For Dishonest Times describes her sound as “engaging, super-varied, dub-influenced electronica” that “bridges the divide between bass music and experimental”. Felix’s previous work has been in the underground breakbeat scene (Xfile and Aref Durvesh / early Visionary Underground) and her remix creds incl. General Levy / Genetic Drugz / Asian Dub Foundation / Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (for Navras Records) Trisomie 21. She also co/wrote and played bass on “Pandora” a track on cult underground film Nil by Mouth. She currently meets and collaborates with artists on Londons experimental music scene, and has taken part in composer Sharon Gals mass feedback performance, become part of Linear Obsessional’s drone orchestra, attended Graham Dunning’s sound art workshops, and performed a short tour of silent gigs in art galleries with Vaat du Fuq. These collaborations have been a real ear-opener and led to Felix performing and recording solo for the first time, using her go-to Hohner headless bass augmented with effects that include a Korg Monotron Delay. She has been increasingly interested in investigating bass and beats in a more abstract way. Her current mission is exploring the question, “How low can you go and how fast can you get there?”, and TIGER GRRR is the second edition of these explorations. Event Information This event is free. No experience needed. Open to all ages. Felix will be travelling around the town and appearing in different locations. No set times or destinations - you may need to go a search for her! :) ___ Even more information ___ See more Felix X Tigersonics https://www.creativehead.space/tigersonic/ This event is being updated Previous Next

Gravesend Innovation Showcase 2024 events, locations, talks, speakers and times. < Back Doraraathara Start Time 18:00 Running Time 40 Minutes Location 14. The Grand GYG Event Type Demonstration About the Event Introduction Doraraathara is an audio visual performance and generative artwork exploring plurality, technology and the politics of creation in a digital context. The work challenges audiences to rethink the link between originality, value and beauty in the hyper-real contemporary landscape. Event info: Using visual art generated from a custom-built audio visual system, and live spoken word performance, the visual outputs are original and unique to the occasion, responsive and reflective of the experience shared by the audience and creators. Creative Technologist Kristian Jones will share the process of creation, and technology underpinning the live audio visual experience, before inviting audiences to consider their own digital futures in a 10-minute performance of Doraraathara with Jen Bell. Followed by a Q&A with the creators facilitated by Zack Davies from Holy Moly Poetry/Fourth Portal More on the event lead Doraraathara is an audio visual performance and generative artwork exploring plurality, technology and the politics of creation in a digital context. The work challenges audiences to rethink the link between originality, value and beauty in the hyper-real contemporary landscape. Event info: Using visual art generated from a custom-built audio visual system, and live spoken word performance, the visual outputs are original and unique to the occasion, responsive and reflective of the experience shared by the audience and creators. Creative Technologist Kristian Jones will share the process of creation, and technology underpinning the live audio visual experience, before inviting audiences to consider their own digital futures in a 10-minute performance of Doraraathara with Jen Bell. Followed by a Q&A with the creators facilitated by Zack Davies from Holy Moly Poetry/Fourth Portal. Event Information This event is free. Open to all ages. Warning: Flashing images and occasional loud sounds. Q&A ___ Even more information ___ Let’s enter Doraraathara Neither destination Or home Step in to Doraraathara Never be alone Infinite Doraraathara Unlimited choice A narrative Vending machine A Personalised Voice Doraraathara’s your partner Your intimate Your twin Your personalised Agent Your digital kin Take the red pill Or the blue pill Side step and go for green When you’re creating reality Choose the familiar Or unseen Previous Next

< Back SeamlessM4T Massively Multilingual And Multimodal Machine Translation While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. Meta Facebook 22 Aug 2023 What does it take to create the Babel Fish, a tool that can help individuals translate speech between any two languages? While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. More specifically, conventional speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded systems composed of multiple subsystems performing translation progressively, putting scalable and high-performing unified speech translation systems out of reach. To address these gaps, we introduce SeamlessM4T—Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation—a single model that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and automatic speech recognition for up to 100 languages. To build this, we used 1 million hours of open speech audio data to learn self-supervised speech representations with w2v-BERT 2.0. Subsequently, we created a multimodal corpus of automatically aligned speech translations, dubbed SeamlessAlign. Filtered and combined with human labeled and pseudo-labeled data (totaling 406,000 hours), we developed the first multilingual system capable of translating from and into English for both speech and text. On Fleurs, SeamlessM4T sets a new standard for translations into multiple target languages, achieving an improvement of 20% BLEU over the previous state-of-the-art in direct speech-to-text translation. Compared to strong cascaded models, SeamlessM4T improves the quality of into-English translation by 1.3 BLEU points in speech-to-text and by 2.6 ASR-BLEU points in speech-to-speech. On CVSS and compared to a 2-stage cascaded model for speech-to-speech translation, SeamlessM4T-Large’s performance is stronger by 58%. Preliminary human evaluations of speech-to-text translation outputs evinced similarly impressive results; for translations from English, XSTS scores for 24 evaluated languages are consistently above 4 (out of 5). For into English directions, we see significant improvement over WhisperLarge-v2’s baseline for 7 out of 24 languages. To further evaluate our system, we developed Blaser 2.0, which enables evaluation across speech and text with similar accuracy compared to its predecessor when it comes to quality estimation. Tested for robustness, our system performs better against background noises and speaker variations in speech-to-text tasks (average improvements of 38% and 49%, respectively) compared to the current state-of-the-art model. Critically, we evaluated SeamlessM4T on gender bias and added toxicity to assess translation safety. Compared to the state-of-the-art, we report up to 63% of reduction in added toxicity in our translation outputs. Finally, all contributions in this work—including models, inference code, finetuning recipes backed by our improved modeling toolkit Fairseq2, and metadata to recreate the unfiltered 470,000 hours of SeamlessAlign — are open-sourced and accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication . https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/seamlessm4t-massively-multilingual-multimodal-machine-translation/ For more: NLP, AI, Machine Learning, Audio, Standards Previous Next

< Back The Cloud Under The Sea The industry responsible for laying the cables for the internet traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, under-appreciated, analog. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists. The Verge 19 Apr 2024 Want a career connecting the world? An immersive long read about laying the cables that the internet and we all rely upon. The home of the Fourth Portal, St Andrew's Church, is dedicated to those who work and travel the seas. This excellent long read follows the journey of those who repair the cables of the worldwide internet, revealing a fascinating life and opportunities for employment to see a whole new world. ___ "St Andrew's Waterside Church Mission for Sailors, Fishermen and Emigrants, 1864-1939 was established in 1864 to serve merchant seamen, fishermen and emigrants passing through the parish of Holy Trinity at Milton-next-Gravesend on 'sound Church principles', (ie 'high' or mainstream rather than 'low' church within the Church of England)." ( https://mar.ine.rs/stories/st-andrews-waterside-church-mission/ ) ___ “It hasn’t changed in 150 years... The Victorians did it that way and we’re doing it the same way.” "The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists. Others come to the field from merchant navies, marine construction, cable engineering, geology, optics, or other tangentially related disciplines. When Fumihide Kobayashi, the submersible operator — a tall and solidly built man from the mountain region of Nagano — joined KCS at the age of 20, he thought he would be working on ship maintenance, not working aboard a maintenance ship. He had never been on a boat before, but Hirai enticed him to stay with stories of all the whales and other marine creatures he would see on the remote ocean. Once people are in, they tend to stay. For some, it’s the adventure — repairing cables in the churning currents of the Congo Canyon and enduring hull-denting North Atlantic storms. Others find a sense of purpose in maintaining the infrastructure on which society depends, even if most people’s response when they hear about their job is, But isn’t the internet all satellites by now? The sheer scale of the work can be thrilling, too. People will sometimes note that these are the largest construction projects humanity has ever built or sum up a decades-long resume by saying they’ve laid enough cable to circle the planet six times. The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. However, there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an ageing and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. “One of the biggest problems we have in this industry is attracting new people to it,” said Constable. He recalled another panel he was on in Singapore meant to introduce university students to the industry. “The audience was probably about 10 university kids and 60 old grey people from the industry just filling out their day,” he said. When he speaks with students looking to get into tech, he tries to convince them that subsea cables are also part — a foundational part — of the tech industry. “They all want to be data scientists and that sort of stuff,” he said. “But for me, I find this industry fascinating. You’re dealing with the most hostile environment on the planet, eight kilometres deep in the oceans, working with some pretty high technology, travelling all over the world. You’re on the forefront of geopolitics, and it’s critical for the whole way the world operates now.” The industry’s biggest recruiting challenge, however, is the industry’s invisibility. It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about fixing it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixing faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.” https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships For more: Security, Infrastructure Previous Next