Talkaoke

    Talkaoke

    Talkaoke is a pop up talk show that has been gaining popularity in festivals, clubs, galleries, theatres, conferences and on the street. it consists of an illuminated round table with a host sitting in the middle on a swivel chair. Participants sit around the outside and are passed the microphone whenever they want to talk, […]

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    Podcasts

    Podcasts

    It’s a natural development of the Talkaoke format. We have in house audio and video equipment and expertise to produce podcasts and empower others to create their own. We work with local sound artists and audio editors. Speak to us about your idea and we can help you come up with the best format. We […]

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    Who Wants to Be...?

    Who Wants to Be…?

    Who Wants to Be…? is the ask-the audience game show, where the audience asks the questions, comes up with the answers, and sets the rules! Using two visualisation systems, some gameshow glitz and a visual voting system, a large audience can brainstorm, feedback, and generate the most incredible ideas together. In its simplest form each […]

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    Talkaoke Skills Lab

    Talkaoke Skills Lab

    Talkaoke Skills Lab is a structured creative development programme, where we share our 25 years of experience in creative facilitation, non-hierarchal spaces, emergent development, co-creation and use of technology. Talkaoke Skills Lab is open to artists, students, community leaders, young people and everyone interested in socially engaged creative practice. The sessions cover: facilitation, creative thinking, co-creation […]

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    One Night Grandstand

    One Night Grandstand

      One Night Grandstand: stadium for a night! One Night Grandstand infuses a regular kick-about with the excitement of a football stadium. Games have a live, amplified commentary, floodlighting and stadium style screens above the pitch, complete with sound effects, live motion graphics and action replays. Watch the One Night Grandstand promo video to see […]

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    Creative Facilitation Workshops

    Creative Facilitation Workshops

    Our creative facilitation taster workshop aims to give participants the confidence and creative communication skills useful in any situation. A typical workshop runs for about 1.5 hrs but can be flexible. Quite often a taster workshop will be followed by a regular public Talkaoke session, where workshop participants will get a chance of putting their […]

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    Part and parcel of engagemen in Pendle – 15 years of collaboration with In-Situ and Building Bridges

     

    “Talkaoke is part and parcel of engagement in Pendle”

    – Paul Hartley, In-Situ

    The People Speak have been collaborating with In-Situ and Building Bridges for 15 years, helping the residents and stakeholders of Pendle Borough envisage a better and more connected borough of the future. As part of this ongoing project we have done a number of residencies, trained new Talkaoke hosts and produced events in the areas overlooked by the famous Pendle Hill: from Walkaoke – Talkaoke on the move, to Pendle Under The Hammer – a series of creative consultations with the residents of Colne, Nelson, Barnoldswick and Brierfield to inform the borough council’s corporate plan. Talkaoke is a regular feature of the annual Pendle Festival of Culture.

    “Talkaoke helps us create the space to have challenging, difficult, fun and creative conversations with residents in Pendle. We’ve done hundreds of them in a variety of places – its mobile and flexible to fit into many scenarios. We’ve used Talkaoke in town centres, Council venues, shops, pubs, schools and colleges, outside McDonald’s and online. It’s a really effective tool for exploring all kinds of themes in our embedded work in Pendle; youth voice, climate engagement and psychology, racism, cohesion, creative careers and future of work, Covid and grief, health and wellbeing, mental health. Our ambition is to continue to train up local people who can host it within the community. It enables us to make sure our programme is relevant; we develop the ideas that come up around the table and these continually inform our practice in Pendle”

    – Anna Taylor, Critical Engagement, In-Situ

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    The Aberfeldy Stories project 2025

    This Spring and Summer we are shining a light on people’s stories in our Poplar neighbourhood and beyond, through workshops in creative writing, music making, podcasting, comedy, performance, radio and storytelling.

    Using our emergent approach, we are inviting you to co-design the programme with us. We want to know about your interests, skills you’d like to develop, stories you’d like to tell and ways in which to tell them. Together we will work on creating a film, a podcast series, a book, a music video, a collection of short stories, a radio broadcast, an anthem, a comedy night, a theatre performance, a guided tour… Everything is possible!

    The project will begin in April 2025 with a series of podcasting workshops and more all the way through August, culminating with a big event in September 2025, where you will be able to showcase your work.

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    Climate Encounters at the Talkaoke Table with In Situ, Lancashire

    We have written a blog for our long-term collaborators In Situ on climate change, inequality and climate emotions as part of Climate Lab Pendle. In our writing we explore factors that inform people’s views and feelings about the crisis, mis and dis-information, numbness, neutrality and understanding the barriers we encounter in climate engagement work. 

    Read the full post here.

    
    Visualisation by Christopher Gerhardt at the Inside Out Pendle Talkaoke, 18th Nov 2024
    
    

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    Knowing AI, Knowing U and AIKONIC – Public Voices in AI

    Was a project in collaboration with Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel (Ambient Information Systems) as part of the Public Voices in AI research program that ‘aims to ensure that public voices are front and centre in artificial intelligence research, development and policy’. We set out to understand and help articulate beliefs and concerns about AI held by two groups in Tower Hamlets: clients of Streets of Growth, a charity supporting vulnerable teenagers at risk of diverse harms, and older adult clients of mental health charity MIND.

    What makes AI problematic as a technology is its opacity. The spread of surveillance cameras in the UK was visible to all, especially those that might have felt targeted. But how do you know you’ve been sorted by a system that exists across distant data centres, ‘somewhere in the cloud’? How can you understand its outputs when even its designers might not be able to fully explain them? And how can you discuss all of this with a neighbour when they see entirely different newsfeeds? Of course, the impact is greatest on those who are already vulnerable.

    – Mukul Patel

    ‘A day in the life’ exercise to identify all interactions 
    with technology in a typical day

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    Artistic Residency with Bielefeld University – 2024

    Between 22 and 25 August 2024, The People Speak team – Mikey, Margot and our multilingual host Timna – joined the University of Bielefeld, Germany as part of the public relations project Ö for the CRC1646 Linguistic Creativity in Communication. Over the next 4 years the CRC aims to investigate creativity of the German language. To combine research and public relations the project is using Talkaoke – our interactive talk show format. This year we had the opportunity to run Talkaoke in 4 different contexts: from a facilitation workshop with the Linguistic PhD students to public events in an adult education centre, a festival and at a democracy event at one of the contested public spaces in Bielefeld.

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