FutureEverything, the Manchester-based international festival and conference of digital culture and ideas, returns for its 19th edition in March with the theme ‘Tools for Unknown Futures’.
The ‘festival as a laboratory’, which features programmes of participatory artworks and innovative live music to support and complement a two-day conference, will this year look to uncover how new tools, devices and systems are transforming how we live and work. The festival launches on 27 March, with the conference taking place at Manchester Town Hall, 31 March – 1 April.
The 2014 art programme will explore the festival theme through two major strands: City Fictions and Data As Culture. Described as a pop-up ‘city’ where ‘ideas for a future city will come to life’, the City Fictions strand is located in Manchester’s new cultural quarter, NOMA.
Highlights include a museum displaying ‘objects from the future rather than relics from the past’ and sentient street furniture and talking lamp posts as part of PAN Studio’s award-winning Hello Lamp Post installation. At Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle Anon Salon, visitors will be able to receive a geometric makeover that renders them invisible to CCTV facial recognition software, while Ben Dalton’s NoPayPhone service will provide free communication from public telephones through the redistribution of donated mobile phone plan minutes.
Data, culture, art
For Data As Culture, an exhibition and workshop series curated by Shiri Shalmy, FutureEverything will partner with Open Data Institute in London and Lighthouse in Brighton to present a multi-venue project across the three cities. The project will explore the relationship between data and art, and look at how it can be used as a tool for artists through works by James Bridle, Sam Meech, YoHa and Matthew Fuller, and Thickear. Meech will also lead a workshop session exploring the ideas and techniques used in the creation of his work, Punchcard Economy.
The festival’s Live programme of music, sound art and performance works includes several artists who work across the visual and sound art realms. Artist and musician Jem Finer will discuss his Artangel commission Longplayer, while sections of the thousand-year-long composition will be performed by voices from The Joyful Company of Singers and Manchester Chamber.
The programme also sees the world premiere of Projectors, by composer, performance artist and videographer Martin Messier. The work uses everyday objects such as alarm clocks, pens and a sewing machine to produce densely-textured sound patterns. Also being premiered is The Hall, by lighting designer and live visual artist Emmanuel Baird (EMN) and engineer David Leonard. This new installation piece investigates how we perceive scale and distance.
FutureEverything Festival 2014, 27 March – 1 April, various venues, Manchester. Early bird Conference tickets: £75 + £5.15 booking fee, available until 28 February. futureeverything.org
More on a-n.co.uk:
New collaboration takes sound for a spin – Rob Allen on a collaboration between sound artist Scanner and textile designer Ismini Samanidou as part of FutureEverything 2013.
In it for the duration – Paul Glinkowski talks to Jem Finer about his ongoing project Longplayer, and to his collaborator James Lingwood, co-director of Artangel (a-n Magazine archive, July 2004).
