FutureEverything

On Friday I opened and closed the Futurity Long Conversation event at Transmediale10, a 9 hour marathon conversation event, by introducing a new theory of time (‘Geek Time’) and unpicking the Transmediale theme of Futurity.

Opening the Futurity Long Conversation

With my tongue only slightly in my cheek, I started by introducing a new theory of time, ‘Geek Time’.

Geek Time is when everything imaginable is instantanly available at a single click. In Geek Time no one decides on the end of a story before putting pen to paper. They start in the middle and move backwards and forwards, editing, recombining. Now the future arrives in new releases and new versions, nothing is totally new, there is only code that is reworked and rewritten. Chatting with David Link, he pointed out that debugging is a continuous process of back fixes, and so Geek Time (aka Version Time) is a totally different way to get to the future than through grand visions and linear progress.

Technology shapes our world and sense of time, just as religion has in the past. Centuries ago, clocks in town squares created a shared sense of time and led to our sense of the ‘public’. More recently, train timetables led to standard national time and ultimately to timezones and the globalised world. Futurologists would tell us Geek Time is rewiring our world once again.

I also wanted to unpick the Transmediale theme of Futurity. Today, we are obsessed with the future, with predictions, and visions of unending and unstoppable technological progress.

It is hard to believe simple predictions of technological progress. There is a famous essay by Walter Benjamin, in which he describes the Angel of History blown along by the wind of progress, looking backwards in horror at the rubble and wreckage of history piling up behind. I gave a twist to this image, as today the Angel of History is looking towards the future, its face frozen in horror at the rubble and wreckage of the future piling up before it – mountains of waste, polluted air, melting glaciers.

The aim of FutureEverything is to ‘bring the future into the present’, we are less interested in futurology and proclamations on the future. To ‘bring the future into the present’ means to give an experience of the future. We ask artists and designers to create projects that enable people to experience today an aspect of a possible future. These are playful experiments that allow us to inhabit the future today. They are seeds, grafting possible futures onto the here and now. Walter Benjamin said that the way to brush history against the grain is to “give an experience of the past”. Similarly, we “give an experience of the future” to break us out of the continuum of the present.

An example is our Environment 2.0 project with the Met Office in 2009. This involved experiments in new participatory ways of observing the environment seeking to generate mass participation in environmental monitoring. One project involved bubble blowing games to measure air flow and the urban heat island phenomenon simultaneously across the city, giving the Met Office access to datasets they could not collect in any other way. There was a big vision, that we could collaborate together to create a global observatory of one billion eyes. But the projects themselves were more small and humble, aiming to try things out and sow a seed.

Our current project involves seeking the make Manchester the UK’s first Open Data City. In this the stakes are higher, as we are no longer only experienting and trying things out. Here we are leading policy and technology development, and have to access that there will be real outcomes and implications we cannot control, both good and bad. Bringing the present into the future is more than a game, and once the genie is out of the bottle there is not putting it back.

I ended my part of the Futurity Long Conversation with an anecdote on weather forecasting, which was an interest of my partner in the conversation, David Link. The Environment 2.0 projects were weather dependent. I had a direct line to the chief forecaster at the Met Office, and was fed regular updates from different climate models. I interpreted these and wrote regular updates on the FutureEverything website. One of the senior scientists at the Met Office had already agreed to work as an artist on the project. I asked my Met contact if I was a weather forecaster now, and he told me that yes I was. So now I have “weather forecaster” on my CV.

A weather forecaster is like a futurologist. They make predictions on the future based on information from various models. Bringing the future into the present is different. It goes to the heart of the FutureEverything ethos, which is social change.

I was master of ceremonies for Transmediale’s Futurity Long Conversation. It was a long day for me, opening the event, and then closing it 9 hours later. Overall it was a great event, and an inventive format that was new to me. It aimed to create a more open ended way of addressing the future and the challenges we face, to force us out of our slumber. Overall I am undecided how successful it was … time will tell.

The Futurity Long Conversation event at Transmediale10 was in Berlin on Friday 5 Feb 2010.

This has been great start to 2010 for FutureEverything with the news that we have been awarded the prestigious Lever Prize 2010. This is the second year in a row we have been in contention for this major award, as we were runners up in 2009, and winner in 2010.

Lever Prize 2010 Ceremony

The quality of the other shortlisted organisations was phenomenal, so we were delighted to walk away as winner. The Lever Prize is awarded by top business leaders following a rigorous selection process, which includes a Dragon’s Den-style interview with CEOs of international companies. This makes it more special, as we have long had fantastic support within the arts community, and for business leaders to also give such a strong vote of support shows that we must be doing something right.

Success in the Lever Prize is the cherry on the cake in what is already an incredible time for us.

FutureEverything has transformed in the last few years, moving from the outer fringes of cutting edge digital culture, into centre stage. And we have been able to do this without compromising our vision or our edge. This is because the world has moved closer to us, giving us the opportunity to work with more people at a bigger scale.

The new name, FutureEverything, captures our broader vision and ambition. The new name makes it easier for people to understand what it is we do. As a result more people seem to want to work with us.

The Lever Prize is a prestigious award of international significance awarded by CEOs of global companies based in England’s North West. In addition to the trophy and £10,000 cash prize, we now have the opportunity to work with a list of top businesses, which includes leaders in areas close to our own heart, such as architecture and mobile communications.

The snow was not able to disrupt the ceremony, which took place on the day of heaviest snowfall in the UK for 25 years. This just gave us a great photo opportunity, which is why there is a snowman on the shoulder of the Lever Prize CEO, Geoffrey Piper.

This award belongs to everyone in FutureEverything’s community, all our friends, artists and partners, its yours too!

Snowman and the Lever Prize 2010

Thanks from me and all the team to North West Business Leadership Team and Arts & Business.

Typical for the FutureEverything ethos, the only time I spent in Second Life was when I was running a series of Second Life events – the virtual meetings in Second Life leading up to the Social Technologies Summit at Futuresonic 2008.

I only visited 4 times, once for each of my 4 events – which was kind of strange, but not unusual, working out how it all works, in real time, at the same time as leading the event and hosting discussion.

Now lots of people are telling me Second Life is over, losing users by the minute.

Glad then that we dipped our toe in the water while it was still hot, with our virtual Futuresonic meetings in 2008.

Each year FutureEverything commissions and presents artworks on themes related to society, the city, environmental sustainability and technology, and plays a leading role in international debates in contemporary art and digital culture.

The festival also features a special focus on an annual theme. In 2010 the annual theme is The City Experiment – Doing It Together. More on Art themes here and Conference themes here.

Cities can be seen as laboratories, as test beds, as accelerators. The festival will highlight urban transformation, when we see the world in different ways, when we experiment with the ways we work, play, create and relate with one another. Manchester has long been seen as a city of experimentation. Today it is home to Europe’s biggest experiment in creating a future city, with major initiatives including MediaCityUK, Corridor Manchester and the Sharp Project.

FutureEverything is world renowned for pioneering work in mobile and locative media, and in 2010 it will look again at mobile and locative arts in the age of the iPhone and Android.

FutureEverything is proposing that Manchester becomes an openData City, following the example of cities such as Vancouver and committing to making public data freely available. Cities have become vast repositories and producers of information, does the opening of these data sources inform and change the way the city evolves? Join us in exploring how this can ignite innovation and enable transparent governance, and so leverage further development.

Adam Greenfield highlights a danger of losing creativity, energy and diversity in networked cities. Cities bring different things and people together, creating a clash of cultures and systems. Social media does the opposite, bringing similar things and people closer together, creating affinity groups. FutureEverything has created the Diversity Groups challenge to invite developers, artists and thinkers to put the edge and innovation back into the networked city.

Public realm experiments combining built environment and digital infrastructure are happening in Manchester at a mass scale. The built environment is increasingly responsive to human and environmental factors as networks of sensors and actuators pervade the networked city. The city is a living organism which continually adjusts and adapts, an ongoing experiment.

Data visualisation enables people to interpret complexity. This makes huge datasets accessible and meaningful. FutureEverything will present the state of the art, and invites visual artists and games designers to create new interfaces.

FutureEverything is exploring a new model of global event, involving networked satellite events around the globe, and distant collaboration between a central city and the remote sites. The vision is that this model will provide an entirely kind of Globally Networked Event (GloNet), reducing the need to fly in participants.

FutureEverything is collaborating in the launch of the UK’s first FabLab. Rapid prototyping blurs the boundary between the digital and physical realm. In the near future, physical objects will be able to be printed at home using standard devices. At the festival there will be a FabLab Art Challenge with 18 artists challenged to create an artwork in 8 hours (apply online soon).

Other themes include Reality Mining and Community Sensing. Interpreting past behaviours that predict future action is nothing new, but the advent of sensor networks that can collect vast amount of complex information regarding preference, spatial and contextual habits has ushered in the possibility of determining how people will behave in future scenarios. This machine based determinism challenges our notion of free will.

Finally, launching the international centenary celebrations of the birth of Marshall McLuhan, FutureEverything asks the question “what didnt he predict?”

Drew Hemment / Creative Director (November 2009)

A new plan for residencies of creatives between Sendai and Manchester has been made following a visit by Mr. Gen Amano from Japan this week.

In March I was invited to Sendai in Japan to speak at the Sendai Creative Forum  - Local to Global, Global to Local about FutureEverything and its impact on the city of Manchester. View my blog post here.

Sendai Creative Forum 2009

A return visit took place this week, with my host in Japan, Mr. Gen Amano, the Director of Industry Promotion from The City of Sendai, visiting Manchester to develop a partnership between the cities.

Sendai is a regional capital to the north of Tokyo, sharing many similarities with Manchester. It has the 3rd strongest creative industries sector in Japan, and is 1st for music.

Gen Amano is leading efforts to build the creative industries in Sendai, and his idea is to do this through a partnership with FutureEverything.

The plan is to establish a programme of residencies / exchanges between FutureEverything (Manchester/May) and the new Occur festival (Sendai/October). Our aim is to showcase creative visionaries, with the focus on partnering artists and creative organisations in the two cities. We also plan to stage a remote collaboration event during FutureEverything and Occur.

Together we did the rounds of the key people working in Manchester who can help him in his efforts, including Northwest Vision and Media, NWDA, MIDAS, Manchester Digital and Manchester Digital Development Agency.

It was great to catch up with Amanosan, and I am looking forward to building the collaboration between our two cities. (Thanks to Katie Gallagher from MIDAS for her help during the visit.)

On 3rd December we launched the revamped EVNTS Network at a joint event with Manchester Social Media Cafe.

This was a coming together of two communities, the independent arts and music creatives from EVNTS, and the social media digerati from Manchester Social Media Cafe.

Hugh Garry from BBC Radio was guest speaker, and he joined the dots between the two worlds, comparing his experience in running music events with his experience of working in social media. He talked about his long history as a club promoter, and how he had built a community for his club in just the same way that he now builds communities online. Garry is currently responsible for driving digital creativity at Radio 1, overseeing all new media projects and inspiring a team of producers to push the boundaries of innovation.

EVNTS is a network of North West creatives working in events, music and the arts. The EVNTS Meetings are a series of regular gatherings, open to everybody working in the creative industries and beyond, to come together to network, collaborate and share.

Since its introduction in 2005, EVNTS has grown from a strand of the FutureEverything festival (formerly Futuresonic), and into a community of creative people who meet year round.

During the festival, EVNTS presents a programme of independently run music and art events across the city, showcasing new and groundbreaking talent. It gives the opportunity for more people to participate in the festival, and enables artists to get their work seen and heard, plus a limited number are awarded funding assessed by a jury of industry experts.

In 2008, EVNTS expanded into becoming a series of networking meetings throughout the year, and in 2009 FutureEverything has collaborated with Northwest Vision & Media to enhance the network through a series of speaker led presentations and workshops. Each EVNTS meeting will be designed specifically to offer a platform of support and advice to those who wish to get involved in the festival and to help develop the burgeoning creative economy within the region.