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. The 2010 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, in partnership with Adam Greenfield, the Serendipity 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?"
FutureEverything 2010 takes place 12-15 May in Manchester England.
Drew Hemment / Creative Director (November 2009)