Artists have dreamt up a ‘museum of the future’ as a part of this weekend’s FutureEverything festival.
FutureEverything is a pioneering festival dedicated to cutting-edge design and technology within the arts, and this year’s ‘City Fictions’ collaborates with its audience to bring the future to Manchester.
Last night saw the launch of City Fictions, a series of pop-up events taking over Manchester this weekend, March 29 and 30.
Visitors are invited to become the ‘smart citizens’ of this virtual world and interact with visions of the future, which will feature talking lamp posts, pioneering data art, audiovisual installations and family-friendly workshops, all running from 10am – 6pm over the weekend.
Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council, spoke of the ‘peculiar Manchester edginess’ of the festival at the National Football Museum launch event.
The founder of FutureEverything festival Drew Hemment added: “We are one of only three cities in the world to use this kind of technology.”
FutureEverything was established in Manchester in 1995, every year it aims to inspire discussion and exploration of ideas through experiencing new ideas for the future.
It focuses on art, design music and performance as well as new technology and lively social experimentation.
In recent years, there has been an increase in intrusive surveillance and an erosion of privacy rights in favour of ‘big data’, City Fictions shows the collaborative counter-culture emerging as an artistic and technological response to this provocation.
City Fictions will build a new urban space from the imagination of its architects and participants.
In the new public square in NOMA (North Manchester), street objects will talk to passers-by, a three-course meal will be ‘cooked’ in a petri dish and a futuristic hair and make-up parlour will draw patterns on your face to disguise it from facial recognition software.
As part of its playful exploration of our prospective realities, FutureEverything has also published a sports newspaper from the as-yet-hypothetical 2018 season.
Dated April 18 2018, ‘Today Sports’ shows match analytics – with Barcelona employing ‘perpetual motion’ defence against Manchester City’s ‘The Spinal Trap’ attack.
The newspaper also details ‘match hacking’ scandals and a UEFA evaluation on a bionic arm.
A free public telecom service will be provided by ‘NoPayPhone’ which will redistribute spare free minutes from mobile contracts to public phones.
Other FutureEverything events over the weekend included ‘Data As Culture’ – a series of workshops to explore the ideas raised by this years’ festival – and a live programme of audiovisual events across the city.
The Royal Northern College of Music is hosting some of the highlights including: a thousand year-long musical composition, music played by everyday objects, such as alarm clocks and pens, and a live performance by local –cum-international cult electronic composer Evian Christ.
The full programme can be found at futureeverything.org.
Image courtesy of louisemakesstuff with thanks
