FutureEverything 2015 - 20th Anniversary Festival
Published On Tue 24 Feb 2015 by Roddy Isles
One of the world’s leading festivals of ideas - founded and organised by Dr Drew Hemment, an academic from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) - celebrates its 20th anniversary in Manchester this week.
Dr Hemment’s research explores various dimensions of the emerging digital culture, from open data to data art, and also innovation, creativity and research methods. He develops highly collaborative and interdisciplinary forms for research, in which building communities of interest is integral.
In this outward-facing role, he developed the FutureEverything festival as a highly effective, research-led interface between higher education and the creative and digital economy. It has been described by The Guardian as one of the top ten ideas festivals in the world.
The FutureEverything festival in Manchester from February 25th to 28th brings together artists, makers, designers, theorists, policy makers and musicians to share insight on our future society and culture, and to put new ideas to the test through art and design experiments.
The FutureEverything Conference returns to the neo-gothic splendour of Manchester Town Hall on 26th and 27th February. FutureEverything 2015’s conference theme explores the unimaginable ways our lives have been transformed by the digital turn over the last twenty years, and what we can expect in the decades to come.
The Festival Lab features a week-long programme of research prototypes and experiments spanning data art, digital identity and connected mobility turning the city into a space for play and experimentation, with people from across the world participating in the new Global FUTR Lab.
The Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) is the Hub for the Art, Live and Filmprogrammes, as the two organisations continue a long-term artistic partnership with a co-curated programme of installations, performances, screenings and new commissions.
The Opening Gala presents a double-bill, commissioned and produced by FutureEverything (in collaboration with British Council and RNCM), featuring new work by three of the most exciting and compelling electronic artists working today - Memo Akten: Simple Harmonic Motion for 16 Percussionists (new commission, world première) and Koreless & Emmanuel Biard: The Well (new commission, UK première).
The inaugural FutureEverything Film programme presents a selection of shorts and
feature-length documentaries that explore the impact of digital culture on our current age.
Dr Hemment said, “FutureEverything and University of Dundee work closely together to develop programmes and interventions that feed in and out of the festival. FutureEverything engages many thousands of people in festivals, art projects, and innovation labs that span data art, service design and smart cities. The academic community at Dundee play an integral role in several FutureEverything programmes, and both the research and these programmes are enhanced by the collaboration.”
On this year’s festival theme he said, “FutureEverything has championed digital art and culture for 20 years. The last eighteen months have brought with them a strong sense of the end of a narrative, as centralisation, inequality, electronic waste, and loss of privacy at an unprecedented scale have challenged our assumptions about the universally positive effects of digital innovation. This year the festival and conference ask what now for some of the foundational values and narratives of digital culture.”
Dr Hemment is an artist, curator and academic researcher. Over 20 years, his work in digital culture and innovation has been covered by New York Times, BBC and NBC and recognised by awards from the arts, technology and business sectors, including Lever Prize 2010 (Winner) and Prix Ars Electronica 2008 (Honorary Mention). Projects include the emoto data visualisation of the London 2012 Olympics and Open Data Cities / DataGM, the Greater Manchester Datastore. Drew is a member of the Editorial Board of the Leonardo journal of art, science and technology. In 1999, awarded a PhD at Lancaster University, in 2009 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK), and in 2010 an Eyebeam resident (USA).
Roddy Isles
Head of Press
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