As one might expect from previous incarnations, this year’s Futuresonic festival was as ambitious and upbeat as ever. Held in and around Manchester city centre from 13th - 17th May it was an eclectic mix of presentations, workshops, performance, artwork, participatory events, and special one-off collaborations. Founded in 1995 by Drew Hemmnet, Futuresonic has its roots firmly plated in digital culture and music, though in recent years the festival’s nature has expanded in all directions meaning, in fact, that this was to be the last installment of the festival under the Futuresonic banner as next year it will be reborn as the bigger, better, brighter, FutureEverything. The re-banding is to highlight the a shifting focus away from music towards the other rapidly developing strands, Art, Evnts and the Summit.
The festival has always sought to gain a better understanding of the impact and use that digital technologies have upon daily experience, attempting to define and augment an awareness of a growing digital presence that permeates and affects our physical actions. In this Futuresonic has persistently stood up to the big questions, attempting to define the criteria of our frame of reference in human experience and how we can make the overlapping digital and physical environments more tangible and open for interaction. The technologies under scrutiny are rapidly progressing and so there is a certain sense of urgency at each event to grasp a level of comprehension that enables an innovative extension of their use towards a more desirable situation.
The concerns surrounding ecological issues and sustainability in this year’s festival have also been present in other large festivals such as ISEA 08, Transmediale 09 or our very own attempts at Mute in their collaboration with FACT Liverpool within the last year and are an extension of the current debates about locative or digital technologies and social media. In 2004 we saw the beginnings of a paradigm shift for Futuresonic towards a heightened interest in mobile and locative technologies with the ‘Mobile Connections’ theme. This was extended in 2008 with a detailed exploration of social technologies. The highly successful ‘Social Unplugged’ theme poked and prodded at these new participative platforms to gain fresh perspectives on their use and explore how the modes of relationship building are being shaped by them. Environment 2.0 can then be seen as the next in a series, exploring the use of locative or digital technologies and combining them with social participatory platforms for the better understanding of our environment. ‘Environment’ can be taken as our frame of reference as well as in relation to ecological or green issues. In light of the previous exploration of the mass participatory nature of social networking technologies there was a desire to expand upon strategies that best cultivate the producer power of peer-to-peer interaction to increase awareness of environmental issues and sustainability.
The backbone to the entire event has become the Social Technologies Summit. It was an expansive three day speculative exercise in imagining the future of digital culture. This was only its fourth outing, but however new, it is a thread of the festival that is growing with each successive year. In comparison to other festivals I find that this conference gathers a wider range of participants, including the slightly controversial representation of the corporate face. The stage is open to academics, bloggers, art practitioners, activists, and corporate types a like, and so, as is its nature, the Summit gave a platform to nearly every topic in the bloggoshpere. The streams of conversation were loosely gathered into sets entitled; digital futures, identity and trust, mobile, environment 2.0 and the semantic web: cultural algorithms, out of which evolved some abstracted threads of discussion that I will attempt to lay out below.
The man with a plan, Jamais Cascio, kicked off the proceedings on Wednesday night with his presentation ‘Hacking the Earth’, setting the fundamental overtone for the entire event he boldly went for the big questions. As the title of this year’s theme suggests we gathered in Manchester to highlight a climate in crisis and speculate upon how we can use new technologies to implement change and lessen its effects. However no-one else spoke as directly as Jamais about the large scale issues of climate change, in his speech he warned of the very real danger in which we find ourselves and introduced new practices within geo-engineering that could be implemented to ease the impact of global warming such as, stratospheric sulfate injection or ocean fertilization to trigger algae blooms, all of which he believes can give us a breathing space in which to achieve the long term goal of ecological sustainability. Although it was at times a rather frightful and intense presentation Jamais did not come across as a melodramatic soothsayer but instead presented a face of realistic tech-optimism.
On Thursday morning Stowe Boyd, a fervent blogger on the theory and practice of social web application design and the impact they are having upon the changing patterns of social interaction, gave his talk on “Social tools: the shape of future culture” in which he set out an argument for the increased use of open social platforms and a more public life in the pursuit of our goals. Boyd spoke of how internet populations are moving away from mainstream media models towards decentralized participative communities through the increased used of social networking tools. In his words we are developing a new form of tribalism where we follow a collection constant information threads fed through a microblogging stream format (such as Twitter). Through maintaining a level of presence on the web (eg: continuous status updates), laying a thought process bare for others to pick up and respond, Boyd believes that users will increase the potential level of opportunity in becoming connected with a more localized group. In his view the benefits of an open mind outweigh the concerns of identity formation or an intrusion of privacy.
Boyd was not alone in his encouragement of a life led in a more public fashion. Adam Greenfield was a strong supporter of extreme openness and the cultivation of personal data, believing that the possible uses of such output can be advantageous for all and that we should move towards a state of ubiquitous computing through networked urbanism. His talk entitled ‘The city is here for you to use’ advocated a high level of transparency, making data freely available for everyone at all times. In giving people the tools to cultivate a larger pool of data it would enable them to have a stronger sense of their locality and become more actionable within the city. Greenfield advanced thoughts beyond mobile phones as the main locative technology towards networked or ‘smart’ buildings. A fully networked urbanism were information processing is throughly integrated into everyday objects. Much like Stowe Boyd’s idea of a new tribalism, Greenfield suggested that as a result of such a system, human settlements and dwellings would manifest within and across the meshed urban landscape.
Throughout the festival there were many proposals like this towards successfully harnessing the productive power of peer-to-peer interaction in the hope that it would help to instill an awareness in the general population and therefore initiate some level of change. The reflex is to think big in terms of climate change, however this technique can only achieve so much as it is difficult for an individual to feel moved to adjust their movements when trying to relate with an incomprehensible level of global action. Speculation began to fall upon the consideration of how the situation of small scale personal experiences could be inhabited to bring about a better balance in the impact of global forces and local understanding, at a digestible level of interaction there is the tangible possibility for positive change in the daily rituals and beliefs of a population. Speakers such as Greenfield, Boyd (and later Tom Ilube, Ben Smith and Simon Cross in their talks about the semantic web) all posed the same question, if people are given the means to cultivate data and network it with other groups what would happen? What actions would emerge from such practices?
Usman Haque presented a project that enables such a local-to-local and many-to-many level of interaction through the establishment a new web service called Pachube.com where members can upload real time data from sensors connected to objects and devices around the world. All data can then be shared or connected through the site meaning that some level of interaction can take place between remote environments, they can essentially talk or communicate with one another triggering responsive actions. In a second project Haque managed to delve a little further into the idea of building a networked community and the social responsibilities entailed. Titled Natural Fuse, the idea begins rather simply; a plant is hooked up to an electricity outlet switch which can only provide as much electricity as the plant can offset in terms of carbon emissions. The idea may grow and is intended to become a city-wide network of electronically controlled plants and outlets that act as energy gates or a shared carbon sync circuit breakers. The plant is controlled, (that is, watered, fed etc) in relation to the level of energy consumption. Should too much electricity be used, the circuit will break and the plant will die. In a network users must co-operate in their energy consumption so that the plants can thrive and they may continue to consume. The users are mutually dependent of one another and have a strong level social responsibility to maintain, because, should one user be greedy and use up the systems allowed energy supplies, another users plant begin to die as it is cut off from its nutrition. Eventually the networks capacity for production diminishes and all suffer as a result.
“For me it’s a really significant step because it’s like putting the “ethics” into [locative] media,” (Drew Hemmnet)
The idea of mutually beneficial actions are a key to Christian Nold’s project ‘Bijlmer Euro’. He is working with an estate in the Bijlmer, a area just outside of Amsterdam, to develop an alternative to local currency that supports local growth and works in conjunction with the Euro. Although still in the stages of infancy Nold presented the idea of sticking recycled RFID tags to Euro notes, these then would be used as a local currency. Local shops would then offer discount and advantage points to customers using local services and buying local goods. Over time it is hoped that the use of the currency would affect the relationships between the residents and develop innovative types of local economy.
On a final point just to round everything up. There was an issue raised on more than one occasion throughout the festival - that our concerns and solutions remain esoteric; only a small percentage of the world’s population is aware or effected by the many topics covered over this four day period. As I mentioned earlier there is a sense of urgency surrounding all such events, and the sincere enthusiasm of the participants in their need to discuss the topic on hand with others often comes to a somewhat desperate point - a moment for those to reach out for help in finding a viable solution to very immediate concerns - how do we make the positive change required and how can we engage a larger audience? I think that the ideas and projects discussed here go some way in answering these questions and provide some very provocative images of a future to come.
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