FutureEverything

Category: Festivals.

Now in its sixteenth year, Manchester’s FutureEverything festival has announced yet another original and innovative line-up of events for May.

Formerly known as FutureSonic, this is the essential place to find out what’s on the horizon in creative new technologies and digital culture. FutureEverything 2011 brings the future into the present through art, music and ideas.

The Umbro Design Studio and 4 Piccadilly Place will form the creative hub of the festival, but with exhibits spilling out across the city.

The festival has three strands: art, music and the popular conference, which explores new ideas for our digital world.

This year’s music programme is its most diverse ever with highlights including an evening with GRAMMY award-winning Steve Reich performing with the Royal Northern College orchestra; exclusive one-off live film soundtrack realisations with BBC Radio 1’s Rob Da Bank re-scoring King Kong and 65daysofstatic re-scoring Silent Running; Brooklyn’s Das Racist giving their first UK performance, and hotly tipped bands such as LA’s Warpaint, Beach House, and Gang Gang Dance.

Clubbers will be covered with FutureEverything teaming up and showcasing various underground nights over the weekend including live session with Kyle Hall, Daedelus, Martyn and Alex Smoke.

Highlights from the art programme include: the world premiere of a one-to-one, reality bending performance by Brighton film-art collective Me and The Machine and the Data Dimension art exhibition looking at ways in which artists and individuals can creatively visualise, personalise and make sense of streams of data This includes Nicolas Felton’s Annual Reports of everyday personal interactions, Nadeem Haidary’s posters revealing the nutritional content of food in art and presentations from Google and BBC Data Art projects. All art exhibitions are free, some require booking.

Emotional computing, the digital self and the integration of digital technology within our cities are all topics on the agenda for the two-day FutureEverything Conference. With questions such as ‘how is journalism shaping and being shaped by open data?’ and ‘what does collaborative media offer for communities?’ being debated.

On May 12 half of the conference programme will be dedicated to Open Data and the continuation of the FutureEverything pioneered, Open Data Cities project. All these explore how relationships between people and their environments are set to change in an increasingly digital world.

Full festival passes cost £180, day passes £120. This includes entry to the music events.

To buy tickets please visit the FutureEverything website.