Making Future Work
“The movement you need is on your shoulders” said Sir Paul McCartney, somewhat cryptically, and it was in that spirit that I found myself at Making Future Work, a day long seminar hosted by Nottingham's Broadway cinema, dedicated as much to the tools available to artists as to art itself. To kick off, Steve Mapp, CEO of the Broadway gave an introductory laudatory statement, speaking in small terms regarding the great achievements of our priceless local cinema.
Regine Debatty, the brains behind the wemakemoneynotart blog, kicked us off with some great rain gags whilst Aram Bartholl, an architect who now explores the space between the real world and the digital one, inserting Google map points into real life spaces and World of Warcraft name tags above real life humanoids roaming the streets. Evan Roth, Aram's co-contributor to the F.A.T. (Free Art & Technology) collective, whose baseball cap and stickered laptop disclose his origins as a street artist, showed his concern is the technology available to anyone looking to make any kind of art these days. From open source programming tools and the cheap availability of equipment to project laser graffiti on to a skyscraper, there was even the touching account of creating Eyewriter which allows a fellow artist who can only move his eyes - due to Lou Gehrig's disease - to write graffiti again.
After F.A.T.'s two representatives had shown us something of their own work, they set us participants a small task, to group together and discuss the best way to credit each person for the work done on multimedia projects, which is no simple task considering the large numbers of people who may contribute small pieces of code or graphics to a much larger project. Nothing much was achieved of course but it was all part of the collective group aesthetic pervading the day.
The afternoon took a more technical path as Richard Birkin brought us the work of Mudlark, a group dedicated to the freedom of data and its application. Showing data regarding the number of trees in Manchester, bus timetables and hills; doesn’t sound especially riveting but just wait until the next time you need to get to work on time. Next, Andy Gracie, as close as we got to a mad scientist (so far at least), who's wheelhouse is the link between biology and technology. Andy is currently breeding a type of fly that can live on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, as well as building several animal/system interfaces in which creatures must interact with technology in order for the ecology to function. I'm sure I’ll see him on the news in a few years.
IBI, the Institute for Boundary Interactions, take Mudlark's premises in a different direction altogether. Their interest is in how technology can interact with our day to day social surroundings, and to that end showcased two devices that register digital feedback to human participants. Firstly the L.O.S.T. Stone, a series of sensors and vibrating arm and finger pads that feedback to the wearer any fellow user in the nearby area who may share similar interests. Secondly the Tweet Platform, this time reading geo-located tweets from the surrounding area and transmitting them through speakers attached to one of IBI's backpack. We took this second device for a test drive, from the Broadway to the Contemporary, and it was surreal to say the least to walk through the streets, under thunder and lightning, with the female announcer re-tweeting how 'furiously underwhelmed' someone was with the film they watched last night.
At the Contemporary, the first presentation came from Brendan and Brendan, who create interactive research installations using simple tools such as the Xbox Kinetic camera system to track the moments of users and create small stop-film animations. They also showed us a video they created for Johnny Cash's song 'Ain't No Grave' in which 250,000 applicants from 172 countries submitted a frame each that was then turned into a complete music video. Finally, the curtain fell with Hetain Patel and Barret Hodgson, who work together using live video screening combined with dance and the spoken word to create living, disassociated art pieces such as a simultaneous screening of Hetain's father giving us a guided tour through his car modification plant. On the right, Hetain himself re-creates this live, with no props, simply miming his father's words.
Making Future Work was an eye opener to a layman such as I am. It's hard to see past Facebook and Ipads to the real heart of the digital revolution, one in which every person has the tools at his disposal to create real, lasting and innovative art, reined in only by your imaginations and the laws particular to the country in which you live in. The line between future and past is blurred and some of what is being done is still firmly rooted in the hands and minds of people like Evan Roth and his metal airport X-Ray plates, which display messages such as 'none of your business' to security staff. But both the creative tools and the means of distributing and receiving them are unarguably changing. It’s a sign for us to make the future work too.
Making Future Work took place at the Broadway Cinema on Friday 8 July 2011.
Making Future Work website
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