After 15 years at the forefront of art, music and ideas, Futuresonic has returned as FutureEverything.
FutureEverything 2010 brings together some of the world’s most visionary thinkers, artists and musicians to celebrate the creativity and innovation that is driving social change in the digital age.
Our mission is to bring the future into the present. In times of change there are fleeting, precious moments when everything is up for grabs, and anything seems possible. In our festival we attempt to conjure up such moments of unbounded potential, at once momentary, turbulent and exhilarating.
New for 2010 is the FutureEverything Award, a major new international award celebrating outstanding innovation in art, society or technology, awarded by an international jury and an open vote of the FutureEverything Community.
Each year, FutureEverything runs year-round digital innovation labs. The labs engage our world wide community in devising and testing innovations in art, society and technology. They feed in and out of the FutureEverything festival, which acts as a living lab for participatory experiments.
This year we have devised GloNet, a new kind of globally networked event, part of a project investigating the creative potential of unlimited connectivity.
FutureEverything is among the organisations leading the charge towards Open Data Cities in the UK. We are championing a global movement calling for the opening up of publicly held datasets in accessible formats.
The City Experiment is a thread running through the festival and conference. Cities can be seen as laboratories, as ongoing experiments. The festival explores our evolving urban condition through a series of urban interventions and artworks visualising the city in imaginative ways.
We are working in partnership to actively explore and shape Manchester’s future, and our focus on place-making and reimagining urban spaces has added meaning in this time of great change for the city.
In the year we launch a new model of global event, it is fitting that FutureEverything 2010 highlights outstanding art from far flung, remarkable places in the world.
This is true of the music programme, which features the thrilling junkyard sonics of Congolese band Konono No.1 alongside Syrian folk-pop musical legend, Omar Souleyman. In the art programme, the artists hail from across the globe, from China to Iraq.
Welcome to the inaugural FutureEverything festival.
Drew Hemment, Director