Curatorial Statement



Social Networking Unplugged
Drew Hemment

"In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society." ⁽¹⁾
May '68 slogan

Imagine Facebook is unplugged. The reassuring blue background, funwall, pokes and news feeds suddenly disappear, and people are left standing in the middle of a huge dark room, blinking. The FaceBook "friends" look up from their dark computer screens at other people equally dazed and disoriented all around them. Suddenly they need new ways to communicate, and start picking up discarded electronics from the floor - little voice recorders, polaroid cameras, even pens and paper - and devise their own kinds of DIY social networking.

Digital culture burns bright with a vision of being not in isolation but in groups, placing the relations between people first. From the earliest days of the internet social networking was promoted by the net's early adopters. Websites such as FaceBook and MySpace have introduced millions of new people to online social networking, but these sites also centralise web traffic and produce conformity. Futuresonic plans to pull out the plug in order to take the new social spaces apart, see how they work, put them together in new ways, and stage a return to a pioneering, DIY spirit.

Like injecting one substance into another to trigger a chemical reaction, the Social Networking Unplugged theme came from mixing the current interest in virtual worlds and online social networking with a focus on presenting social and participatory artworks in unexpected city spaces. Some artworks directly address online social networking and virtual worlds, others go in search of the social in other ways, such as by playing with expectations around social interaction in public places. Although social networking has been a buzz topic for years, and frontpage news of late, it has not yet inspired much really good art. The artists involved in the exhibition have responded to the theme with some highly original new work. The artworks range from installed gallery pieces to ambient happenings in public space, artworks which occupy online and offline spaces simultaneously, and projects involving the people of Manchester in creating 'free' and 'open' spaces.

Futuresonic is unique in its focus on the city, art and social technologies. During 2003-4, it was involved in early events on mobile and locative arts, taking digital culture out into the streets. For the Futuresonic festival the legacy of this has been a focus on the city and on the social. It has focused on presenting artworks within lived social spaces, and that are inherently participatory and collaborative. It is this that provides the backdrop for the current exhibition.

This is not so dissimilar to the movement in public art away from artists creating monuments to artists creating the spaces between buildings. It offers something different to the gallery-centric, white-cube sociality involved in Bourriaud's relational art, or to the documentary art promoted by Mark Nash (Frieze, April 2008).

Another influence are forms of ambient performance, which likewise intervene in the way social spaces are lived in the city. A new collaborative partnership has been forged with Matt Fenton at Nuffield Theatre Lancaster who has been supporting similar work from a different standpoint: "performance as a space for meeting and encounter, and the politics of the social" ⁽²⁾. This collaboration has helped to shape the exhibition and a linked programme of national activities supported by Arts Council England.

Once in a while a festival theme seems to fulfill a widespread desire to go in deep on a certain topic. For Futuresonic, this was true in 2004 when we staged the first major exhibition with a linked conference and call for proposals on mobile and wireless arts. It is hoped that this year we can achieve something similar for social networking, which has not previously received such a focus in an arts context, by commissioning new artworks and staging a major exhibition and conference, both with an open call for submissions.


Social Technologies

Here art offers new perspectives on the ways in which people collaborate to make or use technology. The exhibition and conference are a part of activities on social arts and technologies at ImaginationLancaster, a major new research lab in England's North West.

Computers have become social interfaces for sharing digital media and collaborating to build online communities and folksonomies. Social technologies create an extension of social space, and new ways for people to find the stuff that interests them, link up with others, and share. Social technologies can refer to technologies created and maintained by social networks, such as communities of developers and users working collaboratively with open source tools. They include tools and applications that enable people to connect, share and interact, such as blogs, instant messenger, social software such as Flickr, FaceBook and Jaiku, and the internet itself.

This runs much deeper than FaceBook. When you use your credit card, you are using a social technology. Each time we buy something we let the company know where we are and what we are buying. An electronic profile is created for each one of us and the aggregated information is used to shape services and select the products on the shelves. This in turn shapes the choices available to us, and the society we live in.

The city is also being transformed. In one moment we can be sat on a bench, logged on to a wireless node in the park, and roaming through the virtual space of the internet, chatting intimately to people many thousands of miles away. The nature of the public sphere, as a place where people can congregate and meet, is changing. We need to conceive of new kinds of architecture, where a fleeting experience of city space is entangled with the folksonomies of the web.

The social is more than a set of preferences or links entered online. There is also the dark matter of unknown composition that cannot easily be counted or given an IP address, but which we know is there because of its gravitational effects on visible culture.

What distinguishes social technologies is that they are bottom up and many-to-many instead of one-to-one or one-to-many. They can be seen as a part of a major cultural and social shift. And yet at the same time we also see how electronic communication can isolate us, as more and more people drown in a deluge of email that generates stress, even reducing IQ - puncturing the rose-tinted view that life is 'more social.' Additionally, 'online communities' are based upon an artificial equivalence between 'users' which obscures power relationships and issues of ownership.

In all parts of the globe people are seeking to open up or hold onto places to meet and communicate freely, online and offline. In India we see emergent kinds of community media, in South Korea new social uses of the mobile internet, and in Brazil the spread of 'cultural hotspots'.

The festival and conference will also mark 40 years since people took to the streets of Paris in 1968 calling for society to be abolished. We live in a very different world to that of '60s radicalism, one in which software developers are already capable of constructing a political reality. Futuresonic will assess the claims of todays digital culture as a potential catalyst of radical change amidst wider currents of radicalism.

Join us as we go in search of the social.


Web 2.0...
I take part
you take part
he takes part
we take part
you all take part
they profit. ⁽³⁾
(May '68 slogan remixed)



Drew Hemment is Director and founder of Futuresonic, established 1995, CEO of FutureEverything CIC, the non-profit creative studio which runs the festival, and Associate Director of ImaginationLancaster, a major new research lab at Lancaster University.

The exhibition would not have been possible without the generous support of Arts Council England North West through the Grants4Arts and National Activities schemes, Piccadilly Partnership and Manchester City Council.