This work by Futuresonic & FutureEverything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Futuresonic 2009
Art Programme
http://www.futuresonic.com/art
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Curator's Statement
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
More ambitious and relevant than ever, themes include society, technology and the city plus this year Environment 2.0. The exhibition takes place across Manchester and beyond, with the focal point an exhibition at the CUBE gallery.
The 2009 exhibition is the culmination of three years of activities by Futuresonic in Manchester, Singapore, Lancaster and Berlin which commenced in 2006. It adds an engagement in the environment to the festival's now perennial themes of society, technology and the city, in an exhibition featuring thirty international artists and ten world premiers.
In urban environments in particular we can be insulated from both nature and the consequences of our actions as surely as the tarmac of the road cuts us off from the earth beneath. The Environment 2.0 theme at Futuresonic 2009 explores how innovative approaches to participatory observation and mapping can overcome this separation, when combined with the way the internet and digital media has enabled individuals to produce and share information globally and instantly.
Futuresonic has devised large-scale, participatory mass observation projects on climate and biodiversity in collaboration with the Met Office and Natural History Museum, with featured artists including Christian Nold, Alfie Dennon and Yara El-Sherbini. A focus on participatory artworks continues with an art device for prospecting for oil in the city centre by Jon Cohrs, and a public recital of the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) coordinated by Amy Balkin.
Artists here avoid cliches and address environmental sustainability in ways both forceful and irreverent. Eva Meyer-Keller re-enacts catastrophic weather scenarios using household objects in Handmade, and Kim Abeles' exhibits commemorative plates with images of U.S. presidents, created by exposing the plates to an amount of smog proportional to their environmental records.
Futuresonic has developed a social engagement within its art programme, and in Beuys' Acorns by Ackroyd and Harvey this resonates within a wider art history context. Installing 250 oak saplings grown from artist Joseph Beuys' acorns, they revisit his notion of social sculpture, where the artist is asking dangerous questions, seeking to change the social order.
The exhibition includes artworks which are purely aesthetic, such as Janine Randerson's compelling film Rorschach Clouds, artworks which are conceived directly as social interventions, such as the urban gardening projects of Prayas Abhinav in Petpuja, as well as pieces which arise out of a sustained engagement and dialogue between artists and scientists such as the work of Andrea Polli.
Elin Wikstršm introduces us to wheelchair tag rugby in a conceptual art event and exhibition in which the drama and brutality of the game offers a metaphor for the invasion of non-native species of plants and animals in the year of Darwin's bicentenary, and also a celebration of the sporting prowess of the disabled wheelchair rugby players prior to London 2012.
Several artworks make visible and tangible the outcomes of our actions at a local level, including aesthetic and conceptual design objects by Usman Haque and Megan MacMurray & Angela Pablo, and documentation of HeHe's award winning Nuage Vert which visualises energy usage using a laser projection on a power station vapour cloud.
Across the Art Programme artists explore other themes, including a number of sound art projects, centred on an important exhibition by Yamaha and Royal College of Art. Futuresonic 2009's focal point is, however, very much this year in seeking to open an original engagement in the environment, with projects which aim to provoke and inspire.
For more information on Futuresonic 2009's participatory mass observation projects and the Environment 2.0 Lab visit http://www.futuresonic.com/env20.
Drew Hemment, Artistic Director, April 2009
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Artists
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Kim Abeles (US)
Prayas Abhinav (IN)
Ackroyd & Harvey (UK)
Carlo Buontempo (IT)
Rob Bailey (UK)
Amy Balkin (US)
Mike Bennett (IE)
Jodrell Bank Observatory
Jonathan Cohrs (US)
Jonah Brucker-Cohen (US)
Alfie Dennon (UK)
Yara El-Sherbini (UK)
Cleo Evans (UK)
Usman Haque (US)
Drew Hemment (UK)
HeHe (UK/FR)
Aaron Koblin (US)
Megan MacMurray (US)
James Marriott (UK)
The Met Office
Eva Meyer-Keller (DE)
Fujiko Nakaya (JP)
Christian Nold (UK)
Angela Pablo (US)
The Owl Project (UK)
POC Group (ES)
Andrea Polli (US)
Janine Randerson (NZ)
Scenocosme (FR)
Will Schrimshaw (UK)
Royal College of Art & Yamaha
Yuri Suzuki (JP)
Elin Wikstršm (SE)
13-16 May, Manchester UK
CUBE exhibition 13-23 May, opening 5pm on 13 May
All Art exhibitions and events are free
http://www.futuresonic.com/art
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Festival
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
World premiers of astonishing artworks, an explosive city-wide music programme, and visionary thinkers from around the world. Now in its 14th year, Futuresonic is the UK's leading festival for digital culture, and this year was nominated for the prestigious Lever Arts Prize. An urban festival experience, it is anticipated that over 50,000 festival visitors will engage with 300 artists and 100 events across 30 venues.
http://www.futuresonic.com
Futuresonic is presented by FutureEverything CIC. It is a Regularly Funded Organisation (RFO) of Arts Council England North West, a pillar event of Manchester City Council and is supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Futuresonic is presented in partnership with ImaginationLancaster http://imagination.lancaster.ac.uk, a major new research lab at Lancaster University.
In 2010 Futuresonic will return as FutureEverything
#futr09
This work by Futuresonic & FutureEverything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Share