Future Everything!

I haven't been posting much because I've been busy doing school work and haven't been going on any adventures worth blogging about. Next weekend, however, I'm heading up to Manchester to go to the Future Everything Festival. There's lots of cool art to see, music to hear, and there's a conference taking place that is part of the festival. The theme is Tools for Unknown Futures. They summarize it on their website:

"FutureEverything will look at how we can collaborate on new tools, devices and systems to transform our lives, from the arts to democracy, business and governance. 

People taking control of tools to shape the future has been a familiar trope within digital culture. Drawing on powerful currents in today’s design scene, such as speculative design and design fiction, FutureEverything will debate our fascination with tools as the most natural path towards social change, and open up new ways to question, imagine and make the strange, troubled thing called the future. 

The festival will bring together artists and designers who make art and change reality by collaborating on new protocols, languages, systems, strategies and even infrastructures. Art and design projects will create new, less conventional readings of tools and technologies through the use of scenarios and fictional objects. The aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of groundbreaking fields, from New Materials to Synthetic Biology, will be explored by figures working across the boundaries of art and science."

So hip to the beat of my art! The work I see, talks I attend, and workshops I take part in are going to be so informative and thought-provoking; my entire body of work for the past year or so has been focused on developing a fictional tool for use in a hypothetical future scenario that is designed to improve a devastated future. I could hardly believe my luck when I learned about this festival and saw that it was happening not only in the country I happen to be in at the moment, but also within the timeframe that I'm here. So - I'm heading up next weekend, and feeling very fortunate and excited about it all. There will likely be a long follow-up blog post (or I may even do a daily blog post while I'm there)!

Here's a sneak peek at what I've been getting up to in the printshop. It's part of the body of work that I just mentioned. ZPOR Brighton reconnaissance mission 2014!

I'm flying home TWO WEEKS from today. This gives me an intense feeling of mingled excitement and stress (I have a LOT of writing to do). I am looking forward to rugged landscapes, real bacon and toutons for breakfast and supper, the 4th year exhibition, summer-time adventures, and my people.