About
Social Technologies Summit
The Futuresonic 2006 Conference
Museum of Science and Industry Manchester
Keynote talk & exhibition private view Thurs 20 July, 4.30pm
Conference Fri 21 & Saty 22 July, 10am-5pm
Delegate Pass 45 GBP
Futuresonic 2006 sees the launch of a major new conference strand, bringing together leading figures to explore "a whole new way of doing things in the air", presented in association with PLAN, The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network.
Thurs 20 July, 4.30pm
Keynote talk at exhibition private view
An Audience With... Toshio Iwai
Toshio Iwai, one of Japan's leading artists and star game developer at Nintendo, explores the influence of a lifetime immersed in Japan's technology culture, and looks at how it is possible for individual artists to create the kind of projects that previously required a major studio.
Talk starts 5.15pm and lasts one hour. If you are attending the talk we recommend you allow time on other days to visit the exhibitions.
Friday 21 July, 10am-5pm: Pervasive and Locative Day
10.30am
Collaborative, Creative and Commercial Digital Mapping
A cross section of digital mapping from Masaki Fujihata, who pioneered the use of GPS in stunning, multilayered artworks as far back as 1992, to Richard Peckham, Head of Business Development (Navigation) at Astrium, the leading industrial participant in the Galileo programme (Europe's alternative GPS system), to Steve Coast, whose OpenStreetMap project is challenging entrenched assumptions about how maps are made and who can own them through user-generated, open source digital maps.
12.30pm LUNCH
IMPROVe, Richard Widerberg and MANTIS (courtyard)
1.30pm
Contested Spaces and RFID
Technologists and technology commentators often approach space, identity and mobility as if no other discipline has considered them before. Professor Tim Cresswell, author of 'In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression', and Chair in Human Geography at Royal Holloway University, is a leading academic focused on space and mobility and how places are socially and technologically constructed. His talk is entitled title 'The politics of mobility in a more than human world'.
This talk will be followed by a discussion of one of the most contested technologies of modern times, RFID. RFID is an interesting technology with all kinds of potential uses but it is also a major social issue generating reactions as adverse as those seen in the context of GM food. Germany has been used as a testing ground by the global 'arphid' industry, foreshadowing, it is said, what is in store for the rest of Europe. A session featuring Inke Arns, Rob van Kranenburg and Drew Hemment co-presented by HMKV (Dortmund) will explore industry perspectives as well as strange alliances between fundamentalist Christians and left leaning artist-activists.
3.00pm BREAK
Urban Tapestries, Robotic Feral Public Authoring (courtyard)
3.15pm
Iterative Architecture (Built On An Internet Of Things)
SMS and low grade media have swept all before them over recent years, with games consoles a lonely ghetto for high end visualisation, but there are now some signs of integration with a resurgence of interest in shared 3D virtual worlds such as Second life. Coming from this background Tom Carden, Matt Webb and Stanislav Roudavski look at how models of behaviour derived from games, anthropology, sensors and mobile devices can feed back into the experience and iterative design of buildings, real and virtual.
4.45pm END
Saturday 22 July, 10am-5pm: Collaborative Cultures Day
10.30am
Social Arts
Build Your Own City
Stephen Kovats (V2) will be joined by Gustaff Harriman from Bandung Center for New Media Arts (Indonesia), Ricardo Ruiz from mimoSa (Brazil) and David Gunn from The Folk Songs Project (USA/UK) to explore how artists are working collaboratively in urban environments, and reflect on how cities around the world are being reshaped by social technologies.
11.45am
Social Technologies Tool Sharing
A quick live sampling survey of what tools the alpha, beta and omega geeks are using, how they use them, and how they make all the pieces fit together. Social technologies wouldn't be much use without users. They are open, connected and intrinsically social. Shared, collaborative technologies once the preserve of hackers in darkened rooms are now a common part of everyday life: Myspace, Wikipedia, Flickr, the internet itself.
12.15pm LUNCH
1.30pm
Future of Mobile Music
Atau Tanaka (Sony CSL) introduces new musical forms that have evolved in the mobile age.
2.00pm
Social Music
Social change, it is said, can be seen first in music because it is the most fluid and rapidly changing medium. Join the social music revolution with Matt Ogle & Jonas Woost (last.fm) (http://www.last.fm/). Daniel Smith and Share NYC (http://share.dj/share/ ) come over from New York to present open jam sessions, improvising on each others' signal. Figures from the music world reflect on how the industry is being reshaped.
3.00pm BREAK
Speckled Jewellery, Sarah Kettley (galleries)
3.15pm
Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art), José Luis de Vicente (Art Futura) and Anthony Dunne (Head of Interaction Design, Royal College of Art) will look at the arts of social technologies, and also at embryonic philosophies and practices that offer an approach that differs from the European media art orthodoxy.
4.45pm END
Info
10am-5pm, Friday 21st & Saturday 22nd July
An Audience With Toshio Iwai, 6pm, Thursday 20th July
Venue
1830 Warehouse
The Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester
Liverpool Road, Castlefield, Manchester M3 4FP
0161 832 2244
www.msim.org.uk
The Futuresonic 2006 Conference will be staged in the room containing a functioning version of Babbage's Baby computer, within the world's first railway warehouse.
Curated by Ben Russell and Drew Hemment, presented in association with PLAN (The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network), and supported by EPSRC, Univerity of Nottingham, University of Salford, Liverpool John Moores University, and Manchester Digital Development Agency.
Toshio Iwai presentation is a part of the REACT lecture series.