Jsut Code is an installation where viewers are invited to decode electronic texts written by a collective of distributed writers. Statements on life and death are gathered in real-time, from the social media site twitter and displayed as geometric images.

Viewers encounter a continuously updating feed as the machine translates language to image and twitter message to QR code (a matrix bar code). The QR code “carries” a language of pattern and meaning, which is activated by the reader. Participants are invited to decode these images through the use of a smart phone or QR reader.

In this work the artists set up a structure of an evolving database in which the activities of reading and writing by human and machine are explicitly collaborative and distributed. Jsut Code performs questions about automated production, ‘collective’ intelligence and the value of labour and artistic production. The installation explores a continuously evolving and mutating database, which moves beyond and between language.

Helen Pritchard is an artist and researcher in the field of digital art and innovation. Central to her work are ideas of co-research, co-production and co-operation. Her projects often explore playful practices of computation and queering data through collaborative events and collective activities. Drawing on Performance Art movements such as Fluxus, Software Studies and Open Source methods for soft and hardware, Helen has shown work internationally including DA Fest International festival of Digtal Art, (Bulgaria), Spacex (UK), Sonic Peripheries (Bremen) Transmodern Festival Baltimore, (USA), Teak (Fin), UKS Oslo, (N), RKS Stavanger (N), Conical Gallery (Aus), ACA Florida, (USA) and National Review of Live Art (UK). She is currently a PhD candidate in the HighWire Doctoral Training Centre at Lancaster University and an associate lecturer at University of Plymouth where she is a member of the Art & Social Technologies Research Group.

Winnie Soon is an artist and digital media practitioner. Her projects often explore the intersection of art & technology through a variety of mediums & experiments with communication technologies. Her artistic practice ranges from digital print, mobile video to interactive installation, artworks have been exhibited internationally including Arnolfini (UK), Digital Art Festival (Bulgaria), Mobile & DMB Festival (Korea), IFVA (HK), PHOTOPARK (China) etc. Soon’s work often examined cultural issues and oriented towards experimental networked media, interests in the interplay between media, culture and communication.Soon currently teaches in Savannah College of Art and Design in Hong Kong.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester.

16-27 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

Ollie Palmer’s Ant Ballet is a three-year research project into control systems, paranoia and dancing insects, and has culminated in the world’s first ballet to exclusively feature ants. The projected insects will feature as part of the FutureEverything Art Exhibition at the 1830 Warehouse.

Through use of a robotic arm, computer vision system and synthesised pheromone (Z9:16 Ald Hexadecenal), technology has been developed that causes a colony of ants to follow artificial trails in preference to their own natural foraging behaviour. It is described as a ‘convergent project between design, art, architecture & a handful of scientists’.

Ollie Palmer is a designer. He runs Hoog and is a collaborator with Open_Sailing. He has travelled around the world, hitchhiked across Iceland, taught I.T. in the depths of the Amazon and plays with ants. He is a member of the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture and is a Getty Images contributing photographer.

The project was made possible thanks to: The Bartlett School of Architecture, Pestival, Zoological Society London, DuPont® Corian®, Universidad Autonoma Barcelona.

Video:

Watch Ant Ballet | Pestival

Watch Ant Ballet | Part Two: Dance of the Ants

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester.

16-27 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

“The…” is an interactive installation by Kasia Molga + Brendan Oliver that enables viewers to interact with ‘thoughts’ by casting their shadows on the wall of the gallery. The motion and body shape sensing Kinect Camera shows the shadows of viewers casted on the walls, engaging in interactive play with “thoughts” loaded from a live twitter feed.

The work considers the theories of David Bohm, that it is not the mind that generates thoughts, but a thought is a universal entity that enters our brains and influences our actions. Taking social media such a twitter as an expression of a “global” thought and making it visible, the work examines how social media can change the course of “our thinking”.

Although seemingly accidental and random, displayed messages are the result of algorithms that construct searches from a pool of words that reach out to twitter, finding users who express thoughts in connection to the search words and phrases. As the thought returns to the application, animated from the head of the viewer, the words  connect to it and are returned back to the cloud, with two new words selected and a new search process begins again.

“The…” was conceptualised and created by Kasia Molga and Brendan Oliver, produced by V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media and was shown for a first time in ISMAR@SHIFT Festival in Basel, Switzerland. The tweets that were discovered and used as part of the installation were recorded on this twitter account: twitter.com/theinbasel

Kasia Molga is a visual artist and interaction designer whose practice is concerned with our relationship with the planet – Buckminster-Fuller’s concept of a “Spaceship Earth”; and changes in our perception: of ourselves and our roles in the context of nature, climate, environment and community in this increasingly technologically mediated world.

She uses technologies such as social media, data visualization, geo-locative technologies, augmented realities to create participatory interactive pieces through which she invites spectators to have a playful dialogue with an artwork. Her work has been exhibited worldwide – among many others in the Museum of Modern Art (NY), ICA (UK), Contemporary Arts Space Osaka (Japan), London Fashion Week (UK), São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound (Brazil), BBC Short Film Festival (UK) or Design Mai (Berlin). Kasia also has over 10 years experience in digital creative industry as a freelance digital designer and user experience consultant. She lectures, presents and publishes conference papers regularly.

Brendan Oliver is an Interaction Designer / creative coder practising for over 14 years. His work centres around creating playful experiences with digital tools that place the viewer at the heart of the work, often where the work doesn’t exist without interaction.

He combines interactive technologies that connect the physical world with the digital space and online communities to create artwork for installations, big screens in public spaces and visualisation of data to engage with audiences. Brendan has worked on projects for the BBC, Victoria & Albert Museum London, Nottingham Contemporary UK, Glastonbury Festival, Playstation, MTV, Broadway Media Centre Nottingham UK, and with Design and Advertising Agencies.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester

16-27 May 2012. Open daily. Free entry.

Your Government has Gone to Sleep is a game of revolution and change by Leeds collective Invisible Flock. Players sign up through the advertised phone number, and drive a mini revolution in the heart of Manchester. The central hub will be at the 1830 Warehouse.

Over the course of three days participants are invited to sign up to a new revolutionary movement orchestrated by text message. Signing up by texting the keyword INTERNATIONALE players allocate themselves a secret revolutionary identity and enter into dialogue with each other over SMS and online, gradually transforming into integral members of the movement,  deciding upon code names, assigning each other small actions for change and nominating real world acts of peaceful revolution.

Over the duration of the game the “narrator” is gradually removed from the world and conversations and exchanges between players over the network continue with their own momentum.

Your Government has Gone to Sleep  is directly inspired by the use of mobile and social platforms to create and power social and political change or actions, either through the Arab Spring or the recent London Riots.

This work creates a temporary network and a micro-community through a game-like experience to create and trigger the idea of a revolution.  The game-like atmosphere and context of the game allows participants a sense of safety in interaction and permits our temporary revolution to flourish for a short period.   The piece is both a reflection on the power of technological platforms and their true ability to power change and also an exploration of the creation of micro-communities and their potential impact on real world events.

Invisible Flock are an interactive arts trio based in Leeds and Bradford. They make installations, moments, public art and games, all of which aims to allow participants to become co-creators of the work itself. They play with and subvert surroundings and try to encourage people to do the same.

The collective have made work all over the UK for places and buildings including the National Theatre, The ICA, Latitude Festival, Forest Fringe, UKYA, and have worked in city streets, market stalls, empty shops, nightclubs museums and online.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester.

16-27 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

Daniel Jones + James Bulley’s sound installation Maelstrom features in this year’s FutureEverything Art Exhibition at the 1830 Warehouse.

Over 48 hours of user-created audio is uploaded to the internet every minute, a figure that is increasing exponentially. Maelstrom is a sound installation that draws on this material in real time, constructing shifting walls of sound from thousands of audio fragments.

By organising these fragments based on their tonal attributes, they collectively form a vast instrument, whose properties are affected by global internet activity. A score composed specifically for this instrument voices an endless series of chord variations, dynamically generated by an array of live processes.

Maelstrom builds a tornado of tonal cluster chords around its spiral speaker system, engulfing the listener in the swirling mass of information that is now an integral part of our day-to-day lives.

James Bulley is a sound artist, composer and doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. His practice explores the dialogue between sound art and music through sound installation.

Daniel Jones is an artist and researcher exploring the links between natural systems and creative practice, harnessing algorithmic process to create self-generating artworks.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester.

16-27 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. The work will be projected onto a large wall outside the 1830 Warehouse.

Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labour tool. The total labour cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as an interactive/video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction. The work is a collaboration with Takashi Kawashima.

Visit the Ten Thousand Cents website.

Biogs

Aaron Koblin is an artist and designer specializing in data and digital technologies.His work takes real-world and community generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and the systems they create.

Koblin’s projects have been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science Foundation’s first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Two of his music video collaborations have been Grammy nominated. He received his MFA in Design|Media Arts from UCLA. In 2010 Aaron was the Abramowitz Artist in Residence at MIT and he leads the Data Arts Team in Google’s Creative Lab.

Takashi Kawashima is a designer and media artist living in San Francisco. His work explores the re-contextualizing of commonplace items to create new awareness of the mundane.

Takashi was featured as one of ten emerging artists in the March/April 2004 issue of RES magazine in an article entitled “Who’s Now/Who’s Next.” His work has been shown in the One Show Interactive, Ars Electronica, Siggraph and Sónar Music Festival, to name a few. Takashi received his BA in Information Technology with a Dean’s Award from Keio University in Japan and MFA in Design | Media Arts from UCLA in the U.S. He is the recipient of a Japanese Government overseas study program grant for artists and a licensed chef in Japan.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester.

16-27 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

Jamie Allen’s Refractive Index contains investigations into the reflective and refractive power of public media displays The work will be displayed at the FutureEverything Art Exhibition at the 1830 Warehouse.

Low-res graphics on very large displays show the physical marks that public media displays make on our city spaces. Refractive Index is an ongoing art-research project that uses the large scale public media displays as a kind of camera obscura; inverting typical uses of the screen, and showing us what our screens “see” when they peer into the night sky.

Supported by Arts Council England, BBC Big Screens and London 2012. Special thanks to Tom Schofield, Ko Le Chen, David Gauthier, Kuba Ryniewicz, Alejandro Altavilla, Matt Pells and Bernhard Garnicnig.

Visit the Refractive Index website via this link.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester.

16-27 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

Jeremy Hutchison’s Extra! Extra! – a collection of newspaper advertising boards with copy written by Facebook users – will appear at MOSI as part of the FutureEverything Art Exhibition at the 1830 Warehouse.

In the 20th Century, journalists wrote the news. But in the 21st Century, it’s written by us: the social network. What if these two forms of journalism clashed? What if our status updates became the breaking headlines of The Evening Standard?

Today, our news is defined by YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. It’s a world of subjective, 24 hour, user-generated news. A world whose tagline is ‘Broadcast Yourself ’. The concept of this artwork was simple. First, users uploaded status updates to a Facebook wall. These were read by the official Evening Standard signwriter. These were written on official Evening Standard posters, and clipped into official ES advertising boards.

During the FutureEverything Art Exhibition MOSI’s walkway will be inundated in scores of Evening Standard sandwich boards. But rather than featuring the normal headlines about terrorists and celebs, these are romantic, political, absurd, or mundane i.e: JO AVERY: “TRAIN FARE RISES SUCK”; JAN’S BOOBS SHOCK THERAPY.

Jeremy Hutchison will reinstall this work at FutureEverything 2012. A disorderly mountain of Evening Standard sandwich boards will spill up the walls and across the floor of a gallery space.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester.

16-30 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

As part of the FutureEverything Art Exhibtion, the artist Lawrence Epps will distribute 40,000 little clay men onto the streets of Manchester on Tuesday 15th May, a few hours before commuters begin their morning journey.

Commuters will be encouraged via local media and the internet to collect the terracotta men and bring them to the FutureEverything Art Exhibition at the 1830 Warehouse (MOSI) which opens on Weds 16 May. They can also be taken to Handmade at Victoria Baths on Sat 19 May which is also part of the FutureEverything festival.

Each clay figure – a composite of commuters’ individual donations – will be placed into one giant sculpture of little clay men at the FutureEverything Art Exhibition (183o Warehouse) and Handmade (Victoria Baths).

The clay men, which carry briefcases, are a comment on office jobs and corporate culture. Each one contains the twitter hashtag #littleclaymen and #futr – the twitter pages will contain instructions on how to contribute towards the sculptures at the both venues.

This will be the second time that the artist and ceramicist Lawrence Epps has created the figures, they were previously displayed on London Bridge to help publicise Stoke’s British Ceramics Biennial.

Lawrence Epps lives and works in Cambridge, England. For photographs and documentation of Human Resources visit his Sykey Art Collective website.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition, 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield, Manchester.

16-27 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

This year’s exhibition of work shows artists whose work is inspired by or responds to mass observation or mass participation. This has been prompted by 2012′s celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Mass Observation Movement and the UN International Year of Co-operatives.

The art strand of FutureEverything explores the changing nature of collective action and brings these issues to life through the work of artists, researchers and designers that provoke and inspire with new perspectives on this theme.

Artists showing work are:

• Jamie Allen
• Luca Ciampaglia
• Lawrence Epps
• Jeremy Hutchinson
• Invisible Flock
• Daniel Jones
• Aaron Koblin
• Kasia Molga
• Brendan Oliver
• Ollie Palmer
• Helen Pritchard
• Joern Roeder & Jonathan Pirnay
• Stand and Stare
• Moritz Stefaner
• Moritz Stefaner, Dario Taraborelli, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia

The FutureEverything Art Exhibition is hosted on the fourth floor of the 1830 Warehouse, which is part of the Museum of Science and Industry site on Liverpool Rd, Castlefield, Manchester. The venue is a grade 1 listed building and was the world’s first railway warehouse.

FutureEverything Art Exhibition

Date: 16-27 May 2012

Venue: 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Liverpool Rd, Manchester

Opening Times: 10am-5pm, Mon-Sun

Admission: Free Entry