Reinventing Manchester’s playtime, Larkin’ About present a participatory gaming event for FutureEverything 2012. Players will be chasing and racing, searching and collecting, and code-breaking and puzzle-solving in a series of games through the Contact building and beyond.

This event sees Larkin’ About experiment with extending game structures onto digital platforms and includes the first outing of a brand new game which sees audiences in both Manchester and New York interact live over a remote link.

Players will benefit from wearing comfortable clothes/shoes (with grips if raining) that you can run around in, but this isn’t a necessity. Plenty have thrived in jeans and shoes before.

Presented by Contact and FutureEverything.

Larkin’ About was launched by way of a 12 hour event of games, art and mayhem at the greenroom December 2009, it was an event of flashmobs in Manchester Arndale, chases through the streets and along the canals, labyrinths in the greenroom performance space, treasure hunts in the Christmas Markets and playful experiences all over the greenroom building.

Larkin’ About responds to our increased demand for interactivity with the media and art that we choose to enjoy. Playing games can be a powerful experience; play can help people engage with media and art and games should not be restricted to the digital world. Larkin’ About uses gaming structures to help people enjoy their city and experience new art and media in a different and direct way. The performers are the participants and they have a direct effect on the outcome of the activity or game, whether by creating something from the everyday and ordinary or simply by participating and being.

www.larkin-about.co.uk

Larkin’ About

Saturday 19^th May / 3PM-Late

Contact, Oxford Road, M15 6JA

Free Entry

Registration: 0161 274 0600 / www.contactmcr.com/larkinmcr

I’d Hide You is the premiere of an online game of stealth, cunning and adventure like no other. 

Log in and jump onboard with a team of runners live from the streets of Manchester during the FutureEverything festival. See the world through their eyes as they stream video: ducking and diving, chatting to passersby, taking you down the back alleys.

Each night teams of runners in illuminated suits will roam the city trying to film each other. As they duck out of the shadows they film the nightlife, streaming the images onto the web.

Go online and play I’d Hide You with them. Click on a runner to ride onboard with them. You see what they see, hear what they hear. Pay attention: your snap button is there for you to grab a freeze frame at any time. Snap a runner onscreen and you score a point. Get snapped by someone else and you lose a life.

Play against your friends online at the same time. Use your wits to choose which runner to ride with. Or get a snap of other runners onscreen without getting snapped.

8pm-11pm, Thursday 17 May – Saturday 19 May
Play online at www.idhideyou.com or at Teacup and Cakes (55 Thomas Street, Manchester, M4 1NA)

Or spot the runners in Manchester’s Northern Quarter and follow the live twitter feed @idhideyou

Four times BAFTA nominated Blast Theory are world renowned as pioneers of interactive art and immersive theatre. I’d Hide You is their next genre-busting mix of online and urban gaming.

I’d Hide You is a new commission for The Space initiative from the BBC/ACE in partnership with FutureEverything. It has been developed by Blast Theory with support from Somethin’ Else and the University of Nottingham.

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Stand+Stare’s ‘Theatre Jukebox – Mass Observation’ uses material and inspiration from the Mass Observation Archive, which documented everyday life in Britain from 1937 to the early 1950s, and continuously since 1981.

On the 75th Anniversary of the Mass Observation movement, this new work explores how universal truths and our national identity are sometimes best revealed through the mundane and the particular. It is presented on a new digital canvas developed by the artists called Theatre Jukebox.

Theatre Jukebox is an arcade-style cabinet that plays stories instead of records and allows you to choose the chapters you want. RFID tags hidden inside a selection of photographs allow the machine to trigger top-down projection + audio specific to each card. One or two audience members at a time are invited to choose a card and have control over how many and in which order they wish the short experiences to be played.

‘Theatre Jukebox – Mass Observation’ will be presented on two interlinked Jukeboxes. Each Jukebox displays a selection of cards. If you experience more than one card, connections begin to sketch a bigger picture, and if you seek out the other Jukebox, you will be able to build a wider narrative crossing 70 years of daily British life. It will be like snippets of memory or flicking through photo albums, each card sparking images, associations, snatches of conversations and ideas.

Theatre Jukebox – Mass Observation is funded by Arts Council England, with additional funding and support from FutureEverything, Ross Charitable Trust, Mayfest, SVA, Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex and The Pervasive Media Studio.

Stand + Stare create immersive theatre and experiential work. Artistic Directors, Barney and Lucy Heywood, are brother and sister and often draw influences from shared memories and family history. They are dedicated to the pursuit of work that seeks to experiment, particularly through the role of audience, choice of space, use of digital technology, and the fusion of theatre and art with other disciplines, such as food or history.

Through collaboration with a broad spectrum of organisations and individuals, they produce touring productions, commercial commissions, small intimate pieces, audio experiences, short films and non-linear narratives.

Stand + Stare is a resident company at Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio and is also supported by a number of other organisations including Arts Council England, Bristol Old Vic, Parabola Arts Centre, Britstol Capacity, Mayfest, The Roses Theatre, and Stroud Valley Arts. Commercial clients include Pan Macmillan, TOAST, Santa & Cole, Alistair Sawday, Hobbs House Bakery and Millar Howard Architects.

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

16-19 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

fbFaces is a specially commissioned project by Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay that explores issues of data accessibility on the internet, a topic that is gaining more importance – especially in our times of privacy protection and social networks.

“Internet giants” are coming under criticism for collecting information without consent from the user, yet it is surprising how many intimacies we reveal voluntarily, especially in social networks like Facebook.

fbFaces is a Facebook crawler, built using JavaScript & PHP, that starts at the public profile of any Facebook user, saving the profile image, facebook-ID and name, and continues to the public profiles of the user’s friends. The artists will be using the Facebook crawler as a tool to create a new work specific to Manchester for FutureEverything.

The project is an attempt to visualize the incredible amount of data and images that we are daily overwhelmed by, so that we can neither realize our own selectivity nor consider the amount of data perceived.

Jonathan Pirnay was born in 1988. Since 2010 he has studied New Media (taught by Prof. Joel Baumann) at the School of Art and Design, Kassel, Germany.

His website is: http://johnnycrab.com

Joern Roeder was born in 1987 and previously studied Multimedia/VR-Design at the University of Art and Design, Burg Giebichenstein. He currently studies New Media at the School of Art and Design, Kassel, Germany.

His website is: http://joernroeder.de

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

16-19 May 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

Notabilia explores the nature and shape of collective decisions around the inclusion of a topic in Wikipedia.

Each deletion / discussion is represented by a thread starting at a shared root node, with it curvature and coloring representing the sequence of “keep” and “delete” votes during the discussion. The work combines hard analytic analysis of the phenomena around consensus finding in ad hoc communities with a allegorical treatment of the topic, to foster serendipitous exploration of the domain.

Moritz Stefaner works as a “truth and beauty operator” on the crossroads of data visualization, information aesthetics and user interface design. Dr. Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia is a young researcher whose scientific interests are online collective behavior, social production, and social information processing. Dario Taraborelli is a social computing researcher based in San Francisco where he works as the Senior Research Analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation Strategy Team.

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

16 May – 10 June 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.


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.

16-19 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 FutureEverybody 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’.

Ant Ballet is separated into four phases. Phase I (2010-2012) included thorough research into ants and control systems, synthesis of ant pheromones and testing of systems with live ants in Barcelona.

FutureEverything is displaying the documentation of Phase I, alongside a simulation of ant trails being disrupted by a model of the Ant Ballet Machine. Phases II-IV (2012-2015) will develop further technologies, chemicals and mechanisms. In 2013 the first public ant ballet performance will be presented at Pestival Sao Paolo.

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.

This project has been made possible thanks to Pestival, University College London, Universidad Autonoma Barcelona, Dupont Corian, The John Lewis Family Trust and the Zoological Society London.

Video:

Watch Ant Ballet | Pestival

Watch Ant Ballet | Part Two: Dance of the Ants

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

16 May – 10 June 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

16-19 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 is 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 JOIN 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

To take part send an SMS text message with the word ‘JOIN’ to 07800000195 from Monday 14 May.

Invisible Flock are Ben Eaton, Victoria Pratt and Richard Warburton.They are an interactive arts trio based in Leeds and Bradford and 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.

The Manchester production of Your Government Has Gone to Sleep has been commissioned by Live at LICA (Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts). Invisible Flock are currently a Live at LICA supported company.

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

16 May – 10 June 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.

Daniel Jones + James Bulley’s Maelstrom is a large-scale, sculptural sound intervention that draws on material in real-time from the sounds of thousands of audio fragments.

Over 48 hours of user-created audio is uploaded to the internet every minute, a figure that is increasing exponentially. Maelstrom constructs shifting walls of sound displayed through suspended speakers in the gallery.

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.

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

16 May – 10 June 2012. Open Daily. Free Entry.