This series of articles and reports tells the story of FutureEverything. We look from when it was founded in 1995 to its closure as a company in 2026. We try to make sense of how, and why, a festival and cultural organisation came to have such an outsized influence. Along the way we chart the development of digital culture in the UK and Europe.

The significance of FutureEverything is evident in the number of initiatives and artists it influenced and supported across thirty years. This first part of The FutureEverything Story traces the organisation's emergence from 1995 to 2009 – from its beginnings as Futuresonic to its establishment as a leading cultural organisation working at the interface of art, technology and society, including highlights such as Mobile Connections and Environment 2.0.

The years from 2010 to 2018 were FutureEverything's defining ones, when it was named by The Guardian one of the world's top ten ideas festivals, invited by Singapore to curate the flagship event for its 50th anniversary, and cited by the UK Prime Minister as one of just two British success stories alongside car manufacturing in Sunderland. Festival experiments became lasting infrastructure: one of Europe's first open data initiatives, the world's first continental-scale citizens' observatory, the UK's flagship Internet of Things demonstrator. 

FutureEverything's final years were among its most ambitious – large-scale AI arts exhibitions reaching millions, major commissions including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Atmospheric Memory, and a trailblazing final initiative that reimagined FutureEverything as a vehicle for ecological resilience, and made it the first cultural organisation anywhere to appoint Nature to its Board. This period is marked by both creative ambition and institutional courage.