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Digital art isn?t about expensive, exclusive technologies any more: it?s about mass access and collaboration, writes Drew Hemment.

Futuresonic 2007

Futuresonic is a festival of art, music and ideas that has been active in digital culture since 1995. The Futuresonic festival is unique in its focus on cities, art and social technologies. During 2003/04, it was involved in early mobile and locative arts events, taking digital culture out into the streets, and presented the first major exhibition in this area in 2004. Since then, it has focused on presenting inherently participatory and collaborative artworks in public spaces. An example is our 2007 exhibition engaging in the social context of a central Manchester shopping centre. The featured artworks are more profoundly social – more participation than objectification, more process than art object – than either the gallery-centric ‘relational art’ movement as described by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, or the documentary art promoted by Mark Nash1.

Work in art and digital culture is a pursuit of impermanence in changing times. Over recent years there has been a shift in perceptions of the computer user, as the lone computer geek makes way for a generation for whom network space is the air they breathe. Digital culture is now a space shared with kids on YouTube and a new generation of artists whose work is edgy, uncompromising and engaged. In parallel with this, there has been a shift away from creating artworks using complex, expensive, elaborate and impenetrable technological systems towards quick, low-cost, intimate, hacked-together media objects.

In its art programme and conference, Futuresonic brings together artists, curators, technologists, researchers, critics, futurologists and scientists to discover the small sparks that grow into new ways of seeing the world and critically explore the latest upgrade affecting today’s digital culture. Here art offers new perspectives on the ways in which people collaborate to make or use technology. It is most interesting when it is truly collaborative and people are outside their conventional roles – artists making social spaces, communities creating technology, technologists enabling us to perceive the world anew.

An illustration from 2008 is ‘Social Networking Unplugged’, an exhibition of 20 world premières, UK firsts and commissions. Although social networking has been front page news of late, it has not yet inspired much really good art. Like injecting one substance into another to trigger a chemical reaction, Social Networking Unplugged came from mixing the current interest in virtual worlds and online social networking with a focus on presenting social and participatory artworks in unexpected city spaces. The artworks hold up a mirror to the phenomenon of Web 2.0, and range from installed gallery pieces to ambient happenings in public space, artworks which occupy online and offline spaces simultaneously, and projects involving the people of Manchester in creating ‘free’ and ‘open’ spaces.

A similar approach is pursued in the ‘Environment 2.0’ projects Futuresonic has been running since 2006, which will culminate in an exhibition, ‘Through Cracks In The Pavement’, in May 2009. Here the focus is on sustainability in urban settings, and the aim is to create precedents for social change through creative, participatory interventions involving people from the fields of art, environment, technology and society.

Dr Drew Hemment is Director and founder of Futuresonic and Associate Director of ImaginationLancaster, a new research lab at Lancaster University. Submissions of artworks are now invited for Through Cracks In The Pavement. Social Networking Unplugged exhibition runs in Manchester till 17 May and will visit London and Leeds in 2008/09.
w: http://www.futuresonic.com

1 Frieze Magazine issue 117, April 2008.