Making Future Work: an exploration of digital cultural practice at Broadway

With an ambitious commissioning budget, Broadway’s new Making Future Work programme sets out to provide a unique opportunity for four East Midlands based artists and collectives to collaborate across a range of media platforms.

Making Future Work has invited Professor Mike Stubbs, Director of FACT; Drew Hemment, Director of Future Everything Festival & Associate Director of Imagination Lancaster; Clare Reddington, Director of iShed and The Pervasive Media Studio; and Michael Connor, New York based Writer and New Media Curator, to develop exploratory texts from which artists could respond to the possibilities and speculative future of four distinct areas of current digital cultural practice:

1. Co-creation / Online Social: How are users/audiences involved in design/development processes?

2. Pervasive Gaming / Urban Screens: How can new technologies expand our boundaries of play?

3. Re-imaging Redundant Systems: Where are the opportunities to capitalise on pre-existing out dated networks?

4. Live Cinema / 3-D: In what ways are we re-defining cinema?

Artists selected for Making Future Work include: Mudlark (an interactive gaming initiative and TV company led by Richard Birkin); the Institute of Boundary Interactions (IBI); Hetain Patel & Barret Hodgson (Vent Media); and Brendan Oliver & Brendan Randall (the inventors of the World’s largest interactive photo booth).

Each artist has been assigned a mentor to help develop research projects. Hetain Patel & Barret Hodgson are working with the Nottingham based director of the truly scary and bizarrely comic film Mum & Dad, Steven Sheil to re-create choreographed scenes from the blockbuster film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon using CCTV camera technology and editing software; Mudlark are being mentored by Julian Tait, the lead of the Open Data Cities and Social Sensor Network at Manchester’s Future Everything festival, to visualize and access redundant data in the city; the Institute of Boundary Interactions (IBI) are working with artist Andy Gracie, who specializes in robotics, sound, video and biological practice, to develop the Urban Immune System Research (UISR), a critical design project investigating parallel futures in the emergence of the ‘smart-city’; and Brendan Oliver & Brendan Randall are developing a live, interactive installation where the audience controls both the narrative and recorded footage of a film through direct participation. The development of each project is being constantly updated onto a blog at www.makingfuturework.org.uk

Broadway and Making Future Work are pleased to be working with the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (LPAC) and QUAD, Derby on 3 core events that provide a platform for the presentation of cumulative research from these artists’ projects.

These events are supported by talks from leaders in the fields of art and science including; James Auger (Auger Loizeau), tutor and Phd student at Design Interactions at the RCA London and inventor of a radical new concept in personal audio communication, the Audio Tooth Implant; and Evan Roth, the inventor of the EyeWriter, a tool that gives people who have lost the function to draw, the ability to create art with the use of their eyes; Rachel Coldicutt, head of Digital Media at Royal Opera House and an award-winning digital producer and convenor of Culture Hack Day in London; Julianne Pearce, Executive Producer of Blast Theory, whose work explores interactivity and the social and political aspects of technology; Aram Bartholl who manipulates video game design to connect the virtual with the real; and Reginne Debatty, founder of we-make-money-not-art.com, curator and writer investigating why artists, hackers and interaction designers (mis)use technology.

Making Future Work director (and member of arts collective, Active Ingredient), Matt Davenport says:

“Making Future Work are excited to have the opportunity to work with such a high caliber of arts professionals in the development of this new media arts programme at Broadway. It feels great to be able to provide artists from the region a generous budget with which they can extend their practice and create some truly unique projects”.

Upcoming events include:

Making Future Narrative: Thursday 2 June, 6-8:30pm, Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (LPAC), Lincoln

Chair: Hannah Nicklin, Theatre Writer, Blogger & Tech Enthusiast

Speakers: Julianne Pearce (Blast Theory), Rachel Coldicutt (Culture Hack Day), Brendan Oliver & Brendan Randall

Performance by: Hetain Patel in collaboration with Barret Hodgson

Making Future Design: Friday 10 June, 6-8:30pm, QUAD, Derby

Chair: Julian Tait

Speakers: James Auger (Auger Loizeau), Julian Tait (Future Everything), IBI, Mudlark (Richard Birkin)

Making Future Collaboration: Friday 8 July, 11am – 5pm, Broadway, Nottingham

Chair: Reginne Debatty

Speakers: Evan Roth, Aram Bartholl, Mudlark (Richard Birkin), IBI, Brendan Oliver & Brendan Randall.

Performance by: Hetain Patel in collaboration with Barret Hodgson

All events are FREE

This new partnership project between Broadway, Making Future Work, LPAC and QUAD is funded by Arts Council England and aims to encourage the growth and development within the digital arts sector in the East Midlands, reinforcing Nottingham as a city that supports innovation.