Leading figures from around the world are converging on Manchester for Use Your Imagination, a unique one-day event presented by Imagination@Lancaster, Lancaster University's new interdisciplinary research institute, as a part of the Social Technologies Summit and Futuresonic 2007 Urban Festival of Art, Music and Ideas.
The event sets out to :
Inspire people with the possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration /
Show artists what engineers get excited about, and vice versa /
Enable people to meet in structured and informal ways /
A man falls in slow motion from a high building. Upon impact the concrete paving gives way and ripples in concentric waves as it absorbs the energy of his fall. The key creative at Saatchi & Saatchi behind the celebrated T Mobile TV adverts, which feature flexible cityscapes and collapsing walls, will explain how they capture compelling new ideas. The urban environment is being transformed by emerging technologies - the ground beneath our feet is no longer hard, but 'soft', as in 'software'.
He will join other leading figures from around the world converging on Manchester for Use Your Imagination.
We live in an age when the future of the next few hundred years is being written. Just as the printing press and the steam engine changed history, so the decisions made now about the design of the technologies we use will shape our lives tomorrow. It is not just scientists who are engineering this future, but artists and DIY technologists also. And we are now at a moment when these ideas are breaking out of small labs and art events.
Presentations by leading international figures on case studies of collaborations between artists and engineers will be followed by a participatory workshop which aims to introduce you to your next life partner, creating a space in which new collaborations can be hatched, or at the least enabling you to leave with some new contacts and feeling inspired.
Followed by Manchester's first Dorkbot, a show-and-tell event for people doing strange things with electricity.
Participants include:
Anne Galloway (Carleton University Ottawa)
Charlie Gere (Lancaster University)
Steve Dietz (YProductions)
Nina Wakeford (INCITE)
Giles Lane (Proboscis)
Eric Paulos (Intel Research)
Paul Domenet (Saatchi & Saatchi)
Linda Doyle (Trinity College Dublin)
Alan Dix (Lancaster University)
Drew Hemment (Lancaster University)
Kristina Andersen (STEIM)
Laura Watts (Lancaster University)
IMAGINATION@LANCASTER
Creativity and innovation occurs at the boundaries... the conception, production, management and use of our 'material world' increasingly relies on the convergence of science, technology, social science, arts and humanities. Nanotechnology, intelligent materials, ambient, mobile, ubiquitous and visualisation technologies provide opportunities for the convergences of the products we use, the clothes wear, the places in which we live and work, and the media we engage with for work and leisure. In order to create this material world we must have the visualisation and creative skills to access and combine the technologies, but also an understanding of sustainability; the social, economic, and environmental factors, as well as an insight into production, management and historical contexts.
Plan :
To work with leading designers and innovators across the globe to build an 'Imagination Laboratory', to enable people and organisations to engage with academia in a dynamic and creative way, using time and space to research and imagine futures. The laboratory would be part of a global network of similar places to enable virtual as well as co-located engagement in research and development.
FUTURESONIC & IMAGINATION@LANCASTER
Use Your Imagination itself involves an unusual collaboration. A link has been established between the Futuresonic festival and Imagination@Lancaster, a major new interdisciplinary research institute at Lancaster University, with the appointment of Drew Hemment, Futuresonic's director and founder, as Associate Director of the new research institute.
A shared aim is to seed new interdisciplinary collaborations, which is a focus of the Use Your Imagination event, as well as provide pathways for further research at postgraduate level.
We invite you to be a part of this.
A part of
FUTURESONIC 2007 www.futuresonic.com
Manchester UK
10-12 May
The Futuresonic 2007 Urban Festival of Art, Music and Ideas features 300 artists and over 30 major events.
++Fixed number of Day Passes available each day on a Pay-What-You-Can basis.
The Delegate Pass gives you access to the Social Technologies Summit,
all Futuresonic seminars and talks, and all Futuresonic Live and Urban Play
events over the festival weekend.
