My career as a musician never really got anywhere, but that doesn’t mean I don’t end up touring…
So, yeah – three gigs upcoming. Here’s the details:
- 30 May 2015: “New Scientist presents”, SCI-FI London Festival, BFI Southbank [more info / buy tickets]
“Fantasy is taking over the future. The wildest and most outlandish stories are slipping through the screens, cabinets and wall-spaces of our most treasured institutions and into the streets and squares of the real world.
Hosted by New Scientist’s culture editor Simon Ings and introduced with a keynote by multi-award winning science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds, this packed afternoon of short films and discussions explores how stories, games and falsehoods are guiding us towards an uncertain tomorrow.”
- 4 & 5 June 2015: FutureEverything City Infrastructure Lab [more info / apply for tickets]
“Are you passionate about cities and systems? Curious about the potential of open data? The City Infrastructure Lab will show you how open data can be used to develop new models of civic innovation. The knowledge, methods and guidance received can be applied in your own practice to tackle ‘big picture’ systemic challenges.
The City Infrastructure Lab will be led by experts in foresight, urbanism and civic innovation from FutureEverything, Future Cities Catapult and the Digital Catapult. During the event, you will work with your peers to identify opportunities for action and generate ideas in response, mentors will be on hand to help you develop concepts into useable products and services. The outcomes will inform the development of the Greater Manchester Open Data Infrastructure Map.”
(This is technically a headline gig for me, so very stoked. Also, it’s lovely to be working with the FutureEverything team again.)
- 11 June 2015: Symposium — “Tomorrow Today: Design, Fiction and Social Responsibility”, ICA London [more info / buy tickets]
“How do we design the future? Fiction has long played a key role in the creation and envisaging of better (and worse) worlds in design. Today, this socially-driven impulse to shape a better tomorrow through design narratives is only growing amidst pressing concerns over what the future holds.
In this symposium we will bring together designers, critics, academics and other voices to explore how designers have created narratives of futures, be they intended or impossible, desirable or not. Whether through the creation of imagined spaces, subjects or temporalities, creating tomorrow today raises questions about design, fiction and social responsibility.”
(It turns out that not only was someone was actually listening when I gave my paper at LonCon2014, but they also found it interesting enough to invite me to say more on the same subject.)
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I’ve got a bunch of other non-public gigs coming up, too; I’m presenting a paper at IPA2015 in July, and then returning to Lancaster for a second stint at the DEMAND Summer School the week afterwards. Very much hoping for a comparatively quiet summer, as that might enable me to focus more of my attention on my actual PhD…
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