A Ceramic Sound Sculpture at Cube Gallery

Day One of Futuresonic wasn’t really a day, rather an evening of events reflecting the vast scope of the festival.

First up was a short event at the Cube Gallery, where a wide range of art was on display. Sonic sculptures, such as plants that made noises when you touched them, shared gallery space with metal detectors and a screening of a film featuring an enactment of the battle between Red and Grey Squirrels, as enacted by wheelchair-bound basketball players(!)

AudioBoo: Cacophony of Plants at Cube Gallery

The Festival Rangers began their reporting duties by streaming live video from the gallery. Fiston in particular was Qiking for his life – interviewing

From there a classic Routemaster bus was supposed to take us on to the Contact Theatre for the night’s keynote speech. It ended up being delayed thanks to a smashed window (well, it is Manchester after all) so a much more conventional Magic Bus took us to our destination.

First on the menu at The Contact Theatre was a performance of ‘Touch the Stars’, a project curated by the Jodrell Bank radio telescope centre in Cheshire. Using a laptop, an astronomer remotely controlled the telescope, taking in the sounds of the cosmos which were fed to an electronic musician who twiddled with his synths to sculpt them into something rather special.

It made for multilayered, freeform music. It really was good stuff. Who knew the galaxy was a talented experimental musician?

Hacking the Earth – the keynote speech

I have to confess that ‘geohacking’ was an area I hadn’t heard of before tonight. Jamais Cascio discussed how it was imperative that we ‘buy ourselves some time’ in the battle to reduce our carbon emissions. His suggestion on how to do this? Artificially cooling the temperature using experimental methods. These included injecting sulphur into the sky in order to reflect heat away from the planet.

This would only be a temporary solution but it might allow us time to sort out our problem with carbon emissions. Jamais acknowledged that there will be many different views on this idea. Meddling with the environment may have unintended consequences in changing the weather in certain parts of the world. This could lead to political friction or worse, military conflict.

It was an interesting introduction to a complex topic from Jamais who was a brilliant speaker who’s obviously given this talk many times before. What he might not have had before was a drunken heckler.

Yes, the free wine available in the foyer may have gone to the head of one woman who kept interrupting Jamais, shouting “It’s all speculative!” while quoting out of date research to back up her claim. Unlike some people, I don’t liken global warming skeptics to holocaust deniers, but there was no doubt this woman had to be go and she was finally persuaded to leave.

It was a memorable start to what should be a fascinating conference. I’m liveblogging many of the talks over at the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit FriendFeed Group. Feel free to come along and join in!