FutureEverything Manchester

Available for over a year

The FutureEverything Festival propels visitors into 2018, imagining the future to inspire innovation. Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson travel to Manchester to a pop-up future city where museums house objects not of the past but of the future. The recent revelations by Edward Snowden have highlighted the battle over privacy and data. Some artists at FutureEverything explore that dilemma in works that reveal the machine-like processing of soldiers' dispatches from the conflict in Afghanistan. Yet other artists take an ironic, but critical approach to privacy by offering an anti-surveillance makeover. Click explores other risks to the cities of the future that might have streets lined by lamposts that monitor your every move and disorientating, chirping electronic bugs that lurk in alleyways and hang like bats overhead. (Photo caption: Gareth Mitchell and producer Colin Grant in front of an exhibition called Endless War at FutureEverything in Manchester © Bill Thompson)