We redesigned the Souls As Software performance to fit within a gallery context exploring some of the context which inspired the performance featuring Ray Kurzweil, Noam Chomsky & others by remixing audio visual media to show reflections of a dystopian future.
Notes From Technotopia interrogates the ways in which we think or dream about the future through past and present trends in technological development. This group exhibition gathers together works by international artists exploring obsolescence, automation, utopian and dystopian visions, politics of labour, subjectivity and even robot football.
It’s 2015 and the future is back on the table again. It may feel like an age since our televisions were dominated by science-fiction and Space Race news events. With technology developing at dizzying speed and the threat and/or promise of machine-consciousness just around the corner, our appetite for dreams of tomorrow has returned. We live in a time that previous generations made wild predictions about, and each passing day sees these proved, disproved or surpassed. A new tech-based economy is emerging, and with it complex relations to our environment, our work, our selves and one another.
With Black Dogs we’ve wanted to put together an exhibition with a sci-fi element for a long time, and working with Recon Festival and within University of Bradford seems like the perfect context for some artistic responses to technological themes, comments curator Andy Abbott The world is developing and moving quickly at the moment and so I hope this exhibition offers some time and space for critical reflection and orientation on our relation to technology and its wider implications.
Notes From Technotopia includes work by multidisciplinary artists and researchers from across Finland, Korea, Sweden and UK including Mika Taanila, Rudiment, The Frozen Music Collective, Giles Bailey, Shona Macnaughton, The Free Association, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Martin Smith and Raquel Meyers.
The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of events and a publication. Co-produced with artist collective Black Dogs (black-dogs.org) and in association with Recon Festival
