The Future Machine is being built. A strange and mystical device sits on a handcart, a witness and a way to navigate the future we want and not the one we fear.
Another device acts as a kind of oracle connecting the past, present and future and a map gives us some instructions.
The development and design is happening in conversation with people in Finsbury Park through a series of workshops that anyone can join by booking here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/building-a-future-machine-workshops-tickets-57695275121
Future Machine is being built through technical design and development work with the technical team that includes Rachel Jacobs, Robin Shackford, Matthew Gates, Matt Little and Dominic Price.
Future Machine is also being built in conversation with the scientist John King from the British Antarctic Survey and researchers Prof Steve Benford, Jocelyn Spence, Elvira Perez Vallejos and Neil Chadbourn from the University of Nottingham, and Prof Esther Eidinow from the University of Bristol Ancient History Department and the collaborating artists Frank Abbott, Juliet Robson and Wallace Heim.
It’s a big team, having lots of different kinds of conversations about the future, environmental change, myth, wellbeing, time, seasons, place, extraction, ritual and technology.
The Future Machine encompasses all of these workshops, conversations and actions, it is many parts of a whole.
The Future Machine is a Furtherfield Park Commission and will be launched at a ritualised unveiling at Furtherfield Gallery alongside the Time Portal’s, Citizen Sci-Fi exhibition.
Then the Future Machine will travel to Nottingham, Cumbria and Oxfordshire, appearing alongside a series of seasonal meetings and moments that are due to take place in Kingwood Common, Tilberthwaite Quarry and Christ Church Gardens.