Future Everybody

Luckily, I was awarded a bursary to attend Future Everything. I only managed to get away from work for a day but what a great day.

I really like traveling alone it’s meditative and the first keynote of the day was discussing modern day Buddhism and how embedded it is already with the “hipsters” only these guys don’t have teachers that can speak their language so what’s happening is another massive shift in what Buddhism means now. You can buy an app to help you along the way, specifically created with the urban Buddhist in mind.

I’m open minded so these things don’t really phase me, in fact I was un-phased by all the talks and workshops mainly because I realise I must be pretty good at research on the web so most of the talks I’d already stumbled across in some form, but it was good to have more of a context rather than a random and complete distraction from what I’m actually meant to be doing. 

Did someone write about the how great it is to meander on through the web without purpose or are we still thinking this is really bad aspect of the web?

I’m still awfully sick of hearing about how great this app or that soc-med is and how connected we all are when I barely get to see my mates who live within probably a 10 mile radius. But I definitely got the “we need you to participate with us” vibe from the Turing sunflowers project talk as they asked for people to come to one side and share ideas of how they’re going to promote interactivity with this project, a study to count the spirals of seeds on a fully grown sunflower, it’s to do with the Fibonacci sequence, and how that arbitrary set of numbers is represented in the number of sunflower seed spirals and lots of other plants and that’s my great explanation, it is good, that’s all you need to know.

I also checked out Think & Stare, managed to get over to the exhibition space (forgetting to pick up my little clay man) and I missed the ant ballet. But I loved this little piece of RFID engineering; place a photo on the screen and through headphones you heard a story behind the image. I can see that could have a lot of application in museums or galleries. Again nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but it’s presented well and it works. Gone are the days of these “testbeds” of applications, we’re in the future- stuff needs to work properly. They were commissioned by Mass Observation, something I’d heard of vaguely; it’s a great British project to observe life in the UK and has been doing so since the 1930s, there’s a massive collection of data in a library in perhaps Sussex.  

I also checked out Cesar A. Hidalgo’s talk on data and economics and how you can predict the next superpowers from a “simple” dataset and rules, he was a great speaker and joked all the way about these “simple” rules, he even broke it down with Lego blocks, and he has a book out and its very pretty.

Went to a few other things, mass participation panel mostly to do with apps mobile or online, city and the city, and the talk about football tribalism; something I didn’t think I’d like at all, moving passed that football thing is hard.

Is there a sci-fi book about how football dominates a future world, I think Cesar a. Hidalgo should use that for a new dataset, he did briefly mention a way in which you could show the cultural exports of a country. 

I didn’t take a picture and I didn’t post a tweet, LIBERATION!