Every-Body Exhibition
City, Technology and the Body
We are delighted to announce our virtual Festival exhibition for 2020, Every-Body: City, Technology and the Body. Universal Everything is a collective of digital artists and experience designers who explore the relationship between humans, technology and futures. We bring their work to Inspace to stimulate discussion about how the body is shaped through AI and the city. The exhibition will launch on the 6 August with a keynote talk from Joel Gethin Lewis.
Joel Gethin Lewis, interactive creative director of the interdisciplinary design studio Universal Everything, will present his thoughts on how modernity birthed new thinking around Cities, Technology and the Body and how UE’s collaborative studio practice brings them into the 21st century.
Every-Body: City, Technology and the Body
Every-Body introduces the work of the pioneering design studio, Universal Everything and presents a digital triptych consisting of three of their most provocative works. From Walking City that has become a graphic icon for the human as city, through Smart Matter that represented technology hype as a dance partner, to the more recent work Future You, that invited the viewer to become part of the machine, opening up a future of possibilities.
Walking City (2014) recovers the futuristic visions of the 1960’s architecture practice Archigram. As Walking City moves along, her body adapts and morphs through a series of 50 different environments, offering a representation of place as citizen.
Smart Matter (2018) is a series of films that are part of the studio’s Hype Cycle work explores the relationship between technology hype and its affect upon us. Working with dancers and motion capture, an algorithm becomes a third dance partner, building a tension between actions and form.
Future You (2019) is an interactive artwork which places the viewer into a relationship with an evolving form. Triggered by a camera, and learning from your every move, the digital form mimics, adapts and accelerates your body toward a Future You.
Universal Everything’s work has sustained a dialogue between three themes that bridge the 20th and 21st centuries: city, body and technology. The Every-Body show takes the opportunity to untangle these themes through curation and discussion with eminent scholars from the fields of dance, architecture and data-ethics. Ola Uduku is Professor of Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture where her research explores the history of educational architecture in Africa, and the contemporary issues related to social infrastructure provision for minority communities in cities in the ‘West’ and ‘South’. Kate Sicchio is a choreographer, media artist and performer whose work explores the interface between choreography and technology with wearable technology, live coding, and real time video systems. Lilian Edwards is Professor of Law, Innovation & Society at Newcastle University and is a leading academic in the field of Internet law, including work on Artificial Intelligence. She also specialises in privacy and data protection, especially as applied to AI and algorithms.
After months of lockdown, the Every-Body show uses three artworks to stimulate discussion about how our relationship with three Modern projects has changed. The City, the grandest of Modern projects, has long been a frame for defining who and what has power, is being usurped by the Technologies that dismember our material infrastructures and signs us up to monthly subscriptions to deliver or consume food, drink and culture. Recast as digital twins, our Bodies have been profiled for inclusion or exclusion in the new cities of Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning. Every-Body invites you to relish and reflect on life in a data-driven economy through the lens of Universal Everything.
Visit the full exhibition now on the Inspace website.
We will also have talks over the next 3 weeks from the academics featured in the exhibition, look out for tickets being released soon but dates for your diary:
13 August 4pm- Professor Ola Uduku
20 August 4pm- Assistant Professor Kate Sicchio
27 August 4pm- Professor Lilian Edwards
