Category: News

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Hybrid Futures: Hypersea – in retrospect

Recently, the Hybrid Futures: Hypersea event premiered at Salford Museum & Art Gallery as part of Fat Out Fest, the University of Salford Art Collection team assistant, Sam, gives his thoughts:

The Hybrid Futures event was exciting from start to finish – welcoming public audiences from a variety of backgrounds to experience this contemporary exhibit of sound.

Hybrid Futures: Hypersea
Image: Courtesy of Sam Parker.

This was born out of a 10 day residency for Hypersea to respond to Shezad Dawood’s ‘Leviathan: From the Forest to the Sea‘ supported by Samarbeta Music Residency, IKLECTIK ART LAB , and the University of Salford Art Collection.

Hybrid Futures: Hypersea
Image: Courtesy of Sam Parker.

Starting with I Am Fya – an eclectic mix of vocals, digital sound, and sporadic imagery progressing through the performance. A spontaneous vocal reaction to candid configuration of music and sound, accompanied by collaged video. Each individual piece both reacted to and stimulated each other, pushing the piece to develop into a unique response to the moment. Some danced, some stood, some sat and embraced the mix of sensory stimulation as the performance existed in uncertainty and unfolded into something irreplicable.

Hybrid Futures: Hypersea, I Am Fya
Image: Courtesy of Sam Parker.

Hypersea‘s response to Shezad Dawood’s ‘Leviathan: From the Forest to the Sea‘ was an encompassing mix of existentialism and possible outcomes for our futures. The sound was engaging, relaxing, and overall allowed the public to experience it how they wanted – the more lively of people danced, those who wanted to experience the sound (and sound only) sat down, closed their eyes, a couple even lay flat on their back to fully immerse themselves in the soundscape. For those with their eyes open, the lighting only added to the immersion of Hypersea’s performance – although lacking any change throughout the performance, the red light cast around the room kept the audience engaged and attentive. The soundtrack that Hypersea was constructed from sonified ocean data and used motion to control the composition – which I found extremely interesting, it gave the performance a real sense of weight and gravitas to know what was being presented.

Hybrid Futures: Hypersea
Image: Courtesy of Sam Parker.

A fitting closing celebration of the 3 year Hybrid Futures project, championing partnership working and collaboration across the North West.

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Hybrid Futures: Hypersea

Image: courtesy of Fat Out Fest 2024

PERFORMANCE COMMISSION FOR FAT OUT FEST IN SALFORD MARKS THE CONCLUSION OF HYBRID FUTURES

From the Other, University of Salford Art Collection & IKLECTIK present a brand new interactive A/V show from Hypersea in response to the Hybrid Futures exhibition. 

Working Men’s Club synth player Hannah Cobb will be undertaking a 10 day Samarbeta residency in the run up to the Fat Out Fest to develop a performance under her artist persona, Hypersea.

This new work will be premiered to an intimate audience on Friday 20 September at Salford Museum & Art Gallery within the Hybrid Futures exhibition.

Hypersea will develop a performance starting with ideas surrounding fluidity, interconnectivity and notions of collectivity, inspired by Shezad Dawood’s work ‘Leviathan: From the Forest to the Sea’, currently showing in Hybrid Futures. The work will evolve over the residency at Islington Mill, facilitated by the Samarbeta music residency programme. It will incorporate instruments built in Max/MSP, data sonification and visualisation, and explorations into motion-controlled A/V, moving towards a final work in which the movements of audience members in the space will contribute to the overall soundscape of the installation.

The work produced will be an immersive sonic and visual experience, where the physical bodies of audience members paired with processes developed using machine learning techniques will collectively form the final outcome.

The evening starts at 7pm with a chance to view the exhibition before it closes on Sunday 22nd September. Following a support act (TBC) at 8pm, Hypersea will perform at 9pm.  A pay bar will be open.

Tickets are on sale from https://www.fatout.info/

Sliding scale pricing £8 (low income) – £12 (standard) £15 – (solidarity) 

Please note the Hybrid Futures exhibition will close early at 3pm on 20th September. 

Book tickets for Hybrid Futures: Hypersea here
Find out more about Fat Out Fest 2024 here

In Partnership with Samarbeta, University of Salford Art Collection, and IKLECTIK

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Seeds for Action: In Focus – Audiences, Artists and Partnerships – Museums Development North

Are you interested in engaging audiences and artists with environmental issues? ?
Are you wanting to take a collaborative approach to climate-focused work? ♻️

Install shot of Hybrid Futures Photographed by Jules Lister

Then you should book onto Museum Development North’s Seeds for Action workshop on the 20th of August! (click here!)

This session will be presenting a lightning talk about #HybridFutures , our multi-part collaboration focusing on climate, sustainability, collaborative learning, and co-production! This project has brought us together with @castlefieldgall
, @grundyartgallery , @touchstones_rochdale , and Shezad Dawood Studios – all the more reason to sign up!

Install shot of Hybrid Futures Photographed by Jules Lister

The talk will be presented by our Curator Lindsay Taylor, and our friend @rt.pritchard ! Hope you can make it!

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Opportunity: Samarbeta Open Call Residency in response to Hybrid Futures

Opportunity Samarbeta Open Call Residency

Responding to the Hybrid Futures Exhibition at Salford Museum & Art Gallery
DEADLINE: 5pm, 15th July 2024.
Click here to apply.

We are thrilled to share a new open-call opportunity for musicians to respond to the Hybrid Futures exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery. This open call is looking for a musician(s) to respond to the Hybrid Futures themes and/or work created by the visual artists, to create a new live presentation to be premiered in Salford Museum and Art Gallery on the opening night of Fat Out Fest.

The opportunity is part of the Samarbeta Residency Programme and includes ten days in residence at Islington Mill, SMAG & University of Salford, facilitation and technical support from Samarbeta & IKLECTIK, culminating in a live performance at Salford Museum and Art Gallery for Fat Out Fest 2024.

To read the full information about the opportunity and application process, click here to visit the Samarbeta website.

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View Now: Hybrid Futures Symposium Live Illustration

Bringing together the Hybrid Futures sector partners, along with artists, commissioners, local authority staff, funders, community members and consultants, the one-day Hybrid Futures: Making, Showing and Collecting Art in a Time of Climate Crisis symposium took place in May 2024.

Throughout the day, Live Illustrator Grace Collins captured the rich conversations. Collins’ illustration records the depth and breadth of the fascinating discussions from across the symposium.

This illustration is part of the Hybrid Futures symposium held at the University of Salford in 2024: a symposium about making, showing and collecting art in a time of climate crisis.
Hybrid Futures: making, showing and collecting art in a time of climate crisis. Live Illustration by Grace Collins.

Read more about the Symposium.

Visit Grace Collins’ Website.

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Artist Shezad Dawood shares his answers to our Hybrid Futures questions

Installation view of Hybrid Futures at Salford Museum & Art gallery, showing the main 'Have Your Say' question wall, and audience responses.

Throughout the Hybrid Futures exhibition at Salford Museum & Art Gallery, questions are posed asking visitors to share how they feel about the climate crisis, and what arts organisations should be doing in response. As well as asking the audience, we’ve asked the Hybrid Futures artists what their responses to four of the same questions might be. This week Shezad Dawood shares his thoughts. 

Question 1: How important is addressing climate change to you? 

“I think the most pressing question of our time is how to get all people to come together around our shared planet and how we collectively make it, and not ourselves, the priority.”

Question 2: What actions are you taking in response to the climate crisis? 

“I’m reducing my travel and working with collaborators to collaborate on film, digital and writing projects remotely where possible. I’ve also been looking at how and where there are ways to reduce shipping, so for a recent set of shows the works were predominantly hanging textiles that could be put together on a single roll, rather than needing multiple crates, and the rest of the works were digital files that could be transferred.”

A photograph of data presented at Hybrid Futures showing a pie chart of co2e emissions from the Hybrid Futures exhibition at Touchstones Rochdale June - Aug 23. The data shows that 32% of co2e emissions came from Energy use, 20% from art creation, 15% from transport of art, 12% from other staff/artist travel, 10% from staff commuting, 7% from paint, and 4% from materials.
Data about the Co2e emissions associated with Leviathan: From the Forest to the Sea presented as part of Hybrid Futures at Touchstones Rochdale in 2023.

? Danny Chivers, Hybrid Futures Environmental Consultant, has calculated that the total emissions from the first three Hybrid Futures exhibitions at Touchstones Rochdale, Castlefield Gallery and Grundy Art Gallery, are roughly equivalent to a single return flight from the UK to Indonesia (4.6 tonnes of CO2e). Reducing how much we fly is one of the biggest ways we can reduce our carbon footprints. 

Question 3: “I believe art galleries and museums should…” 

“Be engaging with artists, audiences, funders and colleagues to see where we can all work together to create new industry standards for how we do things, from reducing waste in exhibition design (and redesign) to hosting creative and interdisciplinary conversations to yield new ideas and collaborations between the arts, the sciences and to broaden our reach.”

Question 4: If you could change one thing to make a more sustainable world, what would it be? 

“Ultimately changing the behaviour and regulatory frameworks of the world’s largest corporations remains one of the quickest and most impactful ways to accelerate change.”

A close up image showing green post-it notes, on the wall at Salford Museum & Art Gallery
Post-it notes at Salford Museum & Art Gallery, responding to the question If you could change one thing to make a more sustainable world, what would it be?

?The 2024 The Carbon Majors Database: Launch Report found that just 57 organisations are linked to 80% of the world’s fossil fuel and cement Co2 emissions since the Paris Agreement in 2015. These findings highlight the importance of systematic change in order to tackle the climate crisis. 

What would your answers to these questions be? 

We hope that Hybrid Futures and these prompts encourage us all to reflect on our own actions, the places where we are already making changes, and where we can use our power and influence to have the biggest impact. 

Hybrid Futures is open now at Salford Museum & Art Gallery until September 22nd, where you can see visitors’ answers to the questions and prompts, alongside work from Shezad Dawood, Jessica El Mal, Parham Ghalamdar and RA Walden.

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RA Walden Solo Exhibition Opens at Grundy Art Gallery 20th April – 15th June

A still image from RA Walden's work a slow and burning hope, showing ten cream coloured pillar candles, burning at different heights.

As part of the wider Hybrid Futures programme Grundy Art Gallery presents a new solo exhibition RA Walden: Object transformations through the coordinate of time.

‘Object transformations through the coordinate of time’, is a solo exhibition of newly commissioned and existing works by the UK born, Berlin-based artist, RA Walden. Spanning sculpture, installation, text and moving image, the works in this exhibition mark and measure the passing of time. Drawing on reference points as varied as, quantum physics, the ecological crisis, ancient timekeeping and the life cycle of worms, Walden is asking us to consider time at both a macro and micro level. More specifically, as an artist with lived experience of a disability, RA Walden also uses their work to explore and express non-normative experiences of time. From sculptures made from hacked office clocks, to texts that ask who and what defines, ‘work’, Walden’s exhibition also provides a poetic meditation on lives and bodies whose timekeeping does not conform to the supposed ‘norm’.

The exhibition opens this Saturday, the 20th of April, until the 15th of June at Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool. For more information on the exhibition and to plan your visit, click here.

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Collective Futures: How might we best respond to the climate crisis?

An image capturing phones, with there screens on, lay down on wooden plank flooring, alongside leaves and branches.

How might we best respond to the climate crisis?

“I found the idea, discussed at one of the sessions, of ‘contributing to a future world we will never experience’ to be surprisingly calming. I have faith, even though I struggle with uncertainty.”

Collective Futures has focused on hearing from invited guests – artists, community activists and cultural strategists. Reflection has been a big part of the group’s sense-making, combining facts, feelings, interpretations and unlocking personal and professional relevance. The programme has given those involved new ways to think about their own work and/or working practices and begin to embed these individual and collective responses at carefully considered pace. The programme has led to direct action and infiltrated unexpected spaces, changing the way people think about their everyday activity for example – whether their actions go beyond sustainable to regenerative.

I also shared with (my neighbours) the story … about the polluted river which caused lots of issues in (an) area. This sparked another discussion, a wider one, about sustainability and ‘green’ initiatives, and prompted an old idea to resurface – to transform a small bit of a green space we’ve got between two of the buildings into a community garden. Everyone offered to contribute and it turned out we’ve already got all the resources we need in terms of tools, seeds, et., from people’s balcony gardens(including a 2-ton bag of soil which our neighbour has somehow been storing on his balcony since last summer. We got permission from the facilities management which I thought would be much trickier, and we’ll set the project in motion as soon as spring begins.”

Catch up on all Collective Futures updates and reflections including next steps and outcomes here.

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Collective Futures Session 10

This online session focused on the roles we can play to support or build projects or change. We used a metaphor of the scaffold to draw out and better understand the roles different people in Collective Futures naturally lean into – some people have ideas they want to run with, some want to support. Find out more here.

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