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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Hybrid Futures: making, showing and collecting art in a time of climate crisis. Live Illustration by Grace Collins.
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.”
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.”
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
“…the take away for me: the difference between sustainable and regenerative practices was a real piece of learning for me.”
“I’d like to broaden and deepen my understanding of what it means to have a regenerative mindset.”
Direct Short Term Outputs
creation of an urban garden,
ambition and advocacy to create a community driven university course – sustainable photography, arts and climate acceleration programme,
ambition to embed artists in school working with moss and dedicated nature group
drive to examine operational practices – team reflection, digital footprints and application of the Collective Futures model,
application of what is means to be regenerative,
active, independent collaborative between the collective – engaging school pupils from Rochdale in Manchester
the formation of strong, supportive bonds between the collective, across geographies and sectors – with a desire to continue to continue to provoke and share together.
‘The effect of these workshops will still be felt much later down the line.”
“Revelling in the ‘just do it’ mentality, unconstrained by KPI and organisation hierarchies -[these artists are] living their politics on a daily basis, anarchic and anti-capitalist – found it inspiring.”
“It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten”.
The group immersed themselves in the landscape as they did in the very first session. This time taking in the architecture, mountainous views and heritage of Windermere Jetty Museum on the lake shore.
As planned, we immersed ourselves in the landscape as we did at the very first Collective Futures session. Taking in the architecture, mountainous views and heritage of Windermere Jetty Museum on the lake shore, we also noted that the building has high eco credentials including being heated by the lake.
The session took place in three defined areas: a gravel circle, meadow to one side, lake to the other bordered by moss covered trees; mini amphitheatre where the boat house is situated; where the lake enters the building; and the learning room with floor to ceiling lake and fell aspects. The sun was just breaking through, the temperature was around 14 degrees.
Prior to our final meeting, Alia had shared a survey with the group to support the process of ending well. Beginning in the learning room, Alia shared the aggregated survey results and how this helped shape the day’s plan in response in which:
71% wanted free and open time to chat with others to get to know each other a little better
57% wanted focus time to think through and identify how we resource our ideas moving forward beyond Collective Futures
100% rest, relax and be with nature
86% end Collective Futures well together
Alia reminded the collective of the purpose of the day: to ‘end and/or transition well‘ and articulate what this could mean.
We started the sessions and set the tone of the day discussion with Sankofa (pronounced SAHN-koh-fah) – a word in the Twi language of Ghana meaning “to retrieve” (literally “go back and get”; san – to return; ko – to go; fa – to fetch, to seek and take). It also refers to the symbol of a bird with its head turned backwards while its feet face forward.
Sankofa is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi,” which translates as “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten”.
Moving outside to the gravel circle, standing and facing each other, Alia guided the group to take a breath and to presence our minds and bodies using the weather and our internalised forecast as a barometer to understand and absorb where we find ourselves and what is available to us. We worked in pairs to discuss ‘hope’ and how long we could project this forward.
Collective Futures meeting in Windermere
Objects representing the experience of Collective Futures.
Breaking out to the lakeshore, Collective Futures’ Creative Producer Kit Abramson gave a summation of activity of the Collective Futures programme noting opportunity for iterations – woven into the process – and the impact the programme has had on individual thinking and behaviour in personal and professional spaces.
Returning to the circle, the group were positioned into an inner and outer circle and tasked to share what they had enjoyed most and what they had found most challenging in a 30 second burst. The outer circle then moved clockwise one space and the process was repeated with one caveat: we were not allowed to repeat anything we had already spoken about. This process was repeated five times.
The lunchtime task was to find an object that represented our experience of Collective Futures, to further explore the museum and grounds, and take the opportunity for chat and projection. Echoing our Resonant Objects session, we talked about the objects and images we had collected – an offering of moss, an oak leaf, a photograph of a bee, a photograph of a tree, a photograph of upcycled plant pot wellies, a fragment of pink acrylic fabric, a photograph of a fish, a forked smooth and flaky twig, two slates threaded with white sediment and two connected ivy leaves.
Moving on to the learning room, we each created a series of ‘I need’ statements on yellow post it notes, followed by the offering of support and resource that we could give to each other to support the development and realisation of activity/proposals/ongoing relationships. These were quickly and loosely grouped into categories of need aligned with committed offers of support and resources. The group discussed Collective Futures as a model and how to embed this model to create systems change if they could apply it to their own workplaces.
I need:
To keep this relationship going
Time to reflect like this
Somewhere to share the importance of moss in nature
Resource for my nature group drawing inspiration from art
Support with a project to bring displaced people to be in and see the fells and capture connections between human experience of movement in green and urban space
To know how to create this space for my colleagues
To advocate for a sustainable photography degree
To find a way to let things be open without controlling
To measure things like digital storage of photos
To keep the momentum going
To find this space
To articulate Collective Futures and the impact of it to our funders
Help to share the value of the project with the wider team
There was agreement that the drop in, drop out structure suited those involved and that the role of the reflective notes/supporting media supported this approach. Going forward the collective committed to meet on a quarterly basis with a structure in place – we called these Provo-Catch Ups.
We moved on to writing with the hand we don’t normally write with – reflecting on the day – what we enjoyed, felt challenged by and what we were proud of. We finished the workshop with a gratitude circle and a poetry reading from Alia to close the day having supported the transition/extension of Collective Futures beyond this first phase funded programme.
