OFFLOAD SYSTEMS FOR SURVIVAL – is the UK’s first interdisciplinary network media and systems arts event on nature, sustainability and ecology.OFFLOAD brings together international, national and local artists and practitioners interested in creating socially engaged work that use new and existing media, highlights include:
Marrying the digital with new forms of engagement, Heath Bunting’s ‘Status Project’ brings it back to the basics by reclaiming how we can survive in cities, particularly when natural resources are scarce and our normal systems of engagement are redundant.
Futurefarmers (US) present their ‘Gardening Superfund Sites’, which looks at the influence of technical or eWaste around the Silicon Valley and across other US site.
Avant garde architects Minimaforms present their SMS text message public sculpture ‘Smoke Signals’. Based on the ancient system of trading messages, their digital version allows participants to text in real-time their messages onto plumes of smoke, which will float across Bristol Harbour.
Nottingham based Active Ingredient utilize the latest mobile computing software’s to create the outdoor, playful, hand-held computer game ‘Ere Be Dragons’, which is controlled by your heart rate. Taking place on the street, as you play the game you create delicate digital landscapes, which emerge and grow on your computer screen.
Polar Produce’s ‘Come Outside’ social bike project encourages sustainable participatory experiences. Polar Produce take people on a bike ride with modified bicycle dynamos that are re-wired to small re-chargeable batteries. As people cycle the energy created charges the batteries and is then used to boil a kettle or power electric devices.
For further details and to join the OFFLOAD mailing visit www.offloadfestival.org
