PRESENT FUTURES DIGITAL
By Colette Sadler & Feral
Present Futures Glasgow 2021 is the fourth edition of a multi - disciplinary art event curated by Colette Sadler and produced by Feral. The 2021 digital edition happened from 5th - 7th Feb 2021. This iteration of the festival was re-imagined as a virtual space and prism through which the local and global can come together to consider post humanism, bodily representation and speculative futures with artistic experimentation at its core. Presenting a collection of short film, artist moving image, immersive audio, online discussion and workshops the digital edition of Present Futures highlighted Scottish and International artists whose work operates between performance, film, visual art and sound.
The 2021 festival continued an artistic and scientific enquiry into the field of human/non-human relations and entanglements. What is the future of relationships between human and artificial agencies? How do we position ourselves as individuals and collectively within an ever-evolving post-humanist world view? How are artists utilising virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotic engineering and synthetic biology to probe hybridisation and new interspecies relations? To what extent are artists reflecting utopian or dystopian futures in their work?
Featuring contributions from artists including KEIKAN, Simon Senn, Alicia Matthews & Robbie Thomson, Colette Sadler in collaboration with Mikko Gaestel & Heiko Tubbesing, Justin Shoulder, Mass Hysteria Collective & Leah Marojević, Wong Ping, Lawrence Lek, Tim Murray-Browne & Panagiotis Tigas, Samir Kennedy, Libby Heaney, Soojin Chang, Hamshya Rajkumar, Clarinda Tse, Laura Fisher, Siri Black, Jake Elwes, Libby Odai, Laura Bissell and Lucy Weir.
