It’s not often that you get to go to the first edition of a festival or conference, but last week was the first ever Fascinate Conference, in Falmouth – a varied collection of artists, performers, musicians and experimenters with technology, some from far away on their first visit to Cornwall, others were local – both researchers from Falmouth University, as well as artists picking up inspiration.
For me the keynote presentations provided some powerful concepts, Atau Tanaka, opening the event presented an thought provoking timeline in terms of his extensive performance experience. Moving from laptop computers, to mobile computing, and onwards to “post-computers”, including Beagle Boards and Raspberry Pi – as more hackable, extendible and open than more restricted mobile platforms but providing largely the same needs.
Another idea running through a moving presentation from Seth Honnor regarded the 4 degree climate change ‘elephant in the room’. While it represents such a huge un-graspable problem, he points out that everything we do needs to take it into account. It doesn’t necessarily need to be centre stage, but it has to be there – as a background future reality. If we do this we can start to build up the necessary imagination that’s going to be needed in the future.
My presence at the conference was somewhat fragmentary (I had other duties to attend to) sadly missing many of the workshops, presentations and performances – it was however a chance for me to perform for the first time in Cornwall, as well as get to see first hand some of the research that’s happening in Falmouth. The event itself was just the right size, and while at times slightly chaotic and problematic in terms of gender representation – they are things that take time to get right, and it’s freshness and interdisciplinary nature was very welcome indeed. Looking forward to next year’s event!
Update: Since writing this post, the organisers have contacted me to clarify that considerable effort was put into gender representation for the conference, there was a good balance on other presentation tracks and in terms of the keynotes it was more a case of unfortunate last minute changes and other unavoidable factors.