f.city

f.city was folly's first festival of digital culture - three weeks of exhibitions, events and activities that brought some of the very best technology-driven creative practice to Lancaster.

f.city was envisaged as a festival that would animate Lancaster city centre with a variety of creative and artistic content that had been developed and delivered using digital technologies. 

Projects drew together the city’s vibrant arts sector and were anchored by the co-presentation of the exhibition and symposium ‘Perimeters, Boundaries & Borders’ in partnership with Edinburgh & Manchester based Fast-UK. The full festival programme spanned the genres of media arts, music, video, performance and participation and links with the community, education and commercial sectors. Combined figures for both real-world and online audiences during the three-week festival period reached 4000.

Fast-uk and folly partnered to present the exhibition, ‘Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders’ exploring the integration between digital technologies for design and fabrication. The converging and blurring of traditional disciplinary boundaries is made possible by these technologies, from rapid prototyping to the use of generative and algorithmic software for design. With ‘Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders’, Fast-uk and folly presented the work of practitioners at the cutting edge of these developments.

Other festival highlighted included Germaine Koh's Lancaster Relay, combining the lonely image of a flashing lighthouse and the invisible communications networks that surround us. From the top of Lancaster's Ashton Memorial, a light beamed out in Morse code – driven by mobile phone text messages sent to it. Lancaster Relay operated as a bulletin board conveying news from near and far, providing opportunities for social discourse across the city skyline.

Jaygo Bloom presented <Bump...>, drawing attention to the presence of technology through a touchscreen interface in the city centre, linked to bright red sound modules in various locations. The touchscreen invited the public to play apparently innocent computer games, but every sound activated while playing had a presence elsewhere in the real world. Originally commissioned by folly for Futuresonic in Manchester in 2006, the work was re-installed in Lancaster for f.city.

f.city also saw the launch of a number of key online projects for folly, with the new artists' commissions f.wish and Areas of Outstanding Natural Banality both launching during the festival. The festival also saw the first of folly's experiments with podcasting, in Square Cuts, a collaboration with Litfest. The Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders exhibition also initiated an ongoing web-based art project in What's Cooking Grandma.