Tech talk: Natalie Kane, comms officer, FutureEverything

Hi Natalie, what can you tell me about FutureEverything and your role there?

I’m the communications officer and copywriter for FutureEverything, a culture, technology and innovation organisation based in Manchester that makes connections between people, places, society and ideas.

I’m responsible for how FutureEverything talks to its audience. We are currently in festival mode, so every day is different. Most of my job is writing the online and print copy that represents our programme, plus helping the team translate all their great projects to our audiences.

The festival marks its 20th birthday this year – what are some of the key highlights from that past two decades?

My personal favourites include the first iteration of The Pink Sheet Method, a data project performance piece by art collective Thickear, which explored the tense relationship between our personal data and those who own it. I also really enjoyed Chattr, a design experiment that shared the private conversations you had using the service to the public. It demonstrated how your privacy is compromised if you don’t fully know what you’re signing up for.

I also really loved the way that data visualisation project Emoto tangibly brought the public excitement around the London Olympic Games to life.

I’m biased, because I wrote on it, but the Winning Formula project, which envisaged the future of data and sport in 2018, was great as well. It gave us the opportunity to imagine possible uses and abuses of data in a fun and slightly tongue-in-cheek way.

FutureEverything is a festival of ideas, but how does it ensure those ideas are turned into something meaningful and effective?

It’s a difficult problem. You’re right; festivals and conferences can occasionally come across as being broadcasters of information, which doesn’t take into consideration the fact that audiences want to feel part of it too.

Something we’re developing with an eye on the long-term is the Festival as Lab framework. It takes inspiration from the “living lab” concept, which sees research taken out of the laboratory and into the real world. Living labs can engage participants in co-creation, experimentation and evaluation. This approach means that we can use the festival as a forum to develop ideas, not just present them.

Your own work as a writer and curator has examined the impact of algorithms in arts and culture – what examples have you seen?

There are a few examples of algorithms applied in curatorial decision-making, such as the one used to curate an exhibition at the 9/11 Museum in New York. The curator put it in place because she couldn’t entrust a single person to hand-select a few moments and stick together a story. There’s a tragedy here in applying logical systems to this very human thing. It’s also an example of where we shouldn’t be passing on responsibility for the curation of our culture.

Artists have been approaching this subject for a while now, for example Matthew Plummer-Fernandez’s project, Novice Art Blogger, which uses deep-learning algorithms to generate art criticism in a straight-up, humorous way. It highlights the objectivity and the unique (occasionally jarring) “honesty” of the way computers “see” visual images.

Then there’s Jonas Lund’s The Fear Of Missing Out, which generates new work according to what an algorithm spits out after analysis. I also really love Erica Scourti’s So Like You, which fed important personal memories into Google Image Search to see what the machine read as the nearest image in common. This is the machine’s eye view. Our culture is being catalogued and interpreted by computational systems in ways to which we should be paying attention.

Are there any dangers inherent in this use of algorithms?

The main problem with relying on algorithms is accountability: who do we blame when things go wrong? There’s a case of a woman in 2013 who, after her death, had her photo used in a Canadian dating app because of an image scraping algorithm that just read her as “female woman” without thinking of the emotional consequences of using that image.

The uproar surrounding it made people ask whose fault it was, with many defaulting to the algorithm, rather than the person who decided to use it. Algorithms don’t understand the context of a photograph, nor a piece of text; they only know how to categorise and deal with it objectively, in truths and non-truths. We often forget that people are behind the decisions made about their instructions, and where and how they are used.

What future technologies are you excited about?

One of the best things I’ve seen lately is the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum’s digital pen, which visitors can use to collect information text on the exhibit walls and turn it into a personal catalogue they can read later. It means they can carry on the learning process because it’s all in one place and linked up with other interesting exhibits they might like too.

It’s simple but effective and addresses an ongoing problem with taking culture out of the museum. It’s not so much about finding new technologies, but finding better ways to use them and in ways people actually want. The most important thing about the pen is that the team who designed it are not just going to leave at the end of the project, letting it go out of date and break. They’re there to keep the project alive and healthy – something a lot of organisations don’t do.

We owe more to our collective culture than to let a bunch of useless technologies stack up in our archives.

This interview was co-commissioned with Arts Industry magazine

Natalie Kane is a writer, artist, curator and comms officer at FutureEverything, the festival of which takes place until 28 February

More Tech talks

Product designers, Clam Collective
Edwin Coomasaru, director, International New Media Gallery
Bertie Watkins, director, CoLab Theatre

Join our community of arts, culture and creative professionals by signing up free to the Guardian Culture Pros Network.