Relax into 2050- Adventures in an Optimistic Future

EXHIBITION 3

RELAX INTO 2050 - ADVENTURES IN AN OPTIMISTIC FUTURE

ARTFLY

7 DECEMBER 2023 - 17 FEBRUARY 2024

TIDAL was our digital arts programme for 2023 which explores the unique proximity of the urban centre of Barrow-in-Furness with the coastlines that outline it. This forms the third exhibition by commissioned artists tasked with creating work for an exhibition to reframe and investigate what the coast means to people and the planet.

What if the future had the potential to be whatever you make it? Kick off your shoes and look around. It’s actually pretty nice! At least that’s what local Artists Chris and Jennie Dennett of Artfly invited you to imagine. ‘Relax into 2050 – Adventures in an Optimistic Future’ is a playful installation set in a flourishing future where nature and technology work in harmony. A future collectively built with airship rides, bountiful rewilded nature and AI-led cures for many of our ills. Visitors were invited to don ‘Step into the Future’ slippers, and enter a ‘dream dome’ to lie back and enjoy mesmerising kaleidoscopic patterns made by themselves and their fellow humans. Serenaded by a specially-composed soundscape, listening to soothing sounds of humanity travelling forward in time, not to a dystopian destination, but to a possible one where it’s actually all OK.

Displayed around the dome were ways people in Barrow and beyond are already building this future. The exhibition was inspired by the Solarpunk art movement which imagines a world in which existing technologies are deployed for the greater good of both people and the plannet.

Location:
Cooke’s Studios,
102-104 Abbey Road,
Barrow-in-Furness,
Cumbria LA14 5QR

Exhibition Opening Times:
Thu 7th December – Sat 17th February
Open Wed – Sun | 11am – 4pm
FREE

ARTFLY

Chris & Jennie Dennett make playful interactive community art, digital exhibits and websites under the name Artfly. Recent projects saw visitors to Barrow’s Dock Museum appear inside Minnie Pratt’s watercolours and a new permanent photo portal transports people into Victorian Barrow, while an interactive gramophone plays memories of the town’s old theatres and cinemas. With FON, they also created ‘From a Pin to a Piano’, a pop-up museum on Duke Street.

They’re based in Ulverston with their two children where Jennie is involved in many of the town’s festivals. She’s Secretary of Ulverston Lantern Festival and runs the Halloween Candlelit Walk. Outside of arts volunteering, she works as a reporter with BBC Radio Cumbria.

Chris makes his electronic oddities whilst also working at CGP books in Broughton-in-Furness as a Quirk Ambassador.

“I encourage creativity and play above passive observation. I’m interested in the awkward bit between the real and digital worlds. Webcams, microphones and dismantled keyboards bring the real world in, while projectors, screens and robots let the digital world out.

I believe silliness, playfulness and joy deserve to rank equally with the more commonly accepted inspirations for “proper art” of suffering, angst and tragedy.”