Event Details

On Tuesday 9 July, Lancaster University’s School of Arts and the Future Places Centre invite you to an evening exploring how data shapes our relationship with place, environment, and the future.

REGISTER

🔗 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cultivating-data-natures-tickets-1401740596859

Cultivating Data Natures

Wednesday 9 July 2025 | 7:00–9:30pm | Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University

Free to attend – Registration essential

On Tuesday 9 July, Lancaster University’s School of Arts and the Future Places Centre invite you to an evening exploring how data shapes our relationship with place, environment, and the future.

Cultivating Data Natures brings together internationally renowned contributors in a lively, interdisciplinary setting. The event is presented in partnership with Abandon Normal Devices, Deco Publique, and Lancaster Arts, and marks the closing celebration of the Future Places Centre—Lancaster University’s interdisciplinary hub for experimental research into data, design, and environmental futures.

The theme of cultivation runs throughout the evening as a research and innovation method. We want to ask how we tend to data, how we nurture new imaginaries, and how we grow more just, sustainable, and imaginative relationships between people, technology, and the natural world.

Event Highlights

Jonathan Gray – Public Data Cultures

Drawing from his forthcoming book (Polity, October 2025), Gray offers a radical rethinking of public data as cultural and political material. Rather than framing data simply as a resource to be opened or protected, he argues for forms of public data practice rooted in care, participation, and solidarity—essential for making sense of today’s interconnected social and ecological crises.

BRiGHTBLACK – Gardeners of the 5th Industrial Revolution

A performance lecture set in a speculative future where artificial intelligence has liberated humanity from labour. In the GrowDome, the audience joins a group of post-labour gardeners navigating fossils, simulations, and hybrid consciousnesses to reimagine ecological life in a future Morecambe Bay. Combining storytelling, game engines, and participatory dialogue, BRiGHTBLACK ask: who are we becoming?

LUMI – Film by Abelardo Gil-Fournier & Jussi Parikka

A synthetic intelligence is trained on historical landscape photography in an attempt to repaint the Earth for climate repair. LUMI is a meditative video essay on snow, light, memory and machine vision—a planetary fiction that poses urgent questions about time, perception, and the aesthetics of environmental data.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

BRiGHTBLACK is a company of two artists Myra Appannah and Simon Wilkinson, from POC / neurodiverse backgrounds whose works have toured to 36 nations on 5 continents over the last decade from Tate Modern to an abandoned toilet in the Arizona desert. We explore the radical potential of immersive technologies to create artworks which aim to disrupt, democratise and decolonise, giving power back to the individual and their communities.

"One of the most influential UK immersive productions of the last twenty years" [UKRI]

"A glimpse of the future of entertainment." CULTURE WHISPER *****

"No one will forget this." AUSTRALIAN STAGE *****

"A real game changer." [Design My Night] ****

Jonathan Gray is a researcher, writer and educator working at the intersection of media, culture, and politics. He is Senior Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at King’s College London and co-founder of the Public Data Lab. His work explores how data is made public—socially, technically, and materially—and how it is entangled with issues of democracy, participation, and care. Jonathan is the author of Data Worlds: A Social Life of Data (with Danny Lämmerhirt and Liliana Bounegru, MIT Press, 2024) and the forthcoming Public Data Cultures (Polity, 2025), which examines the cultural and political practices involved in making data meaningful and consequential. His research spans public data infrastructures, data journalism, digital methods, and the aesthetics and politics of evidence. He has collaborated widely with artists, designers, journalists, and technologists to explore the civic potential of data in addressing social and environmental challenges.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher whose work explores the visual cultures of environmental transformation, technological vision, and the politics of landscape. Working across film, photography, and critical theory, his practice investigates how planetary processes are mediated through images, data, and machines. Gil-Fournier’s work has been exhibited and presented internationally, and he frequently collaborates with theorist Jussi Parikka on projects at the intersection of art, media archaeology, and environmental aesthetics. Their film LUMI, featured in this event, offers a speculative vision of climate restoration through synthetic intelligence and landscape datasets.

About the Partners

The Future Places Centre at Lancaster University has been a hub for interdisciplinary inquiry into data, place, and futures thinking—bringing together environmental scientists, designers, artists, and digital humanists. This event celebrates its contributions to participatory research, public engagement, and climate imagination.

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is a radical arts organisation working nationally and internationally to produce immersive, site-responsive works at the intersection of creativity, technology and science. Renowned for its nomadic digital arts festival, AND challenges norms through experiences grounded in ethics, sustainability, and critical dialogue.

🔗 andfestival.org.uk / @abandon_normal_devices

Deco Publique is a Morecambe-based art and culture company animating coastal and rural landscapes across the North of England. From festivals to public art commissions, they foster creative place-based practice that connects artists, audiences, and environmental context.

🔗 decopublique.co.uk / @decopublique

Lancaster Arts is the university’s public arts organisation, working with contemporary artists and local communities to develop meaningful and transformative cultural experiences on campus and beyond.

Cultivate is Lancaster University’s cultural innovation framework, developed from the 2024 Arts & Culture Review. Cultivate positions the university as a Global Cultural District, bringing together research, practice, and regional partnerships to support wellbeing, sustainability, and creative growth across disciplines.

A Future Places Centre Colloquium (EPSRC grant EP/TO22574/1)