Futuresonic. It's in Manchester and it's soon

Futuresonic celebrates this year its 10th anniversary with an amazing line-up of performances, exhibitions and events across Manchester city centre. This festival of electronic art and music will take place on July 20-23. That's very soon (only got my ticket yesterday!)

There will be the Social Technologies Summit, a series of conferences that explore "a whole new way of doing things in the air". I'm particularly thrilled at the idea of making a fool of myself at the Social Art panel. How will i not? I'll be speaking with two persons i admire a lot: super clever Jose Luis de Vicente, critic and curator of major new media art festivals (Sonar, Art Futura, OFFF, etc.) and Anthony Dunne (his name has been mentioned about 100 times in this blog, he's Head of Interaction Design, Royal College of Art and the author of Design Noir, the Secret Life of Electronic Objects (together with FIona Raby) and Hertzian Tales. i nevertheless think that he should be fined for having such an annoying website).

Other talks include:
- a keynote by Toshio Iwai himself;
- Collaborative, Creative and Commercial Digital Mapping with another favourite of mine, Masaki Fujihata, but also Richard Peckham, and Steve Coast.
- Contested Spaces and RFID with a talk by Professor Tim Cresswell followed by a discussion of one of the most contested technologies of modern times, RFID. A session featuring Inke Arns, Rob van Kranenburg and Drew Hemment.
- Iterative Architecture (Built On An Internet Of Things). With speakers like Tom Carden, Matt Webb and Stanislav Roudavski this session should be both fun and brain-challenging,
- Social Music with Atau Tanaka, Last.fm, Share NYC.

There's more: two Urban Play exhibition. One is dedicated to mobile, locative and mapping technologies, the other to Musical Instruments. Both run from July 20 to 29 at the Museum of Science and Industry.