Future Machine Summer 2024 Update

Emerging Voices is pleased to present an update from Rachel Jacobs on her journey with Future Machine, an interactive artwork designed to encourage conversation and action on our ongoing climate crisis. For background and more stories, see Rachel's work in our Archives.

Future Machine: When The Future Comes,  2024

Future Machine is a deliberately heavy, cumbersome, technologically complex, slow and somewhat mysterious being. An interactive artwork, it prompts those who meet it to consider the future and be a witness to change. In some sense, Future Machine might be thought of as a mythical creature, a totem, a being that appears as if from nowhere as the seasons change. A child said it looks like a witch. It captures the imagination as people stroke it and laugh at its wobbly, clunky movements. Many are drawn to it, returning each year when it makes its appearance.

2024 has been a busy year for Future Machine and the artists of  'When the Future Comes Project’. In 2024, after a year of no funding, we received much needed money from the Arts Council of England to continue this ambitious 30 year project. As this longitudinal project evolves, we are aware that each year will be different. Sometimes we’ll expand, sometimes we’ll hardly manage to be present at all – as in 2020 and 2023. A cardboard effigy of Future Machine may appear or we may just walk by, filming and taking photos. Perhaps we’ll simply gather with a few people around a tree.

As part of this year's funding commitment, we explored ways to tell the wider story of When the Future Comes, based on the five places across England where Future Machine has appeared:  Christ Church Gardens, a memorial garden in Nottingham; Finsbury Park, a large urban park in north London; the Windermere-Leven waters in rural Cumbria; Peppard, an Anglo-Saxon village in Oxfordshire; and Cannington, Somerset, an ancient village, now becoming a commuter town for Hinkley Point C Nuclear Power Station.

We have begun to tell the story through objects and moments in time, captured by the collaborating artists in each place. We have created a 'Cabinet of Curious Places' to hold the objects and stories. This ‘cabinet’ can unfold as an exhibition, enabling people to follow trails and threads and scan QR codes. A large banner provides a backdrop to the cabinet, representing this journey with a map, along with a key to the places represented by hand embroidered QR codes.

The aim is to make sense of things that hold these five places together, that reveal their uniqueness, their beauty and peculiarities. This has been a challenging process, and it continues to shape itself. Most probably, we will be unable to tell a coherent story of these sites. Yet Future Machine appears in each place once a year, its presence binding the sites together over time. The cabinet has just been exhibited at Derby Cathedral as part of a larger exhibition called 'Our Stories Are Wild', featuring artistic works exploring connections with nature, curated by one of the collaborating artists Caroline Locke.

THIS YEAR’S JOURNEY

First, we took a walk along the lanes of Peppard, meeting families leaving the primary school at the end of the day on the Spring Equinox. Over 50 people came to the Cricket Pavilion on a Sunday afternoon to celebrate the end of winter and the Spring Equinox. A break in the wet weather brought us a beautifully warm day. People met Future Machine, listened to Oxfordshire's collaborating artist Juliet Robson's sound works and toasted the coming of Spring 2024 with damson gin. Some of us went with Future Machine to the community-managed Unicorn Pub to watch the sun go down.

Soon thereafter, Future Machine returned to Nottingham to meet under blossoming trees. This year brought the wettest Spring ever recorded in Britain. The trees were not looking healthy. They had blossomed a full month earlier than in 2018, the first time we met there. When we gathered, the blossoms were nearly gone, pink petals on the ground. We celebrated the change in heart of the council to cement over the rose garden and place cement blocks with chess boards on them, covered with words celebrating nature. They agreed to move this to the playground and instead plant six more cherry trees.

With the local youth service, the Toy Library, and the local Mellers Primary School, we made plants and creatures from rubbish and waste. We surrounded the cherry tree with these funny human-rubbish-made beings. People met Future Machine, spoke to the future and listened to messages from the past. Nottingham's collaborating artist, Frank Abbott, filmed participants walking around the tree with their beings made of rubbish. A most memorable moment was when Future Machine played a message from Oxfordshire, made a couple of weeks earlier, full of bird song. When the message stopped playing, there was silence, sudden awareness of the absence of birds singing out the Spring in these inner city gardens. 

In July, we made Future Machine's annual summer appearance at Cannington Primary School in Somerset. We met with every class, each group coming out to the playground where the collaborating artist Caroline Locke had planted trees with the school in 2022. Each class was invited to write a poem to speak to the future. 

These poems were based on Caroline's concept of a Tree Crier. Based on the old Town Criers, the children dressed in costume, and rang Caroline's tree bell. The bell is tuned to the frequency of the Cannington hornbeam tree Caroline herself planted on the village playing fields, when she was a pupil at the school in the 1970s. Every child had a chance to turn Future Machine’s handle, push the lever, speak to the future. The teachers were given the stories printed out of Future Machine. These will serve as prompts to discuss climate and environmental change, the importance of planting trees and of being a witness to when the future comes. 

WHAT’S NEXT?

We are now preparing for Future Machine to go to Cumbria at the end of Summer.  We have much to think about. How can we sustain the project into next year? What next for the Cabinet of Curiosities?  Can we continue to move such a large, heavy object as Future Machine around the country as we all get older? How can we reduce the carbon footprint of the journeys between each place?

As with our need to change our ways of being and reconnect with the natural world (that we are at once part of and have made a false separation from), committing to these five places with this heavy artwork is difficult. It is at various times painful, wonderous and inspiring. It gives us artists hope, and appears to inspire hope in those who encounter it. 

Most of all, it seems to inspire change. In Peppard, people say they now look forward to gathering together after the long winter. A new collaboration is evolving to create an accessible path through the local woods, which we hope to be able to traverse at the next Spring Equinox. In Nottingham, people are giving attention to the previously overlooked memorial gardens and new trees are being planted. In Cannington, trees have also been planted and the school is working on innovative ways to think about the environment. In Cumbria, Future Machine connects to a growing awareness of access to and quality of the waters. In London, Future Machine's collaborating artists have been invited to facilitate an ongoing arts, ecology and music residency, alongside a community gardening project in the most derelict corner of the large, urban Finsbury Park.

To find out more about Future Machine's next appearances in Cumbria in September and Finsbury Park in November visit: https://www.whenthefuturecomes.net/

To find out more about The Commons Residency and Community Gardening Project in Finsbury Park visit: https://www.whenthefuturecomes.net/residency/

Update on Rachel Jacobs’ Future Machine

Rachel Jacobs, a contributing editor to Emerging Voices, first wrote about Future Machine in March, 2020. She has contributed ongoing updates on her work as an artist, thinker, climate activist, and academic. You can read other posts at

Conversations on Crises

This latest update provides insight into where Rachel is now, mirroring both her optimism and her challenges in being part of the urgent conversation around climate change.

2023 has been an inspiring yet difficult year as I accompany Future Machine on its uphill climb into the future. The climate modelling at the heart of this project appears to have been proven right, even understated. The tipping points and uncertainties of climate change are happening sooner than expected. Now the sea ice in the polar regions is melting faster, and the Arctic and Antarctic are warming up more quickly. At times, the rise is 35 degrees above their average temperatures.

Meanwhile, in England 2023, we had both a heatwave and a drought in June. Then we were on the cooler side of the increasingly confused Gulf stream. In September, a heatwave returned. My mum recently found a diary entry from the 1970s, noting that 21 degrees was too hot to walk up mountains. Over the last few years, I have become used to walking in the mountains in 25 – 28 degree heat.

The world suffers fires, floods, unbearable heat, earthquakes. Despite all that is happening, Future Machine is having a quiet year. Funding and partnerships are increasingly hard to secure. Cuts to public funding indicate major changes in the way art and research is valued in England--very little. With all this in the background, Future Machine has continued its journey across England.

In February, a small cardboard Future Machine maquette went for a walk with my collaborators Juliet Robson and Glenn Bryant along the lanes of Rotherfield Peppard village as Winter turned to Spring, meeting villagers and a donkey along the way.

In April, the Nottingham local council did a brutal clearance of the shrubs and flowers that were our friends in Nottingham’s Christ Church Gardens, where we had worked with the local primary school after lockdown in 2020. Then ‘something amazing happened’. We met under the blossom trees, with a visit from Mr X, an artist from London who has been collaborating with Frank Abbott, my collaborator in Nottingham.

Mr X's amazing artwork on wheels appeared under the blossoming trees, the first time he and his work had been out of London. Alongside Future Machine and Mr X's appearance, Frank lit up the year 2023, beacons cut out of huge cardboard boxes. We ate samosas and drank tea and coffee as people spoke to the future via Future Machine and listened to messages from its past as we walked through the park.

On Saturday, November 11, Future Machine will celebrate the season in north London's Finsbury Park. All are welcome. For more information and to learn more about Rachel and her Future Machine, go here.

Don't forget to share this with your networks. Click the buttons below! Come to Finsbury Park on November 11!

Future Machine Spring 2022 Update

by Rachel Jacobs

Future Machine is an artist-led project planned to continue for 30 years, a witness to when the future comes, however and whatever the future brings.

The Future Machine is a device created via a series of conversations with artists and citizens across England. As the name suggests, the creation looks ahead, aiming to help address an uncertain future on a planet in crisis. Its interactive technology allows stories to be recorded from the words of participant viewers. These narratives are intended to help individuals imagine creative ways to address global climate change.

This is the latest update on Rachel’s journey with Future Machine. For more of Rachel’s writings, see Emerging Voices, Winter, 2020, and her writings in Emerging Voices’ Conversations in Crises.

The first annual journey of Future Machine has come to an end.

www.whenfuturecomes.net

Winter 2022

Celandine Day. Monday 21st February. Finally, after over 2 years of shielding, lockdowns and remote collaboration, artist-collaborator Juliet Robson and I met in the Parish of Peppard, Oxfordshire, on the weekend of the worst storm in 30 years – one of three storms in one weekend. Given this, we decided to delay the Future Machine event until the Spring Equinox. Instead, before sundown, we posted 100 Celandine Day cards through the letterboxes of as many houses as we could reach within Peppard’s parish boundaries.

The week before the Spring Equinox, 20th March, I began to feel unwell. I was trying to ignore the sore throat and sneezing. But my lateral flow test was positive. I had Covid. Happily, Juliet and a group of village participants agreed to go ahead without me.

In her driveway, Juliet introduced Future Machine and the wayfaring stick to those who would accompany her. The wayfaring stick, created by Juliet, is a holder of stories and sounds from the village and beyond. On the way to the common, Future Machine got stuck in the gate, too wide to get through to the daffodil and blossom strewn field where the gathering was to be held. The only way forward was to remove the larger gate. Villagers searched for the padlock buried for decades in the earth underneath, dug it out, removed the gate and pushed Future Machine through. Others from the village then joined in to speak to the future, hear the sounds of the beautiful warm spring weather as they were played by Future Machine, and listen to the wayfaring stick. Messages were left for the future, including a haunting Irish melody played on a harmonica by a visitor from Ireland.

When the Trees Blossomed 2022

The cycle quickly began again with the cherry trees in Christ Church Gardens, Nottingham, blossoming just a few days after the Spring Equinox. They bloomed six days earlier than last year, during a global heatwave. I was still in bed with Covid.

This heatwave was an ominous result of the shocking polar temperature rises at both the North and South poles – up by 60 degrees centigrade in some parts. With my collaborator, Prof. John King, Senior Climate Scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, I write 'News from the Planet'. Future Machine prints this news as prompts for people to speak to the future. Preparing the recent edition, John and I discussed the impact of this frightening rise in temperature. We were continuing discussions we’ve been having over the past few years on the changing climate, its impact on the polar regions and how this portends future sea rises. We consider how these stories can be shared in ways that have meaning to the people in England where Future Machine visits, without leading to despair and disconnection – an ongoing and very difficult job.

Then came the snow. Always a possibility in April. This year, the near horizontal snow was dramatic. Frank filmed the blossoms as they survived the onslaught, but our original blossom tree suffered. By the time we met up with Future Machine, all the trees were in varying degrees of blossoming. The new baby blossom tree was fully in bloom; a young, bright pinky-purple in contrast to the much older trees we had been following for the past five years.

The day of the Future Machine event began with the mysterious discovery of a blossom flower painting left under one of the trees. The identity of the painter remains a mystery. We met 62 children and 4 adults from the local primary school. We introduced them to Future Machine and showed them the weather word and bird light boxes they had made, hung in high up branches amongst the blossoms. We explained how Future Machine turns the weather into song. Alexandre Yemaoua Dayo and David Kemp, the musicians who create the sounds of Future Machine, played the weather; the children joined in with their own sounds. As the wind picked up and blew the blossoms from the trees, swirling white petals about like snow, we waved with the wind and Alex danced with his Djembe drum amongst the shower of petals. Then the children split into groups and planned their own messages. Taking it in turns to meet Future Machine, turn the handle, press the button and speak to the future.

Others gathered under the blossoms as we waited for the light to fade. Future Machine played the weather as the bright spring sunlight refused to fade. People turned small hand generators to light up the trees with the light boxes made by the school children. Messages for the future were recorded until, eventually, the light faded. We gathered under the blossoms to witness the moments between light and dark, past, present and future, and to consider the coming of Spring this year.

Time for Reflection

A week after meeting under the blossoms, Frank discovered the new cherry tree uprooted and destroyed. The same week I received an email from the Friends of Finsbury Park, north London. The local council ripped out 200 trees planted by volunteers – on Earth Day. These two destructive acts in places where Future Machine visits, where we pledge to be guardians of the earth, are a reflection of the wider world. It’s a world closer than ever to another unthinkable global war, alongside the greatest loss of species and natural environments since the last Ice Age. Climate desecration is happening at a speed not seen on earth since the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

It’s always difficult for young trees to grow into old age, particularly outside of a forest. Predators--including us humans--are a continual hazard. Equally, it’s hard for young humans to grow strong and caring of their places. We are all jostling, struggling to survive closer together with few green spaces to share, know and love, particularly in England, where 92% of the land is privately owned and inaccessible to most.

An image keeps returning from the blossom meeting this year, 2022. A young girl I had earlier seen playing in the gardens looked over the wall with her father, as we were waiting for the light to fade. They disappeared and then reappeared, looking in at the gate but not entering. I was caught up in the music and the people already there. I didn't go to speak to them and invite them in. They left without joining us.

How do we make space for people to come together? As artists, how do we enter a place without imposing our own agendas onto others’ lives? How do we tread carefully, take time to speak and listen, find ways for witnessing and wayfaring? Let us not be another thing in the world that tears lives down, but a force that brings humans together.

Rachel Jacobs is a practising artist, academic researcher, interactive games designer, writer, arts facilitator and a consulting editor to Emerging Voices. In 1996, she co-founded the award-winning artist collective Active Ingredient.

When the Future Comes & Future Machine is a collaboration between artists Rachel Jacobs, Juliet Robson, Frank Abbott, Caroline Locke, Wallace Heim, Esi Eshun and musicians Alexandre Yemaoua Dayo and David Kemp. Future Machine has been developed by Rachel Jacobs, Robin Shackford, Dominic Price, Matt Little, Matthew Gates, researchers from the University of Nottingham, Prof John King from the British Antarctic Survey and people who took part in public workshops across England. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England, Furtherfield Gallery and Horizon Digital Economy and the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham.

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