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!

Gülce Tulçalı Reviews Two London Exhibitions

British Espionage & Male Homosexuality: Ungentle

Huw Lemmey in collaboration with Onyeka Igwe

Studio Voltaire is a hidden oasis in busy Clapham Common. Renovated in 2021, the space functions as both artist studios and a gallery along with a limited edition shop: House of Voltaire.

As visitors navigate through the multifunctional space, the gallery presents a black curtain dividing work and outer reality. A gentle narrator’s voice is heard through the walls.

Ungentle is filmed entirely on 16mm and is on a continuous loop between 10am to 5 pm, Wednesday to Sunday, at Studio Voltaire’s Gallery space. Watching the film, the audience experiences a sense of ‘spying’ on busy streets, calm countryside picturesques and historically significant places of the espionage. The protagonist directs the entire film from outside the camera lens, making the camera itself a pair of binoculars. As the narrator softly continues, one gets the sense of an intimate conversation with someone about something not so secret.

The film preserves a conversational sincerity throughout ,despite the critical themes it touches on such as: imperialism and sex. As described by the gallery, “It moves from St James’s Park, a historical cruising ground at the center of British power, to Beaulieu, a historic country house in Hampshire that served as a Special Operations Executive training school, and its surrounding countryside.”

More information can be found here.

Ungentle can be seen in Studio Voltaire until January 8th 2023.

Insomnia

by Leah Clements

Leah Clements’ new work INSOMNIA transports the viewer to 3 in the morning, no matter what time you visit the exhibition. Inspired by the artist’s own sleep paralysis and insomnia, South Kiosk hosts the artist’s first photographic solo exhibition. Curated by Marianna Lemos, visitors are placed in a setting with big linen sheets and a bright blue carpet serving like a body of water underneath. Purple and green lights come through the photos, and doors from the photos open to hallways with an uncomfortable sensation of stuckness. Objects are thrown out of time, stuck in a state between wakefulness and sleep, moving but not going anywhere. Clement’s work is informed by this in-between state, where mind and body exist in a parallel world. Her world resembles reality, but simultaneously, space, time and the body are compromised. The photographs suggest time that moves at an irregular pace, a space that appears disproportionate to its dimensions and a body stripped from its regular functions.

The exhibition is accompanied by a sound piece with image descriptions. The viewer is given gentle suggestions as to how to navigate the space. The installation is produced so as to be accessible. From the gallery brochure: “Leah Clements’ practice includes performance, installation, writing and film to develop a language of chronic illness and disability.”

The exhibition can be seen at South Kiosk until 29 January 2023. There is a public programme with talks, workshops and in-person live events.

More information here: https://southkiosk.com/Current

Enough is Enough is Enough

It’s mad that a protest involving two people can get more attention than one involving ten thousand. All it takes is two cans of tomato soup thrown at a Van Gogh … or the guts to mount the roof of a Tube train during rush hour. But I'm glad I joined the crowds at King's Cross on 1st October, protesting our need for a competent government to handle the cost of living crisis, shouting our rage: ‘enough is enough.’

The ‘Enough is Enough’ rally was organised by trade unionist Mick Lynch, who said, 'In the leadership campaign, if that's what you can call it, we had a choice between two short straws for the working class in this country. They want to change this society so that the rich man's on top and the workers are down below.' Lynch’s words amplified our thoughts: we did not vote for Liz Truss and we did not ask for her. We did not choose Rishi Sunak in any kind of a democratic process. The Conservatives cannot simply keep switching out their Queen bee for a fresher, more right-wing face. We need a general election, so the conversations can be about policy and not popularity.

Lynch’s words amplified our thoughts: we did not vote for Liz Truss and we did not ask for her. We did not choose Rishi Sunak in any kind of a democratic process.

Looking around, I saw XR flags, 'I have Truss Issues' signs, 'Tax the Rich' banners, and placards supporting the trade unions, the Don't Pay campaign and the Labour party. Of course, Keir Starmer wasn't present at an event which supported the strikers, having forbidden his shadow ministers from standing on picket lines. It was incredible to be amongst so many different organisations, individuals and groups, all protesting for a fairer Britain. My own placard simply read, 'It's not fair.'

From feeling worried and angry--about tax cuts for the highest earners in Kwasi Kwarteng's ephemeral mini-budget, soaring profits for energy's big bosses and the inflated price of my favourite breakfast muffins at Sainsbury's--I felt a surge of hope. My anger still remains. But at this rally, I felt my anger might have an effect, joining with the pink flares around me and the fists in the air to make some kind of impression on those who decide the policies that determine our lives.

From feeling worried and angry--about tax cuts for the highest earners in Kwasi Kwarteng's ephemeral mini-budget, soaring profits for energy's big bosses and the inflated price of my favourite breakfast muffins at Sainsbury's--I felt a surge of hope.

Two months on, I’m struggling to remain hopeful. We are approaching a Christmas of strikes, because our rail workers, postal service and NHS do not have what they need. Only the highest earners have what they need this December. They have what they need to heat their mansions and fill up the tanks of their Mercedes Benzes and to cram the spaces beneath their Christmas trees with elegantly wrapped luxuries.