Performing Futures: Billennium and To Those Born Later // Projects

The artistic works in this Perform Europe project, Billennium and To Those Born Later (International Collection), both reflect on the present through the future and use technologies to enable participation.

Billennium toured to 3 cities in Spring 2022, with new versions adapted for, BBK OFF Festival, Bilbao, International Theater Days in Belgrade, and PLACCC Festival, Budapest.

Watch a 5 minute film about the project HERE.

Billennium is an Augmented Reality tour of the future of a place. It is a theatrical guided tour, not of historic sites, but of a city's futures, on which you walk through time to the locations of utopian and dystopian science fictions. Future architecture appears before your eyes, and you hear what different worlds might sound like. Accompanied by archaeologists of the future, you carry mobile devices that interpret and visualise traces of what's to come. The tour concludes with an opportunity to design tomorrow's city together and see the buildings you imagine layered onto the architecture of today using AR (augmented reality). Livestreamed, multichannel audio immerses you in sci-fi location sounds and speculative architecture is drawn in real-time over the existing buildings.

Billennium is different every time it is performed, re-made uniquely for specific places.
Made with creative technologists Michele Pannegrossi and Luca Biada (Fenyce) and animator Sam Steer.

Originally commissioned by Watershed Media Centre and University of Bristol's Smart Internet Lab, for their Layered Realities Platform, 2018

To Those Born Later (International Collection) is an interactive online event, which brings together groups from different countries to discuss what should go into a time capsule to be opened in 150 years. What do you want to save for our children's children's children's children? What do you want to pass down to future inhabitants of the world?

To Those Born Later will be performed online 3 times, hosted once by each festival and promoted locally. It is produced by Fuel.

The project will test 2 new approaches to international touring: Billennium explores deeper engagement with communities, leading to a work that is re-made with and for specific neighbourhoods and shown outside in public spaces; To Those Born Later engages local audiences without travelling, facilitating meaningful exchanges across these European contexts.

Partners: Uninvited Guests (UK), Fuel (UK), IKUSEEARTE (Spain), Students' City Cultural Center (Serbia), Artopolis Association (Hungary)

Images: Jon Aiken