About

Drew Hemment is Associate Director of ImaginationLancaster, a major new creative research lab at Lancaster University, Director and founder of the Futuresonic Urban Festival of Art, Music and Ideas, and Director of FutureEverything, a non-profit creative studio recently awarded Regularly Funded Organisation status by Arts Council England. Hemment's artistic and curatorial work has been covered prominently by New York Times, BBC and NBC. He has curated numerous exhibitions on art and social technologies, including the first major art exhibition on mobile and locative media (Mobile Connections, 2004) and the first major art exhibition on social networking (Social Networking Unplugged, 2008). Served on many international Art Juries including the International Jury of UNESCO DigiArts Award, and was the first international curator on the Programming Group of the Sonar festival in Barcelona. A recent art project Loca: Set To Discoverable premiered at ISEA2006 and ZeroOne in San Jose, California. He was a key figure in the emergence of the field of Locative Media, and was involved in early UK electronic dance culture in the late 1980s including seminal parties said to be dance culture's equivalent of Woodstock. Completed an MA (Distinction) at the University of Warwick, and a PhD at Lancaster University.

Current projects

Futuresonic
An International Festival of Art, Music and Ideas, established 1995.
futuresonic.com

Loca
An artist-led interdisciplinary project on mobile media and surveillance. Loca is an exercise in grass-roots, pervasive surveillance; tracking digital bodies in physical space.
loca-lab.org

Sonarmatica06
International member of programming group for Sonar2006 festival in Barcelona
sonar.es

All Drew Hemment's projects, past and present, are listed in the projects archive.

Texts: recent entries

Last Night An Arphid Saved My Life
A run in with Conrad Chase, the guy putting RFID in the arms of clubbers in Barcelona
Click here to read the article.

Locative Arts (revised)
Discussion of locative arts practice available via Leonardo
Click here to read the article.

Locative Media and pervasive surveillance: The Loca Project
A collaborative text with John Evans, Theo Humphries and Mika Raento
Click here to read the article.

Locative Media
Edited LEA double special issue available via Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Click here to read the article.

Read all Drew Hemment's texts in the texts archive.

Networks

PLAN - The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network

Full details of these networks are held in the networks archive.