Curtains drawn on Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015

This year, the Festival welcomed 23,000 and counting, and had a more provocative angle with the theme of power and resistance, which resulted in conversation and debate centred on the ideas shared at a host of events, including talks, debates, performances and film screenings.

There were a number of firsts at the 2015 Festival. During the first week, there were two mounted police officers and their horses, Kestral and Roxy, from the City of London Police at St John’s College – part of the RAND Europe talk on the unlikely role of horses in criminal justice. Musical innovators, Asian Dub Foundation, played to an audience who were captivated by the musical and visual artistry of the band’s live score accompanying George Lucas’ sci-fi film, THX 1138. This event was part of a collaboration with Cambridge Live.

Another first included the co-production of ‘Question everything’ on Sunday 25 October, dubbed a ‘day of dissent’, this was a marathon of talks, art and ideas that featured a broad range of speakers drawn from popular culture, the arts and academia. Some of the speakers included artists Gary Anderson and Lena Simic from The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; compere Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship; Priyamvada Gopal, Faculty of English, Cambridge; satirist Heydon Prowse from The Revolution Will Be Televised, and activist Peter Tatchell. The event was co-produced with the Index on Censorship and Cambridge Junction.

Cambridge Junction Arts Producer, Daniel Pitt said: “Cambridge Junction is delighted to have been a partner of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas for the third year running, this year contributing programming in the form of #TORYCORE and a curatorial collaboration in Question Everything with Index on Censorship. The ‘power and resistance’ theme this year was a particularly pertinent and enjoyable stimulus for programming provocative and vital new performance, speakers and artists and the promotion of free-thinking in the city.”

The Cambridge Junction also hosted one of the final events of the Festival, #hackCambridge – a 24-hour event that saw a range of technology and data experts work throughout the day and night to explore what it means to live in a smart city. The aim was to ask questions about and generate solutions for a smarter Cambridge.

Another event that caused quite a stir amongst the media and public alike was artist Mark Farid’s ‘Data Shadow’ installation, which was commissioned by arts organisation, Collusion. The interactive installation required individuals to enter a shipping container in which their mobile phone data was hacked and revealed to them alone in an image of their own shadow. The project was designed to make the public more aware of how easy it is for their private mobile phone data to be unwittingly shared.

Collusion Director, Rachel Drury said: “Our first two projects were part of the 2014 Festival of Ideas and so we were delighted to come back for 2015 with our first Real Time Commission, Data Shadow.

“The 'big blue box' as it became known, was installed in All Saints Garden and at Cambridge Junction, and attracted hundreds of visitors from Cambridge and beyond, a hugely diverse audience including university professors, data and security experts, technologists, artists and parents of teenage children. The overall reaction from participants was one of genuine amazement and concern. Many were stunned by how easy it was to expose their data and couldn’t believe that their text messages and photos, which they thought were safely stored on their phone, were actually in a cloud and accessible to apps and hackers. A few had written down all their passwords on a file on their phone and were really caught off guard when the passwords were projected back at them, making them realise how insecure digital information can be. Everyone left with greater awareness of their data security.

“We discussed the issues raised at a packed event on Monday 26 October – ‘Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed’, which ended with Mark Farid giving away all of his passwords to his Gmail, Facbeook, Twitter, etc to a surprised audience.”

In addition to events focussed on data privacy, other hugely popular events were those related to censorship, including an event that looked at political correctness and the idea of censorship in terms of who is allowed to speak rather than what is said or not said in ‘Hidden voices: censorship through omission’.  The question of whether censorship is the answer to female objectification was also explored during ‘The body politic: censorship and the female body’.

Another stellar event was ‘What do we owe the universe’. This panel discussion explored human impact on this planet and how that might spread to other worlds in the future and was driven by provocations from the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta and Professor Rae Langton.

Feedback from attendees on many Festival events has been positive. “I really appreciated the strong contrasting viewpoints,” wrote a Festival-goer about the ‘Hidden voices: censorship through omission’ debate. Another wrote, “This difficult subject as it turns out was beautifully unpacked by an interesting panel,” after the ‘Can writers and artists ever be terrorists’ discussion. Further remarks echoed this sentiment and many people commented on how well informed, stimulating and enlightening sessions were. Feedback comments also praised the Festival as whole. “Wonderful events and provides huge value to the public.” “It brings great thinking into the public domain.”

The 2015 Festival sponsors and partners were Cambridge University Press, St John’s College, Anglia Ruskin University, RAND Europe, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Cambridge Live, University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden, Arts Council England, Cambridge Junction, British Science Association, Heritage Lottery Fund, Heffers, WOW Festival, Southbank Centre, Collusion, TTP Group, Goethe Institut, Index on Censorship and BBC Cambridgeshire.

Audio recordings of selected talks are now available online: www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/photo-gallery/audio-recordings