Could this Smart Citizen processor board help you take control of your life? (Image: Smart Citizen)

Manchester, long-time cradle of radical, grassroots movements, was the perfect setting for the recent , in its 19th iconoclastic year of bringing together art, design, music and ideas, and award-winning innovation labs.

It was no accident that this year’s festival, which ran from 27 March to 1 April and was themed “Tools for Unknown Futures”, saw Manchester join Barcelona and Amsterdam to become only the third city to join the community. It’s a movement that captures and shares data on the local environment.

Developed at as a crowdfunded project, Smart Citizen provides digital tools for people to capture data about their homes and cities to improve their everyday lives.

Manchester’s Smart Citizen scheme, backed by Intel, will send out an initial 25 urban sensor kits to volunteers to use in their local areas. And five processor boards will be given to local science and innovation organisations to calibrate the data. The boards are based on Intel Galileo, a board the company designed to be compatible with Arduino, an open source platform popular with hobbyists that will let anyone write code for apps, games or research.

Get Smart

Volunteers will attach little blue boxes to measure temperature, carbon dioxide, noise, light, humidity and Wi-Fi saturation in their homes. The focus is on measurements of variables that are considered to impact our health and the smooth running of day-to-day lives in the city.

Once processed, the data will be shared with the larger Smart Citizen community, allowing for intercity collaborations and for developing open data applications. Workshops will be held in Manchester over the coming months where volunteers can learn how to use the data collected.

In Amsterdam, the – an interdisciplinary media lab backed by the Dutch government – along with Amsterdam Smart City and the Amsterdam Economic Board are assessing the implications of sharing real-time data about things such as levels of air pollution in a particular area.

The hope is that Smart Citizen projects can encourage people and governments to work together to create solutions to urban environmental problems based on crowd-collected data.

Control your own data

As data collection tools proliferate and access to data increases, we will need to work out what we want to do with this wealth of information. One thing that could help is a research project highlighted elsewhere in the festival called the . Irene Ng, one of the research team involved in the £1.2 million multi-disciplinary project funded by the Research Councils UK Digital Economy Programme, explained that it seeks to transform “vertical” data collected about our lives into “horizontal” data.

This means taking those endless stacks of data collected, for example, on our shopping habits and transforming it into something we can easily access, understand and use to inform decisions.

Ng says the HAT will become as familiar to us as email and will enable people to use their data in everyday life to avoid “mundane crises” like traffic jams, knowing if they should take a cardigan to work, or whether they’re about to run out of milk.

Today, the data we generate is owned by the companies and institutions that collect it. But a culture of data harvesting is beginning to lead to distrust of data collection and fear of lack of security. Ng says that by using the HAT, data generated by an individual will be owned by the individual, enabling them not only to control its use but also to trade it for money, products and services.

Among all the noise about smart futures, it looks as if the really smart citizens will be the ones who are in control of their own data.

Extraction continues to 31 March, various venues across north-east England

Picture north-east England and if any image comes readily to mind, it is almost certainly a coal mine. Coal was once king here, fuelling industries like steel and heavy engineering. And Extraction is the title given to – standing for audio visual – a biennial event in the region.

This turns out to be more than a convenient marketing wrapper. The festival is forged from the relationships between people and the places we inhabit and plunder for the raw materials that mould our lives.

It is an extraordinary gathering of international work that feels like it couldn’t take place anywhere else – a month of films, exhibitions, installations and live music that consider the processes, violence and power inherent in the word “extraction”.

One of the pieces is being housed in the Stephenson Works in Newcastle, where Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, an early steam train, was built. There, Wang Bing’s epic film Crude Oil offers a more or less unedited, minute-for-minute portrait of workers who extract oil in the barren, high-altitude landscape of Qinghai province in China.

No nostalgia

(Image: Wang Bing)

The film, shown in two halves, is 14 hours long – the length of a typical shift. Once the country’s poorest region, Qinghai has been transformed by the growth in oil and coal mining, but the pressure on the workers is immense.

The festival may have global contributions but it has local roots: a number of commissions involve the region’s own geology. At one point, I found myself crossing the ancient rocks of , on a guided walk led by the sound artist Chris Watson. Watson’s recordings of the area have captured some surprises, like the crunch of a limpet grazing in a rock pool and the characteristic growl of local boulders as they move.

Just a few hours later, in a Newcastle alley, I planted my feet on one of – marked stopping places where echoes naturally occur. The pioneering sound artist has been performing, building instruments and presenting sound installations since the 1960s, and his oto-date encourage you to explore the sounds of the city.

AV festival venues may be spread across a landscape littered with remnants of industry, but there is no hint of nostalgia in the work presented. A good example is the huge steel mineshaft cap that has been transported to The NewBridge Project space for Lara Almarcegui’s The Last Coal Extraction in Newcastle.

The roots of this piece go back to 2011, when old mine workings beneath Science Central – a planned centre for science and sustainability – . Ironically, a recent assessment by Newcastle University showed that extracting the coal would rack up fewer carbon emissions than any alternative uses for the site.

Musical strata

In December, Almarcegui arranged tours of the redevelopment, which had been temporarily transformed into an open-cast mine. The cap on display now testifies to this unusual intrusion of heavy industry into contemporary urban life.

At the Laing Art Gallery, Susan Stenger’s installation Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland is open until 6 April. Stenger’s piece is based on a cross-section diagram of geological formations on the coast that was drawn by local mining engineer Nicolas Wood in the 1830s. It uses the diagram as a graphic score, travelling from the coal seams of Tyneside to the rocks north of the Tweed, layering instrumental sounds, melodies and rhythms extracted from traditional Northumbrian music. Field recordings of local pipe bands, fiddlers and the stomping feet of sword dancers build to a rousing conclusion.

(Image: Colin Davison)

The installations and exhibits of Akio Suzuki’s na ge ka ke last only until Monday 31 March. The roar of traffic outside makes listening to his meditative works of stone and metal quite challenging. But the entire festival is, after all, built around the way landscapes are shaped by our actions.