WIRED has partnered with digital arts organisation The Space to form the first ever The Space/WIRED Creative Fellowships. The winners will be granted £30,000 to develop their practice. Each will present their work at the WIRED2015 on 15-16 October. Here, we profile one of the winners:
As co-director of immersive theatre company Coney, Annette Mees is in the business of creating "experiences". Mees came to the theatre "almost by coincidence", she tells WIRED, when she moved to London, after studying fine art in her home country the Netherlands. It was the interdisciplinary nature of the medium and the making process, through from rehearsal stage to giving a live audience a role to play, that snared her. "They're there -- what can you do with that?" says Mees. "Whatever I make as a maker changes depending on who's there and what's there. It means I'm a part of a process as much as the audience is part of the process and together we get to surprise each other and delight each other and challenge each other."
Mees likes her work to create dialogues "about massive questions to which no-one's got an answer". The question that formed the basis of her latest work was one that arose out of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, Iceland crowdsourcing its constitution and other events that Mees describes as moments in which "people were pushing and elbowing the edges of what politics was and how we should organise ourselves".
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Mees' latest work with Coney -- Early Days (For a Better Nation) -- started life as a National Theatre of Wales project but grew into a touring show. It was built on a robust framework of political ideas, but it also remained open enough for the audience to "genuinely create a new nation each night".
When it was played in Glasgow, says Mees the audience was "incredibly fierce but also incredibly sophisticated". "You could really hear the referendum still hanging in the air." In Liverpool, the day after Labour's devastating defeat in the General Election however, the piece became "just the most gentle and generous and lovely show".
Audiences also have the capacity to be very funny, she adds; one adopted "Beyonce-ism". "They decided that they wanted a form of matriarchy so men were allowed to be part of the parliament, however before they spoke they had to quote a line from a Beyonce song of their choice to put them in the right frame of mind."
As a Space/WIRED Creative Fellow, Mees will once again make her audience part of the work and take on a challenging idea -- this time, the future. "As the world is shrinking and everything is more interconnected, how do we feel empowered to think about change, how do we feel about creating our own future, how do we do that together when there are so many different agendas on the table?" she asks.
These questions will form the basis of the piece, the Almanac of the Future 2015-2065 edition. Her plan is to create "change labs" -- one on each continent -- with 15-year-olds and 65-year-olds, supported by artists, thinkers and activists. Together they will look at the next 50 years and create the almanac around it, before opening up the conversation to an online audience, which will also feed into it. Mees says she hopes that the project will have "a relentless optimism to it". "It's about the future we want."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
