Pat Kane, a co-initiator of the Alternative Global, writes: I’ve been enjoying the initial launch coverage for the Unboxed Festival. It’s year-long all-islands celebration of creativity, instigated initially to be a compensation for the stresses of Brexit, but which has become a genuinely open-ended experiment in popular creativity, by means of ten commissions which span the disciplines of arts and science (and sometimes the cosmos also).

I was a creative consultant to the early, R&D stages of Unboxed (then known as Festival UK*2022 - see my column on it from October last year). This weekend’s Financial Times feature on the event quotes me on my thoughts on the process:

By now, the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments had all signed up to the festival. Green’s approach had won over some sceptics. Pat Kane, a musician and supporter of Scottish independence who had called the festival “a fête worse than death”, joined as a creative adviser.

The festival, conceived as a way to bring the UK together, was to him compatible with Scottish independence: “I was thinking of Britishness as a Scandinavian-ness or a Nordic-ness. It felt like a new Britishness.” And he was enthused that it wouldn’t just be “the usual suspects — the National Theatre and so on.”

Not everyone was convinced. “I felt there was this fake sense of optimism,” says Kasia Molga, an artist who withdrew from one of the initial teams. Her concerns included Brexit — “A lot of my friends after Brexit can’t tour [internationally] and can’t exhibit” — but stretched to broader financing of the arts. “It doesn’t feel like it’s a celebration of British creativity because it doesn’t solve the big problems.”

The 30 teams were offered weeks of online workshops, with lectures from cultural luminaries. The musician Nile Rodgers talked about the rise of disco. The scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock talked about space. The psychologist Dacher Keltner talked about awe and the social and psychological benefits the emotion provides. [Pat Kane was a host and interviewee in this online R&D process, also interviewing Nadya from Pussy Riot, and the writer/theorist Malcolm Gladwell - Ed]

“There’s no point in kidding about it: it was a utopian process,” says Kane. “Imagine that you were paid to dream as massively as you want to. We were inventing a virtual, temporary, ad hoc Bauhaus.” A panel, mainly comprised of Green’s team, narrowed the 30 teams down to 10. Neither politicians nor civil servants overruled them. “We had a slight worry that someone might say, we want to see the other 20. No one even went there,” says Green.

More here. Mance’s article is fair, accurate and funny, and captures the daring of the project - even more remarkable given that the thinking and preparing time for the pitches all happened under lockdown, and by means of remote working.

Mance particularly notes how the creatives involved in each pitch and project were able to evade the original Brexit context. The conceptual artist Nelly Ben Hayoun, who’s trying to create an artistic bridge between the earth and the moon, is explicit in the FT piece:

Ben Hayoun, who was born in France to an Armenian mother and an Algerian father, does not believe in Brexit. She barely believes in Britain. “I’m post-nation-state . . . If you want to hear me say, ‘Oh my god, the UK is the most groundbreaking nation state to come up with such a brilliant idea [as Unboxed]’, I don’t believe that for a second.”

I can testify to the brilliance of the team involved - particularly the lead director Martin Green, and the programme director Sam Hunt - in creating a fertile space in which creative teams could invent freely, soaring across scientific and artistic fields. And certainly not bounded by a plebiscite in 2016.

There are more than a few of the events that cross over with the Alternative Global’s past and current orientation:

…Unboxed’s mantra is “open, original, optimistic.” That optimism must contend with a country strained by Covid and spiralling inflation, the shadow of an unprovoked war in Europe, and the grim reality of climate change. One Unboxed project, Galwad, envisages life in Wales in 2052.

With Alex McDowell, who worked on the film Minority Report, it has created a vision of the future — filled with multilingualism, climate migrants and shifting identities. “It wouldn’t be interesting for the audiences or the participants to create a utopia, but neither is it a dystopia,” says Claire Doherty, who is leading the project…

…Two projects are explicitly about space exploration [Ben Hayoun’s Tour De Moon and Our Place In Space - ed]. Two more are nature-focused: See Monster, where a decommissioned oil platform is being made into a hub of creativity, and Green Space Dark Skies, where attendees will be taken into the countryside at dusk with low-impact lights. Others explore identity: one, PoliNations, emphasises Britain’s debt to immigration, by looking at how much of the UK’s plantlife, including the “English” rose, came from elsewhere.

I was particularly struck by Mance’s poignant closing paragraphs, reporting on the launch of the event this week in Paisley, Scotland, with the About Us event:

…The message was uncompromising. “Indigenous forests are funnelled into factories, sweatshops, mines,” ran the narration. The light at the end of the tunnel was in fact a bush fire. The exhilaration of modern life was the forerunner of Armageddon. “We are here, but not for long, not forever.”

Whereas the 1951 Festival of Britain touted human achievement, the light show underlined our insignificance. As I stood in the cold night, this seemed a fitting epitaph to Brexit: it didn’t matter half as much as we thought.

We’ll keep track of the development and reception of Unboxed over this next year. What we obviously chime with - and something that I was at a pains to contribute in my Unboxed consultancy - was the need for us to be creating plausible new worlds, We need stories and milieux that grip us and fill us with possibility, as a way of finding our way through tough problems like climate, pandemic, automation and now territorial war.

Like Unboxed, our idea of “Planet A” assumes that ingenuity and innovation are already out there, ready to be networked together and dynamited by ambitious framings and flexible organisation. Maybe no surprise we are kindred spirits…

To conclude with the FT piece, it’s most excited (as much of the coverage is) with the idea of Dreamachine. This is a free community experience of psychedelic technology - light shows and sounds playing upon closed eyelids - that will also be the biggest data collection ever made in neuroscience. A Guardian piece raises the stakes, interviewing Jennifer Crook, one of the creators:

Crook hopes her Dreamachine can revolutionise humanity. Eyes wide shut, we might open the portals of perception wider than ever. “We have this big organ that’s capable of so much and we’re using so little of it. My dream is that Dreamachine could be a new kind of secular temple. I really want it to change the world.”

More from patkane.global. For more on Unboxed’s events click here

The Unboxed festival was triggered by Brexit, says its consultant Pat Kane—but it’s become a wild and diverse celebration of human creativity