After each presentation of Best Festival Ever, the audience join us for a glass of wine and a conversation with an expert who helps explain how some of the systems science and resilience concepts from the show are used in real-life contexts.We are excited to announce the guest scientists for our Seymour Centre season from Wed 31 May - Sat 3 June. Tickets available here.Wednesday 31 May - Dr Michael HarréAmong the seemingly disparate issues that concern many of us are how our retirement years will be affected by the prevailing financial markets and other economic conditions, and the implications of climate change for the long-term prospects of human life on this planet. Dr Michael Harré's research into complex adaptive systems has applications in both of these areas, among many others. He studies how systems as diverse as financial markets and environmental ecosystems evolve and are affected by variations in human behaviour, with the aim of allowing us to better manage these systems and to thrive as a society in the complex environments in which we live."We are not well equipped, cognitively speaking, to deal with the complexity of the systems that have come to dominate our world: financial and economic systems, climatic systems and even our social interactions and how information is spread. Everything depends on everything else, often leading to the impression that chaos and disorder dominate, and that trying to understand such systems is a lost cause. But if we scratch the surface, there are often some basic underlying principles. Understanding these is the biggest challenge we face today, and this is what my work aims to do.”
Thursday 1 June - Dr Joseph LizierDr. Joseph Lizier is an ARC DECRA fellow, and Senior Lecturer in Complex Systems in the Faculty of Engineering and IT. Dr. Lizier studies how biological and bio-inspired systems process information."We examine complex systems - systems made up of a large number of small entities, whose local interactions produce emergent behaviour at the system level. Classic examples are the emergence of consciousness from billions of interactions between neurons, or shock-wave traffic jams emerging from the interaction of many cars."
Friday 2 June - Dr Mahendra PiraveenanFrom human relationships to the body's neural networks to the internet, almost everything in the world can be conceptualised as a network, says Dr Mahendra Piraveenan. He studies how complex networks operate, and how this knowledge can be applied to such diverse challenges as arresting contagious disease outbreaks and designing better software."There are many structural and functional commonalities between various types of networks - from the social to the biological to the technical - and we can use our understanding of these to design better networks in each domain.”
Saturday 3 June (matinee) - Dr Ramil NigmatullinDr Ramil Nigmatullin uses computational and analytic techniques to study complex systems near criticality and far from equilibrium. He seeks connections between seemingly disparate complex phenomena using the notion of statistical mechanical universality. He is also interested in quantum technologies, in particular, in the questions of robustness and scalability of quantum computers.
Saturday 3 June (evening) - Dr Joseph LizierDr. Joseph Lizier is an ARC DECRA fellow, and Senior Lecturer in Complex Systems in the Faculty of Engineering and IT. Dr. Lizier studies how biological and bio-inspired systems process information.
Democratic Nature: the first prototype of a new work
So Boho have just been in Stockholm for the last five weeks, from the last warm burst of summer through to the first winter snow. We've been working with Swedish NGO Miljöverkstan, on the second phase of our collaborative project Democratic Nature.
Democratic Nature is a development of the model we developed at University College London over 2011-12, and tested out for the first time with Best Festival Ever. The format of the work is based on the methodology of 'participatory co-modelling' - a practice whereby scientists work with community members to map and model a social-ecological system, and then use that model to help facilitate discussions and conversations about that system.
Our goal was to try to bring some of the skills we've developed making interactive experiences to bear on this process. Best Festival Ever was our first full exploration in this area - building a playable model of a fictional music festival. Democratic Nature is the next step for us - using these same skills to map and model the real world system of Flaten.
Flaten is a nature reserve just south of Stockholm. It's a beautiful lake, surrounded by a forest of oak, pine and spruce trees, right on the edge of Stockholm city. In the 1930s, it became a hub for young Stockholmers learning to swim, and it's still a major recreational destination. It's been a space for various groups to set up camp and live in, legally or illegally. It's the home of various endangered species, insects and birds. And it's coming under increasing pressure as Stockholm suffers a housing crisis in the wake of increasing migration and asylum seekers.
In January - February this year, we undertook the first phase of this new process: research, meeting with experts, mapping, making new game devices and talking about possible structures for the new work. This month, our focus was on building a prototype. Over the month, we constructed a full working version of the show, which we tested with three scratch audiences this last week.
Democratic Nature consists of a few key games: a sequence we call 'Worldbuilding', in which the audience play through the history of the region, from the end of the last ice age through to the modern day. There's a game looking at the competition between oaks and spruce in Flaten forest, a game looking at the algal blooms that impacted the lake in the late 1990s, a game about Flaten beach on a summer day, and our collective favourite; a game we call 'Governance' about managing the nature reserve.
We're really fond of the Governance game - it's a nice mechanism that we haven't used before, in which the audience undertake a number of different projects scattered throughout the room simultaneously. It's a nice mix of cooperation and competition, and it's generated some interesting discussions in the scratch shows.
We were lucky enough to be joined this time by two of our favourite collaborators: sound designer Nick McCorriston, who produced a soundtrack based on field recordings from the Flaten area, and designer Gillian Schwab, who constructed an incredible array of set and props.
Following three scratch showings of the prototype, we've now wrapped up this phase of the work, and we're heading out of Sweden on to the next thing. We're planning to be back in Sweden in mid-2017 (Scandinavian summer!) to undertake the final development; tightening and calibrating the work, and then working with local artists to translate it into Swedish.
A month in a snowy Swedish forest
It's February, and we're writing this from the shores of a frozen lake south of Stockholm.It’s been a busy 2016 so far, starting with a profile about Boho in New Scientist magazine, alongside our good friends from Coney, written by Stewart Pringle:
Boho Interactive’s tagline, “we fight dirty for science”, neatly conveys the company’s urgency. Much of its work features fighting talk and disruptive activity.The company has collaborated with the Stockholm Resilience Centre, a joint initiative of Stockholm University and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The centre researches new ways of governing and managing human activity, taking into account the complex needs of the surrounding environment. In other words, it is looking for ways of doing business that don’t trash the planet.It’s a grand mission, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be played on a grand scale. Boho’s projects include unpicking the systems that sustain a news stand in London’s Euston station. In its large-scale touring performance, Best Festival Ever, the company explores the complex interplay of processes in the management of a major music festival.
Go on, have a read.We spent a week in January in London with Forum for the Future‘s Systems Innovations Lab. Forum uses systems thinking to help businesses and large organisations tackle sustainability challenges, and we're hoping to work with them to develop a toolkit of games that they can use in their projects.
Right now we're undertaking a month-long development in Sweden. Working with Stockholm NGO Miljöverkstan, we're building a new game based on the Flaten nature reserve south of Stockholm.Flaten is a lake, surrounded by beautiful forest (oaks, pine, spruce, trees 500 years old or more), and a place where a lot of different groups intersect – swimmers and dogwalkers, itinerant workers camping in caravan parks, squatter camps in the forest, the nearby suburb of Skarpnäck…
Miljöverkstan want to try to capture some of the complexity of the region in an interactive format, so they’ve invited us over to map the system with them and turn it into a game experience, a platform for learning and conversation.This month we’re building a systems map and putting together a rough prototype of the show. We’ll be returning to Sweden in August and October to finish off the game, and present it for the first time to a Swedish audience.This is a big project, with a short timeframe, but it’s exciting to be applying the tools we developed through Best Festival Ever to a real-world system.Feel free to check out our process blog if you’d like to keep track of the creation of the work. As always, we’d love to hear from you with any thoughts, comments and ideas. And if you’re interested in any kind of collaboration or joint project, we’re starting to look towards 2017…
Best Festival Ever at the Canberra Street Theatre
Okay so we are excited to announce that we will be bringing Boho's Best Festival Ever: How To Manage A Disaster to Canberra this August.We'll be at the Street Theatre for two weeks over 12 - 22 August.This will be the first Boho show in Canberra since Word Play in 2013, and the first presentation of Best Festival Ever in Australia. After premiering the show last year with seasons at the Battersea Arts Centre, the London Science Museum and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, we're really stoked to be bringing this one home.Best Festival Ever: How To Manage A Disaster places the audience in charge of programming and managing their very own music festival.Seated around a table, participants take charge of designing, constructing and managing their festival from beginning to end. From taking care of rowdy campsite parties to assembling the perfect lineup of bands, from dealing with artist tantrums to preventing fights in the moshpit, the audience experience every part of the festival manager's ride.Part theatre show, part performance lecture and part boardgame, Best Festival Ever introduces participants to concepts from Systems Science and asks how we can best understand and manage the complex systems we live in.Each of the Canberra shows will feature a conversation with a guest scientist talking about the ideas in the work, including Dr Will Steffen (Climate Council), Dr Bob Costanza (ANU) and Dr Nicky Grigg (CSIRO).
Following the conclusion of Big Day Out, Harvest, Future Music, Stereosonic, the Great Escape and Parklife Festivals, this might be your last chance to experience a music festival in Australia: jump on board.
17 shows in 9 venues: The first Best Festival Ever season
David here with a final wrap-up note at the end of the first Best Festival Ever season. After 17 shows in 9 venues in London and Stockholm, we've finished the show's first tour and returned to Australia for a break - as well as to plan and prepare for the project's next phase.Over November, we presented the show at venues including the Battersea Arts Centre, the London Science Museum, Central St Martins, Kings College London, Forum for the Future, Zone Creative Agency, Färgfabriken, Miljöverkstan and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.We shared the work with theatre audiences, scientists, high school students, sustainable development post-grads, researchers, festival-makers, urban planners, museum staff and corporate groups.Fereday Films produced a great video of the show in action, which you can check out here:Perhaps the most satisfying part of the work for me was the discussions with the audience we held after the show. For our Science Museum season, scientists Yvonne Rydin, James Millington, Chris Brierley and Emily Lines presented short talks after the shows, discussing their own work in relation to the systems science ideas in Best Festival Ever. The conversations about sustainability, planning, climate change and complex systems were incredibly rewarding to listen to.That's it for Best Festival Ever in 2014. In 2015 we'll be looking at further tours for the show both within Australia and overseas. We're also seeking to begin partnerships with other organisations to develop new interactive tabletop works looking at specific systems.If you're interested in knowing more, or if you'd like to chat about a possible collaboration, please drop us a line. And thanks to everyone who contributed their support to make this project happen - we're hugely grateful!Cheers from David, David, Nikki, Nathan and Rachel!