Imagining Future Festivals

As part of the 8th edition of the MUTEK Forum in Montreal, our team convened policy makers, industry professionals, artists, and members of the public to speculate on the transforming role of the festival as a sociopolitical actor.

How can festivals be collective sites of meaning-making? How can festivals deal with the tensions between addressing social issues and the realities of producing festivals in a capitalist society? How can our proposed experimental methods better provide the necessary affordances for translation and collective knowledge-making lacking in other forms of participatory governance? How can a festival make policy?

Through this workshop, we share an approach that takes the Digital Democracy Workshop Kit on speculative design and liberating structures as a point of departure.

The Workshop

Each team was tasked to write a newspaper headline and paragraph outlining their speculative future festival and share it with the other teams. The goal of this workshop was to facilitate collective futuring and to jointly imagine the future of festivals. By grappling with paradoxes (or Wicked Questions) teams had common grounds from which they could speculate.

The Wicked Questions

1. How can future festivals address climate change while at the same time relying on flying in hundreds of people in fostering cultural exchange?

2. How can future festivals critically deal with emerging technologies while becoming increasingly dependent on and enmeshed in them?

3. How can future festivals deal with equity, diversity, and inclusivity while continuing to profit from existing structures of domination and exploitation?

Findings

We witnessed a discrepancy between different participants’ expectations. On the one hand, workshops during the MUTEK Forum are typically built around knowledge transfer, which creates a specific set of expectations for some attendees. This contrasted with our workshop structure, which was centred on co-constructing and collective futuring. As a result, some participants approached the workshop task through a problem solving lens whereas others focused their energy on democratic decision-making. Some participants raised the concern that coming up with a “concrete output” induced pressure, while for others producing such output in written form presented a challenge.

Future Iterations

For future iterations, we will consider other formats for outputs as a way to make the experience more accessible (especially in multilingual teams) and add playfulness, which may have been lacking in the seriousness of writing a newspaper article. Moving between macro or “think big” conversations and translating these into concrete and practical steps was challenging for most participants, so future workshops will take this pressure into consideration and adapt accordingly.