In the workshop Festivals as Testing Grounds, Innofest presented the compelling use of music festivals as a means for testing innovative designs, a concept which the company has been exploring over the past two years. Hosted by Wilbert van de Kamp and Anna van Nunen (Innofest’s co-founder), the workshop brought together designers, entrepreneurs, and festival organizers to discuss the ways in which festivals are – and could be – used as a space to test the way we consume, behave, and relate with one another.
By Jacob Heydorn Gorski
Festivals are radically unique spaces: quasi-upotian, self-contained and complete with their own infrastructure. Innofest’s workshop challenged the conception of festivals as merely parties, instead suggesting that they can become a place where innovation, creativity, and a willing audience come together.
The effects can be far-reaching, challenging social norms, encouraging new ways of relating with one another, and changing our attitudes towards consumption. Designers and entrepreneurs are appropriating objects and qualities inherent in many festivals – drug use, tents, light displays, and collective gatherings – and recognize their potential to be repurposed or reimagined in fascinating ways.
Mimic the drugs
Two design entrepreneurs shared with the audience their products, realized with the help of Innofest. First on the stage was Schelte Meinsma, part of the design initiative VR Room which is testing the use of virtual reality to mimic intoxicated states from drugs. But it’s not all fun and games. The product is also being used by police officers to train how to react to intoxicated individuals. In the future, he posited, VR Room could be used to induce empathic states associated with certain drugs. What, if any, line is there between mimicry and neurochemistry?
Joachin de Vries, member of the artist group Werc Collective, followed by leading us through a recent installation that used autonomous flocking ‘conversation’ to create light-based visual experiences on the usually-boring walk between the festival grounds and the campsite. His Pixi lights transformed the woods into a visual orchestra. He hopes to expand this idea to creating sound installations, which have the potential to be used in an urban context, say, for guiding the visually-impaired.
From left to right: Wilbert van de Kamp, Floris Schoonderbeek, Ferry Rosenboom en Anna van Nunen
Water for all
The workshop also featured appearances by several festival organizers. Product designer Floris Schoonderbeek and Ferry Rosenboom, organizers of Into the Great Wide Open, spoke about a ‘water cocktail bar’ BRAK they designed, which reimagined the role of water during festivals not as a product, but as a common good available to all. The bar desalinated saltwater and formed part of a common space, ‘Strand Tuin’, which was energy self-sufficient. Coming into contact with experiments like these could change attendees’ attitudes about resources consumption, widening their impact beyond the festival itself.
Wilbert van de Kamp in conversation with Johan Gijsen (right)
New opportunities
Johan Gijsen, founder of Le Guess Who? festival, discussed the potential of festivals in bringing people and cultures together. Le Guess Who? was created after Gijsen and a friend lamented the lack of lesser known international artists in festivals. The festival seeks to bring in artists from across the world to Utrecht.
Ending the program was Sjoerd Bootsma, who works on Friesland’s Welcome to the Village festival. He saw festivals as a way of showing the potential cities can have for creativity and imagination and as a way to help people come together and put their imagination first. By doing so, Welcome to the Village has the power to change policy-making and farming practices that are threatening the region’s biodiversity. Festivals as such can have political ramifications, rebranding a region’s identity and rewriting the ways we can become inspired by our communities.