Control is our latest piece, a response to the world we currently live in and an attempt to explore ideas of positive change. It’s a desire to see how we might better feel like we have some control over our relationship to the world around us, big and small, local and global, now and then.
Since its inception over a year ago we have been travelling the globe meeting people who we think provide an insight and unique perspective on how we might be able to affect positive change. The diversity of this opinion and insight has been thrilling and invigorating, meeting people who have extended our imagination of what might be possible. Control is our attempt to distil these conversations into a live documentary that explodes a multitude of ideas into something compelling and illuminating. An exploration of the systems and economies of control within which we exist today.
The interviews include conversations with the next possible Prime Minister of Iceland, world specialists on disease, climate change, violence, peace and the economy. A man who has grown the world’s first hamburger; journalists, artists, sci-fi writers and technologists; activists, doctors and thinkers, radical historians and politicians, people who are making changes, seeing changes or offering up examples of change. It is an attempt to create a panoramic vision of the future, to paint a global picture of the limitless possibility of tomorrow.
And it’s been fun and mind blowing, positive and negative, it’s taken our thinking and rattled it about so much we’re not often sure which way is up, it’s a piece we are itching to share with you.
The interview process has taken place against a backdrop of events that seemingly are changing or affecting our futures as we speak, including Brexit, The Paris Summit, The US Presidential Race, the Panama Papers leak, the continuing war in Syria and a great deal of polarised debate around who the UK is as a country. Control reflects this immediacy, the flux and shifting sands of change.
Control is a show for twenty people, it is technically very ambitious, a live documentary that uses motion tracking, video mapping and live soundtracking to create a piece that reflects and abstracts a host of provocations for change. It is personal and political, frenetic, anarchic and peaceful and it involves you, not in a heart dreading, put on the spot, terrifying kind of way, but in that your presence is necessary and your interaction affecting.
Moreover we hope it is generous with you, a small space in time and thought to stop and absorb some big and little ideas. An invitation to weave the future together.
By Rich Warburton (Invisible Flock)
Invisible Flock are bringing Control to ARC at 7pm on Wed 12 and Thu 13 Oct, you can book tickets and read more about the show here.