Pat Kane: How I was convinced to help out with the 'Festival of Brexit'

The first meeting, in February 2020, was in a Soho bakers called Princi, all marble walls, communal slabs of table and Milanese flakiness. My companion was the cultural producer Sam Hunt, who a year before had asked me to host some sessions on possible futures at the Bluedot festival in Cheshire.

Bluedot mixes anthemic bands and hardcore science tents, under the immense, rusted shadow of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. What a geektastic day it was: I thought I’d died and was about to empirically prove the afterlife. Sam, his bearded coolness equally verifiable, wanted to explore something with me.

Yes, this was the festival proposed by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Theresa May, intended to be a post-Brexit booster for British-national spirits, with £120m ring-fenced for the celebrations. But what Sam presented to me was the opportunity for something quite different: a “festival of creativity and innovation”.

As Sam had written to me: “Politics is continually reduced to the binary. We want to try to celebrate the complexity of places and the people who chose to call them home.”

Does that remind you of the spirit of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony? No surprise – much of that team (including the producer Martin Green) is also in charge of this project. This week’s flurry of outraged Tory MPs, complaining that Unboxed2022 is “trendy” and “politically correct”, displaying no Spitfire flypasts or Proms-like flaggery (or even one mention of the word “Brexit”), were always fated to be disappointed.

Yet I had a proper struggle before saying yes. The 2022 team couldn’t have made it clearer this was going to be the opposite of jack-waving patriotism. But a long-standing (and irreversible) Scottish independence supporter has to ask himself how and why he’s getting involved in an explicitly UK-defined cultural project.

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I think I have a good working theory of Britishness. Which is that it’s a Scandinavian/Nordic identity in waiting, where separate states with entangled histories can resonate both along and across their borders, cooperating relaxedly and authentically when necessary. The political break-up of Britain might be one route to such an expansive, subtle British feel.

But what else might prepare the way? What would create a popular well of vibrant fellow-feeling, friendly towards transformation across these islands? Capacious towards all forms of change, constitutional or otherwise?

One part of my mind mulled over that a “Festival of Creativity” might be that kind of preparation. From the get-go, a “four nations” framework was assumed and bolted into place (and despite the resistance to such a framing by some UK ministers recently, “four nations” has persisted into the launch).

But the other part of my mind was equally enthralled by the idea of a massive collective celebration of human creativity, in and of itself. This has been the theme of my adult life, by means of music, media, technology and activism.

I wrote a tome about these matters in 2004, titled The Play Ethic. The book has left me with a multi-disciplinary interest in how human nature keeps our options open, by means of joyful experimentation and exploration (in other words, “play”).

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From that interest, the clincher for me was that the Festival was taking a STEAM approach – standing for science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics. And that all of these creative commissions had to touch on most or all of these fields. (We also took the A of STEAM, and slotted SHAPE into it vertically – standing for social science, humanities, arts, philosophy and environment).

My curation of FutureFest since 2012 (a London-sited festival of the future, powered by the innovation foundation Nesta) had been all about the collision and fusion of artists, transformers and radicals – from Edward Snowden to Deep Mind, from Brian Eno to (indeed) Nicola Sturgeon. All on the basis of the old Alan Kay slogan, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”.

So I was raring to go, thinking furiously as to what conditions, structures, practices and concepts would be required to make this R&D process hum. What sociable set-ups could allow coders to talk to dancers, land activists to work with mobile engineers, dance musicians to co-create with neuroscientists? When would they move together, where would they hang out, how would they play around?

And then, along with everyone else from March 2020, everything shut down. Posing the question: how do you prepare an islands-wide festival of creativity from behind screens, in domestic back-rooms, fiddling with untested shareware and virtual whiteboards? Well, how?

I’m immensely proud that I played my small part, embedded with the brilliant 2022 team, in answering that question. In the decisive online creative sessions we designed in November 2020, I got to interview Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and polymath Malcolm Gladwell (below), and was privileged to summarise the insights of each day, along with a young poet who’d hung out during all the ideation.

ALL very utopian, you say? Well, how else are you supposed to be, when Gaia is giving humanity a necessary lesson, chasing you off the street?

When I look at the ten final commissions, narrowed down from a shortlist of 30, taken from over 300 submissions, I can’t help but connect the nature of their visions to the context in which they were birthed.

“From one little roome, an everywhere”, as the Elizabethan poet John Donne (of “no man is an island” fame) once wrote. And from the online forums and platforms that we devised, the projects have literally gone everywhere.

Green Place, Dark Skies uses GPS and light tech to reclaim community authority over the land. Our Place In Space deploys the same island landscape to look at our current divisions from a cosmic perspective.

Dreamachine will ask communities to commit themselves to a brand-new, drug-free psychedelic experience, traversing new inner worlds. While See Monster planks an entire North Sea oil rig in the middle of a fairground in Weston Super-Mare, urging us to consider what to do with the relics of a fossil-fuel age we must leave behind.

And a special mention for Scotland’s lead entry Dandelion, which reimagines the harvest festival as a platform for food growth anywhere in the country. It’s led by one of our great Scottish imagineers, Angus Farquhar, bouncing back from his failed attempt to turn St. Peter’s Seminary into a requiem for modernist ambitions.

So, yes, I would say that Covid (and other planetary disruptions) hung over the coruscating creativity of all the participants, in the process that resulted in Unboxed.

But it’s creativity, initiative, and adaptiveness – drawing on all resources, deploying all knowledges and practices, artistic, scientific and participatory – which is the most valuable human response to these systemic challenges. Unboxed2022, probably to a fault, aims to prove the truth of this response.

As an indy-minded Scot, with an interest in meaning, mastery and autonomy – however it manifests for a human community – I am proud to have played my small part in setting these sparks flying. The point is not to douse it all with water, but to fan these flames, in whatever locality or polity they catch light. I wish good luck to them all; may they avoid all the boxes.

More on Unboxed2022 at www.unboxed2022.uk