What was once the Festival of Brexit has become Unboxed, a dizzying array of oil rigs, dream machines and food boxes.
The ten projects for the £120 million public-funded event to “celebrate creativity and bring people together” next year were unveiled yesterday.
The festival, announced by Theresa May in 2018, will bring together scientists, technologists, engineers and artists, the organisers said. There will be poetry, computer coding, music, pop-up forests and a decommissioned oil rig in an abandoned lido in Weston-Super-Mare. “We are unboxing creativity,” Martin Green, the chief creative officer, said. “We hope that future generations of creative talent will be inspired.
“The future is about combining science, tech, engineering, art and maths. We also want it to be fun.”
Among the projects is Tour de Moon, a series of festivals “inspired by and in collaboration with the moon”.
A DJ will be able to phone the moon for advice on a new “alien music genre”.
Green said that Boris Johnson was “absolutely” behind the festival after being “taken through it”. He added that the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were also supporting it.
One project aims to transform a decommissioned North Sea offshore platform by placing it in Weston-super-Mare’s former Tropicana lido and plant it with gardens, provide meeting places and “harness the power of the elements to provide renewable energy”. It would “reference the heyday of British coastal resorts”.
There is also to be a plea for 20,000 volunteers, or Luminators, to help create the Green Space Dark Skies project which is inspired by the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, which established access rights to countryside.
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The volunteers will be equipped with hand-held lights that, thanks to new technology created by Siemens, will be “animated through geo-positioning” allowing for “dramatic chains of light to sweep down mountains and through valleys” in the country’s national parks. The resulting “interventions” will be filmed and broadcast.
There will also be a pop-up forest in the centre of Birmingham as part of a project that will celebrate the diversity of the UK through the “incredible biodiversity of our plantlife”. Green said: “From daisies to horse chestnut tree and dahlias to the English rose, many of the plants we considered to be part of the landscape originate overseas.”
Continuing the flora theme, the Dandelion project will “reimagine the harvest festival for the 21st century” with Cubes of Perpetual Light, miniature vertical farms, dotted around various urban and rural locations in Scotland “showing the even the unlikeliest space can be a place to grow produce for local communities”.
Then there is Dreamachine, “an artwork seen with your eyes closed that explores the limitless potential of the human mind in a powerful new kind of collective experience”.
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