Situated in a converted horse float in front of the Melbourne Museum, The Post-Truth  Booth was live throughout the 2018 Creative Summit, held by Creative Victoria 14 and 15 June. The Post-Truth Booth  actively engaged the general public with the concept of post-truth, fighting a sense of ‘truth fatigue’ while creating a live post-truth scenario in which expert and public opinion are intermingled and represented indiscriminately. Unlike most of the creative summit program, this project was not a talk, it was an art project to run in conjunction with the summit. Rather than discussing how creativity can inform public debate this project exemplifies it.

Passers by were be invited to read a brief paragraph describing post-truth (taken from wikipedia) before giving an ad hoc response to the current conference topic. These responses will be facilitated by one of our 4 artists who will periodically incorporate emotional and deliberately misleading information and questions into the conversation.  All of these discussions are filmed. The footage collected in the booth is streamed onto an interior wall of the creative summit, simultaneously the actual conference will be streamed live onto a small screen in the booth. This process creates a live post truth scenario in which ‘expert’ information is intermingled with informed, uninformed, misinformed and emotive information delivered by the general public and 4 artists. This project aims to highlight some of the underlying mechanisms of post truth as a provocation for further conversation that goes beyond the audience of the creative summit itself. All footage gathered will be edited and available online after the summit.

For more information, contact helen@wideopenroadart.com