Annie Saunders : 'You had to be there' Liveness, creativity and the unforeseen / KIKK Festival 2022

Annie Saunders is a multidisciplinary creator and director of site-specific experiences. She has made installations and performance works for both disused spaces and major arts institutions, experiential works for multinational brands and interactive works for public space. In recent years her projects have won the Tribeca Festival’s Immersive Creative Nonfiction Award, the D&D Yellow Pencil, and the UK APA Award for Best Use of Technology for Good. Saunders is the founder and artistic director of site-specific performance company Wilderness, and her experimental project ‘The Wreck’ for Opera Omaha was called ‘ingenious…a persuasive expression of complex female feeling,’ by the Wall Street Journal.

In this talk Annie Saunders discusses experiential work, the role of technology in creating moments of spontaneous intimacy, synchronicity, enchantment and the unexpected, and the impact of pandemic years on the connection between inspiration and mysticism: that the creative process depends on a belief in the potential existence of something we’ve never seen before.