#Meow wolf santa fe fridge how to#

Curation is important - there is a deep skill involved in the careful placement of the pieces of evidence around a space, whether that be Meow Wolf, a workshop or a minister’s office.

It means that evidence is engaged with in a deeper, more creative and more meaningful way. It would move away from a top-down, singular version of what truth is, and move towards a more bottom-up, participatory and emergent way of co-creating meaning together. This is an approach that can and should be used in policy and evidence worlds. I wonder if participants left caring more because they ultimately had the responsibility to decide what happened to the family. I was impressed by the agency that was given to participants to construct these stories. It is deliberately left open and for the audience to assemble their own narratives of what these pieces of evidence mean. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ interpretation of the story of what happened. Some of it provides pointers towards the disappearance of the family. Some of it builds understanding of the texture of the household, the personalities involved, their hopes, fears, irritations. There are papers strewn over the living room table, family portraits, passive aggressive notes, a video camera, a bookcase, a will, a child’s diary, the contents of a safe, a drawing board, an adult’s diary… Each artefact provides information. The newspaper in the kitchen, shown in the top picture, provides further clues. Meow Wolf is fully hands on - you can touch and interrogate pretty much anything - and rifling through the mailbox out the front you soon discover that the family’s absence is caught up in mysterious circumstances, to which the hamster is central. The fridge is in a kitchen, and the kitchen is in the house of a family comprising parents, children, an uncle and a hamster.

#Meow wolf santa fe fridge how to#

On another level Meow Wolf presents an intriguing case of how to engage with and explore information. I later understood from speaking with Meow Wolf’s team that each of these rooms were designed by different artists, either on Meow Wolf’s payroll or contracted out. That fridge in the image at top? Open the door and you enter a multitude of beautiful, luminous, surreal rooms (see images below). On one level - and one of the things I liked about Meow Wolf is that you could engage on it at multiple levels - it’s a visually stunning exploring space. They have recently opened sites in Las Vegas and Denver - I was fortunate to also see the Las Vegas site as part of my visit. It’s a business, they have been running for 10-15 years, and they received investment funding from George RR Martin, author of Game of Thrones. Meow Wolf is an artist-led entertainment space, based in an old bowling alley in Santa Fe. Hence started a four year journey which included becoming the Wellcome Trust-sponsored Clore Fellow, meeting Meow Wolf founder Vince Kadlubek at the Royal Academy, planning a visit to Santa Fe, a pandemic, a baby, producing Glass House, planning another visit, Omicron and finally, in April 2022, making it to New Mexico. The academic responded ‘Oh, like Meow Wolf’. I described an ‘evidence discovery’, a process by which we would deconstruct a science report, and splay its key evidence around a physical space for participants to walk round and engage with. In 2018 whilst working on a project on national data I met a US east coast academic to discuss participatory approaches to policymaking. This is the fifth blog on my Clore Fellowship/Wellcome Trust sponsored study visit to the USA.