Counterpilot @ The Outside
So you’ve encountered Counterpilot?
It’s okay.
We all have days like these.
This web page might not give you answers. That sounds like a google job.
But we’ll do our best to give a bit more context for your many questions.
WHAT EVEN IS COUNTERPILOT?
Counterpilot is an award-winning collective of interdisciplinary artists based in Brisbane, Australia.
Together, we create interactive performance works - activating audiences with new technology, rich design, and transmedia storytelling. Counterpilot seeks to transform the familiar, juxtaposing rich fictional worlds against a backdrop of the everyday.
By subverting real social circumstances, we co-opt our participants as authentic performers. In this way we are harnessing what we believe to be the most exciting thing about theatre - the live audience. Our works enable participants to observe themselves responding in real ways to hyper-real situations.
We seek to provoke change through acts of trouble, mischief and low-key chaos. We play in the space between people, and we poke at the tensions that bind us.
Counterpilot is directed by Nathan Sibthorpe. Our core team includes Christine Felmingham, Mike Willmett, & Sarah Winter.
I SURVIVED TRUTHMACHINE and all i got was this lousy qr code
A working polygraph test for a room full of strangers (or in this case, colleagues) to explore truth in a post-truth world. Our multi-award winning theatrical social experiment has been touring since 2019, playing seasons including Sydney Festival, Brisbane Festival, and Darwin Festival.
In 2016, Post-Truth was declared word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary. We became obsessed with trying to understand what this meant. At first, our fascination was with alternative facts and fake news - the idea that for a few years the world was waiting for answers around one big conspiracy in particular - was there collusion between Donald Trump and Russia? In the lead-up to 2019, it felt like we might be about to witness a big reveal - the FACTS unfurled on a grand stage after years of conjecture. But of course, life isn’t that tidy, and the truth is rarely that simple.
We started asking questions about whether post-truth meant that truth didn’t exist or just wasn’t available for easy consumption. Since our first draft of Truthmachine, we have made more than a dozen versions of the work, and over time the interest has shifted from political truths to very personal truths. If we can’t have a binary ‘yes or no’ on a global scale, then maybe the truth about ourselves and our experience of the world is just as muddy. It’s rarely as simple as fact or fiction.
Truthmachine is fuelled by the tension of trying to force complex enquiries into an artificial binary. And then playing with the impossibility of verification. The polygraph doesn’t work, after all. And the truth? Might not be out there.
Discover more (including some images and a cool little video) here