Election season is once again upon us, and this cycle looks to be most divisive yet again. Whether we like it or not, the attractions industry has found itself squarely in the political discourse. As Meow Wolf has grown into an expansive company with exhibitions in both red and blue states, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my love for art, entertainment, storytelling, and themed attractions and how politics fits into it all. Our industry should not avoid the discourse, but at the same time we hold a unique position and responsibility that we should never forget.
This world we live in is filled with various forms of division. These separations express themselves through large-scale, aggregated societal forms but they actually originate within each one of us individually.
Division is found within our personal identities, our distinctions, our definitions. We fabricate hard stances based on our own observations of threat – sometimes that threat is real and sometimes it’s exaggerated by our personal mental narratives. We gravitate towards packs of like-mindedness, whether on social media or in social spaces, that then re-enforce these identifiers and perspectives. A loop of validation strengthens our stances in the world, affirms our place as the righteous, and fuels our view of the enemy.
No room for exploration A caricature of ourself starts to form, increasingly void of nuance, and our delusional minds form the same caricatures about ‘the other’; a simplified construct of human beings painted with low-resolution textures and monochromatic colours. Fox News reflects it back to us, and so does MSNBC, and so does ESPN, and so do the hyper-targeted ads we see on our feeds, and so does the curated algorithms of our social networks, and so does the sub-cultures of the communities we live in. The grey areas become black and white. The result is us vs. them with punitive dogmas running our mental processes.
Communion becomes impossible. The ecosystem of these defined perspectives leaves no room for exploration or possibility — we become determined by our determinations. Our daily lives are experienced within environments that re-establish our divisions and further define our enemies.
The magic of play But a magical opportunity exists within the landscape of entertainment: Play. Through storytelling, art, and creative expression, humans have crafted make-believe worlds that are free from identifiers and create space to connect as the versions of ourselves that existed prior to when we committed to all of our opinions: The Child.
Because in the limitless world of the imagination, the dividing perspectives of our day-to-day carry little reference or value. Who I am and what I’ve already determined becomes irrelevant within the vastness of dreams. In this binary existence of red vs blue, right vs left, wrong vs wrong, old vs new, black vs white, there’s an alternative space of possibility where nothing has been labelled yet and we can co-exist in the communion of exploration. It’s within our worlds of co-creation.
If that communion can be felt for even the slightest moment, it has the profound power to short-circuit the mechanisms of judgement and remind us that we are loving and forgiving beings that ultimately seek to have peace with one another.
Our industry has been bringing all types people together for the past century, providing a miraculous opportunity for people of all backgrounds, beliefs, and character to come together to share in wonder and joy with each other, even for small windows of time. That’s the power of art, entertainment, attractions and play; to rise above the predictable divisions of the self and expand our minds towards the shared experience of community.
The child inside I’m reminded of a time when Meow Wolf first opened House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A family standing in line caught my eye. The mom and the two kids were giddy with excitement, but the father, wearing a Harley Davidson tank top and a hat with the Texas state flag, stood there with his arms crossed looking uncomfortable. I could tell he that he had already determined that Meow Wolf was not for him.
An hour later, I was walking around inside the exhibition and saw this family again. The mom and kids were still in a place of enjoyment, and the father was crawling through the fireplace with a huge smile on his face proclaiming: “There’s a dinosaur skeleton in this room that plays music through its bones!”
The environment allowed the father to drop his identity and instead just explore and play like a kid again.
Meow Wolf’s fourth permanent attraction opened in the Grapevine Mills shopping centre near Dallas-Forth airport, North Texas in July 2023.
Created by 40 Texas-based artists together with more than 150 Meow Wolf artists and fabricators, the exhibition takes visitors on a journey that begins in what appears to be an ordinary front yard in the Midwest. Guests enter and explore the ‘Delauney family home’ where everyday objects hint at a mysterious disappearance.
In signature Meow Wolf style, what follows is a “swift freefall down a narrative rabbit hole. Guests will revel in spectacle after spectacle which materialise into a gleaming triumph of multisensory art.”
Immersive installations include Brrrmuda, an “intersection of refrigerator portals from various dimensions, taking guests on unexpected adventures or to lively parties.” A mystical forest cloaked in magical daylight features musical fungus and a treehouse, while Lamp Shop Alley has shop windows overflowing with trinkets and doors leading to the unknown. Neon Kingdom offers visitors the chance to take part in a ‘multiversal dance party’ with its ‘charming dance floor’ and ‘whimsical cuckoo-clock landscape’.
More than 450 artists worked on the attraction / Photo: Photo: Imani Thomas
Read more from this issue of Attractions Management magazine
View contents of Attractions Management 2023 issue 4
People: Clara Rice
The director of global marketing for Adirondack Studios shares her plans
Interview: Delphine Pons
As Parc Asterix launches a new themed land and celebrates record attendance figures, its CEO tells us what’s next for the much-loved French park
First person: The power of play
Can the power of play help heal divides in our world? Can art and attractions bring people closer? Meow Wolf’s founder is sure that it can
Museum: Lighting the way
With major new museums taking shape in Jeddah and Abu Dhabi, digital art sensation teamLab are riding high. We speak to the team
Opinion: We need a revolution
It’s time for radical thinking to address the staffing crisis in our industry, argues Margreet Papamichael
Tourism: On the road
With its Scenic Routes project, Norway has turned the road trip into an attraction, and boosted tourism in a huge way. Terry Stevens gets behind the wheel
Museums: Mark Cutmore
What’s the future of immersive technology in museums? The head of commercial experiences at the Science Museum Group shares his thoughts
Research: Joined up thinking
Natural history museums around the world are sharing details of their collections to help find solutions to some of the most urgent issues of our time
The arts: Show time
As the UK’s biggest cultural venue for decades opens, we hear from the team behind Aviva Studios
Research: Making memories
The link between the emotions of visitors and their memories of an experience helps shape their reactions. Researcher Wim Strijbosch explores his findings
An opportunity to reimagine one of the UK’s most recognisable towers has been formally
opened by Rivington Hark, as St Johns Beacon invites operators and partners to shape its
next phase. [more...]
Election season is once again upon us, and this cycle looks to be most divisive yet again. Whether we like it or not, the attractions industry has found itself squarely in the political discourse. As Meow Wolf has grown into an expansive company with exhibitions in both red and blue states, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my love for art, entertainment, storytelling, and themed attractions and how politics fits into it all. Our industry should not avoid the discourse, but at the same time we hold a unique position and responsibility that we should never forget.
This world we live in is filled with various forms of division. These separations express themselves through large-scale, aggregated societal forms but they actually originate within each one of us individually.
Division is found within our personal identities, our distinctions, our definitions. We fabricate hard stances based on our own observations of threat – sometimes that threat is real and sometimes it’s exaggerated by our personal mental narratives. We gravitate towards packs of like-mindedness, whether on social media or in social spaces, that then re-enforce these identifiers and perspectives. A loop of validation strengthens our stances in the world, affirms our place as the righteous, and fuels our view of the enemy.
No room for exploration A caricature of ourself starts to form, increasingly void of nuance, and our delusional minds form the same caricatures about ‘the other’; a simplified construct of human beings painted with low-resolution textures and monochromatic colours. Fox News reflects it back to us, and so does MSNBC, and so does ESPN, and so do the hyper-targeted ads we see on our feeds, and so does the curated algorithms of our social networks, and so does the sub-cultures of the communities we live in. The grey areas become black and white. The result is us vs. them with punitive dogmas running our mental processes.
Communion becomes impossible. The ecosystem of these defined perspectives leaves no room for exploration or possibility — we become determined by our determinations. Our daily lives are experienced within environments that re-establish our divisions and further define our enemies.
The magic of play But a magical opportunity exists within the landscape of entertainment: Play. Through storytelling, art, and creative expression, humans have crafted make-believe worlds that are free from identifiers and create space to connect as the versions of ourselves that existed prior to when we committed to all of our opinions: The Child.
Because in the limitless world of the imagination, the dividing perspectives of our day-to-day carry little reference or value. Who I am and what I’ve already determined becomes irrelevant within the vastness of dreams. In this binary existence of red vs blue, right vs left, wrong vs wrong, old vs new, black vs white, there’s an alternative space of possibility where nothing has been labelled yet and we can co-exist in the communion of exploration. It’s within our worlds of co-creation.
If that communion can be felt for even the slightest moment, it has the profound power to short-circuit the mechanisms of judgement and remind us that we are loving and forgiving beings that ultimately seek to have peace with one another.
Our industry has been bringing all types people together for the past century, providing a miraculous opportunity for people of all backgrounds, beliefs, and character to come together to share in wonder and joy with each other, even for small windows of time. That’s the power of art, entertainment, attractions and play; to rise above the predictable divisions of the self and expand our minds towards the shared experience of community.
The child inside I’m reminded of a time when Meow Wolf first opened House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A family standing in line caught my eye. The mom and the two kids were giddy with excitement, but the father, wearing a Harley Davidson tank top and a hat with the Texas state flag, stood there with his arms crossed looking uncomfortable. I could tell he that he had already determined that Meow Wolf was not for him.
An hour later, I was walking around inside the exhibition and saw this family again. The mom and kids were still in a place of enjoyment, and the father was crawling through the fireplace with a huge smile on his face proclaiming: “There’s a dinosaur skeleton in this room that plays music through its bones!”
The environment allowed the father to drop his identity and instead just explore and play like a kid again.
Meow Wolf’s fourth permanent attraction opened in the Grapevine Mills shopping centre near Dallas-Forth airport, North Texas in July 2023.
Created by 40 Texas-based artists together with more than 150 Meow Wolf artists and fabricators, the exhibition takes visitors on a journey that begins in what appears to be an ordinary front yard in the Midwest. Guests enter and explore the ‘Delauney family home’ where everyday objects hint at a mysterious disappearance.
In signature Meow Wolf style, what follows is a “swift freefall down a narrative rabbit hole. Guests will revel in spectacle after spectacle which materialise into a gleaming triumph of multisensory art.”
Immersive installations include Brrrmuda, an “intersection of refrigerator portals from various dimensions, taking guests on unexpected adventures or to lively parties.” A mystical forest cloaked in magical daylight features musical fungus and a treehouse, while Lamp Shop Alley has shop windows overflowing with trinkets and doors leading to the unknown. Neon Kingdom offers visitors the chance to take part in a ‘multiversal dance party’ with its ‘charming dance floor’ and ‘whimsical cuckoo-clock landscape’.
More than 450 artists worked on the attraction / Photo: Photo: Imani Thomas
Read more from this issue of Attractions Management magazine
View contents of Attractions Management 2023 issue 4
People: Clara Rice
The director of global marketing for Adirondack Studios shares her plans
Interview: Delphine Pons
As Parc Asterix launches a new themed land and celebrates record attendance figures, its CEO tells us what’s next for the much-loved French park
First person: The power of play
Can the power of play help heal divides in our world? Can art and attractions bring people closer? Meow Wolf’s founder is sure that it can
Museum: Lighting the way
With major new museums taking shape in Jeddah and Abu Dhabi, digital art sensation teamLab are riding high. We speak to the team
Opinion: We need a revolution
It’s time for radical thinking to address the staffing crisis in our industry, argues Margreet Papamichael
Tourism: On the road
With its Scenic Routes project, Norway has turned the road trip into an attraction, and boosted tourism in a huge way. Terry Stevens gets behind the wheel
Museums: Mark Cutmore
What’s the future of immersive technology in museums? The head of commercial experiences at the Science Museum Group shares his thoughts
Research: Joined up thinking
Natural history museums around the world are sharing details of their collections to help find solutions to some of the most urgent issues of our time
The arts: Show time
As the UK’s biggest cultural venue for decades opens, we hear from the team behind Aviva Studios
Research: Making memories
The link between the emotions of visitors and their memories of an experience helps shape their reactions. Researcher Wim Strijbosch explores his findings
A new immersive attraction designed to transport visitors into the final hours of ancient Pompeii
is preparing to open near the world-famous archaeological site in southern Italy.
Experience design company, BRC Imagination Arts, has completed a transition that sees founder
Bob Rogers pass ownership of the business to four long-serving senior executives, while
remaining actively involved with the company.
Movie Park Germany has opened a new Paramount Pictures-themed attraction as part of its 30th
anniversary celebrations, using immersive storytelling and adaptive reuse to reinforce the park’s
longstanding “Hollywood in Germany” positioning.
Therme Manchester’s 28-acre development, which will include interconnected glass pavilions
that measure 65,000sq m, will be the largest bathing and wellbeing attraction in the world once
complete, according to prof David Russell, CEO of Therme UK.
Efteling has opened Hooghmoed, a new family drop tower designed to broaden the appeal of its
recently launched Sirene Island themed area and introduce younger visitors to thrill attractions.
A proposed Puy du Fou development near Bicester and Universal Destinations and Experiences’
planned resort in Bedford are emerging as part of a wider transformation of the Oxford–
Cambridge Growth Corridor into a major centre for UK leisure and tourism inv
Shedd Aquarium has opened the Immersion Theater developed in partnership with SimEx-
Iwerks, as part of a wider strategy to enhance the guest experience and create additional
revenue opportunities.
The UK government has announced a temporary reduction in VAT on visitor attractions and
children’s meals as part of a summer cost-of-living support package designed to stimulate the
visitor economy and encourage family days out.
As designer Yinka Ilori prepares for his first solo gallery show in London, he speaks exclusively
to CLADmag about his mission to spread joy, the power of play, and his bold approach to using
colour (including the colours you won’t see in his work).
The government of Thailand is exploring plans for a THB300bn (£6.3bn, US$8.3bn)
entertainment complex in the country’s Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC), with officials
proposing a large-scale theme park and sports destination as part of a broader tourism and
economic development strategy.
An opportunity to reimagine one of the UK’s most recognisable towers has been formally
opened by Rivington Hark, as St Johns Beacon invites operators and partners to shape its
next phase. [more...]
