An interview with Meow Wolf’s Caity Kennedy
Caity
KennedyCaity Kennedy is Senior Vice President of Creative Direction at Meow Wolf, an arts and entertainment company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico known for highly immersive and interactive art installations. Meow Wolf started out as a DIY arts collective and today it’s a Benefit Corporation. You can learn more about Meow Wolf in their documentary Origin Story.
If you were going to imagine an immersive experience for a cultural institution — a museum or an arts center—how would you go about it?
Well, there are two very different starting points depending on whether you are starting with a space. I always prefer to start with a space for obvious reasons. In thinking about immersion, people frequently fail to properly consider the space.
Let’s say the project is a forest. The tendency is to make a forest scene on the walls and put some leaves in the air, which is often all you can really do. That’s one of the most important reasons why having a space first can be really important: knowing how much you can do above and below, to the texture of the floor and to the ceiling; knowing how much you can bring out into the room, how much freestanding stuff that creates a landscape to navigate. Finding out early what you’re allowed to do is key to designing. We’ve come upon some projects that were like, “Well, but the floor’s special so you can’t touch it and the ceilings are fragile and fire code won’t let us put anything in the room.” Those are huge barriers.
Let me also ask you about virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Is that a space you’ve worked in?
A little bit. I’ve used a VR tool in order to design a very complicated real space because drawing in two dimensions was limiting. Being able to go into VR and build, even in sort of a lumpy clay sort of way, was really cool, really, really cool.
Could you ever see putting any of these emerging mixed reality technologies into your work?
Yeah, but headsets are difficult. No one has solved the problems with durability and disposability and cleanliness, and some of the lighter weight headsets are kind of underwhelming so far.
We have docents walking around, but we don’t have someone standing there walking you through. It is important that you be able to walk up and put a headset on and take it off and not necessarily stand in line and wait. With AR, the tech just isn’t quite there yet. I think it will be, but it’s not good enough yet, other than through a phone. With a phone, your mind already is like, “I’ll use my little frame.” But when you have a frame in your field of view that doesn’t have anything around it, it’s the opposite of immersive. It’s like a weird little sticker. Once AR can have relatively full field view, it’s going to be incredible.
There are amazing VR environments, but if you’re going to an exhibit, you’re there to experience something real, something physical. We’d need a compelling narrative reason or improvements in the technology before we use those tools.
Where do your ideas come from for the projects?
I’d say a lot of us are inspired by theoretical physics, metaphysics, and science fiction, and that leads to a lot of fun conversation—even about mundane things like grocery stores. Grocery stores have rows and rows of brightly colored, neatly arranged, heavily yet terribly designed objects that are there presented, waiting for you to want them enough. Inspiring things are everywhere, which is a pretty well-trod idea, of course, but that’s where our ideas come from: being in conversation with other people who are seeing the world, experiencing the same fascination with it, and picking it apart together. That has a sort of cumulative effect where “two heads are better than one,” but it’s more like “two heads are a whole other mind with its own ideas and no single author” really.
Can you talk a little bit about your process? Now that you’re a big company, has your process changed?
It’s changed and it’s changing. We have done a couple of full company ideations and they were pretty crazy, pretty uncomfortable. There was too much saturation of ideas—a panic to get your idea out—and we couldn’t really spend any time on one thing because there were so many people.
One of the most successful things we’ve done already is sprints: essentially, getting people to propose how they want to spend a week trying a thing and then putting a team together to get that thing done. We‘ve only done that once because it was a lot of work and took several weeks, but it was extremely productive. Most of those projects became something else, became a longer-term project. Some of them were just hilarious; it was good for morale to make something absurd that couldn’t go anywhere. Fun’s important. Fun is surprisingly hard to hold onto.
How many projects is Meow Wolf doing now?
I don’t know. If you mean exhibits like buildings, we’re doing two right now, Las Vegas and Denver. Denver is an exhibit. It’s the biggest thing we have planned so far.
The question was how do we ideate, how do we come up with ideas? And how has that changed?
There’s a number at which we can still kind of just talk. We’ve passed that a long time ago, so we haven’t necessarily figured out how to ideate, because our timelines are pretty long. Not long in the entertainment world: theme parks and movies take a lot of years to build. But on the art project scale, one to five years is pretty crazy, especially with a large group. A lot of our figuring out is happening seemingly slowly.
The way that we would like to ideate, we haven’t actually quite done yet with the team. We need to do a presentation of all the information that we have on a project and then break into small groups so that the conversation is really possible, with a facilitator who can answer questions about the project.
Choice is so important to us on all levels. Choice for the viewer, choice for the maker. We all have to do things we don’t necessarily want to do but especially when it comes to ideating, we want people to work on what’s exciting. But we haven’t done things like that. We haven’t done a relatively full team ideation at the beginning of the project. We’re working on it. We really are trying to find a balance between how to be effective and how to be collaborative; how to incorporate people’s ideas, but how to avoid people taking too much.
How big are the teams?
Well, the company now has around 450 people. The biggest team, I believe, is the art team, maybe 40 people. But there are a lot of teams. An art team, a fabrication team, a design team, an infrastructure team, the digital storytelling team, an XR/VR team, and an entire entertainment division.
Figuring out who should be involved in these ideations is another thing we have to do. Sometimes work across disciplines is really simple and sometimes it’s impossible. We’re figuring out not only how to build worlds, but how to build a world that will let us build. So, we have this pretty insane challenge of building the plane as we fly it.
How would you describe your process of working with communities? You go see this space, but what about the people? Is that something you consider?
Very much. It’s one of the first things. Finding the right space in part has to do with how it affects the people there. We don’t want something that displaces people or is exclusively for tourists.
We’re figuring this out as we do this and we’re learning from every city how to do better. For example, in Denver, we have a community action committee made up of members of the greater Denver area who are active in the arts scene and also people from the neighborhood right by the building. We’re going to be establishing these committees in all cities.
We’re also establishing a plan. How do we go into a city? We didn’t have that plan in Denver and Vegas, but that plan is now being articulated. We’re doing a lot of reorienting ourselves based on what we’ve done so far. We’re doing a lot of redesign, more intentional design around DC, since it’s next. We have an internal timeline that sets aside time from the beginning to research the local artist communities and seek out initial liaisons or collaborators.
The plan we’re developing for DC is based on what we’re learning in Denver and Vegas. It has two aspects. It has the artist community aspect, and it has the more socio-political aspect, the neighborhood outreach. Each aspect has a respective department, so there is the outreach department and the artist liaison department. It used to be only one person. There’s a lot of overlap in the departments: the artist liaison zone has to do with being socially and politically responsible, and much of the community outreach zone has to do with art.
When Meow Wolf started, you talked about radical inclusion, right? Anyone could come in and start working with you. Do you keep that ethos now? Are community members allowed to work?
We legally can’t for insurance reasons, and we can’t have volunteers because we’re not a nonprofit, so it’s technically slavery if we have people work for us for free. We can’t be open-door in the same way.
It’s really important to me that we have ways for people who are just super interested to be involved, but we haven’t solved for that yet. We’ve been called out for not being radically inclusive, I think accurately. We are seeking to be radically inclusive. That is a goal. I would not say that we have achieved that yet.
Do you work with local artists?
We already had three DC artists come out to go over the initial phases. We have a DC artist liaison. Getting people involved really early is something that we weren’t able to do in Denver and Vegas because we didn’t have any research capacity, so we didn’t know how to find people.
Right now, we have a handful of project managers who are from Denver and live in Denver, and that will increase as we go. It’s deeply important to have local people involved. In Denver, we’re shooting for 40% of the local artist participation[of all the artists on the project]. I don’t know if we’re going to hit that, but we’re going to have a lot. In Vegas, it’s a lot less, but there are still local Vegas artists involved. In DC we’ll use a similar type of metric, seeking to have a lot from the DC and Baltimore area.
Do you think specifically about including under-represented groups?
Yes. Obviously, it can get a little sticky. You aren’t going to ask a bunch of people who are applying to work, “By the way, what’s your race?” That would be deeply inappropriate. But, through doing what research we can and from what people have elected to tell us, we are trying to be as representative as possible or as, essentially, intersectional as we can be. I think people expect more than is necessarily super possible. Some people would like for us to have majority non-white artists, but the community is majority white, so the math doesn’t really work here. We’ve got to do more.
In terms of audience, have you thought about people with disabilities?
It’s a huge priority for us. The Denver building, for example, is going to be more than 90% wheelchair accessible. Almost everything is accessible in Denver. We’re keeping all-important experiences or narrative experiences accessible. There’s nothing that you can’t get to that would be an important part of the story.
We have met with a few really interesting groups that specialize in creative accessibility. We’re looking to go way beyond code requirements and make things not just accessible but enjoyable and cool and sometimes even better for someone in a wheelchair. Same for people who are blind, or deaf, or have sensory overload problems. We do some in Santa Fe, but we were so limited when we were building. We just have to make the future ones better.
How do you engage audiences?
One is choice. There are a variety of ways to experience whatever it is based on the choice of the person experiencing it. Sometimes that’s literally left or right, and other times that’s depth of experience. The other is giving people questions instead of answers, making people think instead of telling them what we think.
Can you give an example?
A lot of it is subtle. You want to guide someone to see, not wave a sign in their face. If you are designing a character who is smart, it would be silly to just give them glasses. That’s lazy.
How can we essentially take that same, world-building and expansive approach to everything? Do we put in some weird dead ends? Can we fully build out this world so that you can wander around in it and find the things that are askew? When you’re in a space that rides that line between familiar and unfamiliar and throws you all the way, one way or another, pretty frequently, you go back out into the familiar world and look at it differently. You examine your surroundings in a way that you might not have been examining them before.
The number of people who have told us, “I went home afterward and opened my silverware drawer expecting it to blow”… it just changes people’s expectations of the world around them. If you’re expecting a mundane world, you’ll get one. If you’re expecting a magical world, you’ll get one.
How would you describe your audience?
Our audience has shifted over the last year from being majority New Mexico residents to majority non-New Mexico residents, mostly because of increased tourism. People have heard about it and seek us out. People notice the kids being noisy and running around, but our audience is actually mostly adults and right now, mostly out-of-state.
But would you say it’s the Disney audience or the art audience?
It’s both. Our audience is everyone, and that’s always been the case. Other than avoiding overt pornography—because we knew children would be around and we didn’t really want it anyway—we don’t adapt our work to fit an audience. The people that now travel to see us are people traveling to go to the Grand Canyon or on spring break or going to just visit family. All types! We have a lot of people who come to Santa Fe just for Meow Wolf and that’s also all types. We have a ton of local people of all types.
Nicolas Gonda (EVP of Entertainment at Meow Wolf) was saying you have Trump supporters next to progressives.
Yeah, it’s pretty crazy sometimes. You’ll see an older, super buttoned-up couple next to a young tattooed family—and they’re both in line for the same thing.
Immerse: What do you want people to walk away with?
In a very simplistic way, I would be happy if people walk away with a sense of joy and wonder. That is sufficient, but the ideal is to walk away inspired or changed.
We didn’t know we’d be having people walk away changed. “Oh wow, I looked at things differently today.” Or preteens who say, “I realized I’m not alone… I’m weird and you guys are weird!” We’ve had super wealthy developer types tell us, “I’ve changed what I want to do with my money because of this.” We had a letter from someone who told us they had, years earlier, experienced a psychotic break and recovered but had never been able to explain it to their partner. They’d never been able to feel like it was something other people understood, or something they could even explain to anyone else. Being in the exhibit with their partner enabled them to share aspects of their experience in a way that they’d never been able to. Mental illness is something that many of us, no big surprise, have experienced. It’s obviously an aspect of our inspiration as well.
We’ve had parents tell us, “Here, I’m not just mom. I’m someone that they’re doing something cool with.” It’s incredible what people walk away with. The fact that so many people immediately get past the surface into the depths with us is why it’s worth continuing.
There’s been a lot of press about your transformation from a DIY arts collective into a big, successful company—and the tension that can potentially create. Can you talk about that tension and the balance?
We’ve always been changing really fast all of the time. We were changing every few months, every six months back when we were a DIY collective exclusively as well. But now there are a lot more people who are being affected by that change. It is not that there is a before and after, really. There are a lot of before and afters. We only had our own warehouse the first two-and-a-half years of our existence. After that, we were kind of homeless and people were like, “Meow Wolf’s gone, Meow Wolf’s dead.” No, we were making shows in other spaces. We were traveling the country.
We’ve had a lot of phases. I think that being true to our roots is very important, but we want to do so in a way that makes things better for everyone involved. At what point is it true to our roots because it was our identity, not because it was important and good? Trying to cherry pick from DIY culture and corporate world and theme park shit and art world stuff, everywhere has its downfalls as well as its values. [We’re] trying to pick all the best bits and go off of what’s good, not off of what’s anything in particular, what’s associated with your identity and essentially being this crazy Venn diagram of different industries and people and methods and letting that change.
In order to be as revolutionary as we want to be, we have to be deeply uncomfortable part of the time or we won’t push on anything. If things are fine, we’ll keep going along as long as things are fine. If things feel horrible, we’re going to push back on that really hard. There’s this intense pendulum swing. We’re not over here having already figured out how to be a perfect, progressive company. We are just a bunch of people with a lot of hopes to be very progressive and we’re going to fuck it up.
What are new ways you think art institutions might present immersive experiences to engage audiences?
Part of it is just bigger tools, more expanded tools. When someone’s immersed in something, you have their attention.
I consulted on a museum project that was intended to convey some history. The curators had a life-size model they wanted to build and some documents, dioramas, and a sound-based experience. They had a really good plan, but I pushed for them to adjust the floor plan so that it was less of an open space and, instead, encouraged visitors to physically walk around to the other side of the thing. The lighting and sound were super important. You can have a big lit room. That’s fine, but if you control the lighting and have particular spots and even add animation to the lighting to draw visitors attention as they move through, you can create whatever mood you seek to convey. Sound anchors a space. Someone recently described sound as changing the quality of the air, which I thought was beautiful. Sound is one of the most important factors in an environment because it’s something that we tend to absorb passively.
I can’t overstate the importance of designing sound. If you have things overhead, sound can help you feel like you are inside of a thing versus just looking at it. If the texture changes under your feet, it changes your sense of where you are. If you are walking on carpet, you’re not in a natural environment. But sound and floor texture can create the illusion that you are.
The other thing that I was pushing them towards was, again, choice. You don’t want a room where you send visitors to just stand and read. Make every room one you can walk through or get close to something in detail — detail is really important. If you want to have something that’s a re-creation, for the love of God, make it out of a like material! If it’s a wooden house, make it out of wood. Don’t paint a wooden house on a drywall box. The detail is the experience and there’s a smell that comes with that. Smell is really hard because there’s a lot of sensitivity involved and it’s also really hard to do well in a way that can be permanent and not obnoxious. When it can be done, it’s amazing.
Anyway, with choice: If you can, say you have the option of exploring a little re-creation of a house, or reading an in-depth essay about the house, or watching a short video that shows the house being built, or sitting back on a bench nearby and seeing the entire scene. Having different ways of engaging with it that are equally valuable for different proclivities and age ranges. That is what’s going to keep an entire family engaged in one room and the person who gets deeply engaged in one thing will become engaged in the other thing.
I had one other point. Be intentional with the choices. That’s what immersion is. All our choices are important. Everything that person is experiencing is part of the experience. Maybe that’s crowd control, maybe that’s making sure only 10 people are in the room at a given time. Maybe you can only really do that by having an arc to the sound and it makes people want to leave. I don’t know. Design is in so much more than the visual and everything visual is part of design.
This interview will appear in an issue that’s sponsored by the Knight Foundation in conjunction with a call for ideas about immersive work in museums. The people applying for this challenge are museum staff but also artists, technologists, and others.
What would be your advice for them, as they’re pitching projects or designing projects to pitch?
I’ve looked at a lot of proposals, hundreds and hundreds of proposals. Thousands, I guess. It was always really surprising when people would not propose their own work. We would invite them to propose a project because we liked their work and then they would propose something that they thought was Meow Wolf-ish. You know?
If you’re good at something, propose what you do, not what we do. You’re good at what you do. Lean into that, but be expansive. Someone who draws should propose something that involves drawing, but there needs to be something else, something special. What if they proposed that we build them a polyhedron room that they draw on every surface and the viewer can find secret messages if they look close enough and then every five minutes, a weird light turns on and the drawing changes?
You can’t really propose too much because we can always edit. Can we bring interactivity into this? Can we bring a physical aspect into this? Is part of it climb-able? Can we bring a performance aspect in? How is this time-based? How is it tactile? How is it rich essentially? How is it layered? How are you putting yourself into it? If you already do this work, why are you proposing to do it again when you could just do it? With us, you can do more, so why is that valuable to everyone?
This piece is part of an issue of Immerse sponsored by the Knight Foundation in conjunction with Knight’s call for ideas to advance immersive arts experiences. Open for applications through August 12, the call offers recipients a share of $750,000 in funding, as well as optional technical support from Microsoft. Learn more.
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