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2017 • Co-Creator, Co-Director, Technical Director • Interactive Hybrid Event (London)

THE PEOPLE'S REVOLT was an interactive hybrid experience in partnership with Historic Royal Palaces that brought audiences to the Tower of London to stage a modern-day Peasants Revolt. I co-created the experience with Jon Cooper as differencEngine, where I co-led direction and concept design as well as leading technology direction.

Over the course of a week, audiences were invited to explore an alternate near-future timeline where high taxes and unstable leadership set the scene for a modern-day mirroring of Wat Tyler's 1381 Peasants' Revolt. Audiences were given a link to SIGNAL, a "dark web" website to plan the revolt, where they were given code names and information from their contact, Raven. On SIGNAL, audiences could coordinate with other members of their cell, discover documents, and learn more about the state of the world.

On the night of the show, all members of that cell received a date and time to meet up near the Tower of London. Their contact snuck them inside, where they received their mission: open the gates of the Tower and begin the revolution.

While audiences could attend the 90-minute live experience without exploring the pre-show online content, logging in got them live text updates throughout the experience from their contact and valuable information to help them on their journey. We also created check-in moments for audiences to call their contact and report back on their progress, which were then woven into the show's finale.

I led the technical design and implementation for THE PEOPLE'S REVOLT, creating the online portal as well as a custom Django interface for our live directors that allowed them to trigger any of the show's multiple endings (and send the appropriate post-show content to the audience's online portal). We also used web portals during the show to pose challenges to the audience, including a moment during the finale to create a light signal that synced with a similar light in a London city building across town.

For the show's ending, we fused live audience audio from the experience as well as pulling live audio from Radio 4 (and, in the show's second iteration, video from the channel Sky) and "hacking in" to the networks with the show's closing content.