Meow Wolf continues to get right what other ambitious endeavors ultimately couldn’t sustain in transporting people to other worlds. With three locations currently in operation, the immersive art collective is making way for more portals which depict a sort of future nostalgia of hope we can only work to make real in our multiverse.
Many may be confused as to what a Meow Wolf is. Is it an art museum? A theme park? A scary sci-fi escape room? A content creation pop-up? No, but it does have elements of all of the above. It’s a themed and interactive walkthrough that taps into the id and unlocks something deep within anyone who visits. What exactly that is, really depends on you. It’s abstract, with fantastical artistic environments filled with layered messages that aren’t exactly photo or video-friendly, but can be if you get creative! It’s perpetual perplexing chaos that quietly sneaks into your mind and makes you feel alive. It’s hard to describe and the sort of place I always find myself telling folks, “Add it to your to-do list and just go see for yourself,” if they happen to be visiting Sante Fe, Denver, or Las Vegas.
io9 recently attended NextStage 2023 to take part in a keynote from Meow Wolf creatives Director of Exhibition Narrative Joanna Garner and Senior Vice President of Emerging Media James Stevenson to find out more about how they do it—and what their plan is for the future of interactive participatory entertainment.
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Meow Wolf is an arts entertainment company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico dedicated to creating immersive experiences that transport audiences of any age into “fantastic realms of story and exploration,” according to Joanna Garner, who talked about how the former hole-in-the-wall operation is now punching holes into the multiverse nationwide with the help of a certain Game of Thrones writer. “Meow Wolf started out as a collective of artists really making art out of trash, which just goes to show you that you really can make any reality you want. The artists of Meow Wolf, they got George R.R. Martin [of] Game of Thrones to buy this old bowling alley and make it a permanent home, which is called the House of Eternal Return. Our mission is to inspire creativity in people’s lives through art, exploration, and play so that imagination will transform our worlds.”
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A new location will be here soon. The grand opening for Meow Wolf in Texas was recently announced for July 14. “We are about to open our fourth permanent exhibition this July in Grapevine, Texas, which is near Dallas and is called the Real Unreal. And we’re not allowed to tell you anything about this story, but it is a real testament to the way we work in terms of collaboration with about 30 artists from North Texas all involved. And I can say that the Real Unreal and the exhibition that we just broke ground on in Houston [are aiming to] keep Texas weird. We can,” Garner assured.
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James Stevenson, who recently came aboard the Meow Wolf team, added, “We’re expanding out pretty rapidly. And we are also working in a very different way with the communities and artists that we that we work with, both [within] our internal community and ourselves, but also the communities in all of the cities where we are expanding too, and setting up shop. So we’re really trying to engage artists to get much more involved in thinking very holistically about what they’re building with us.”
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Each location inhabits a familiar enough space on the outside, like Santa Fe’s original bowling alley, Denver’s transit station, or Vegas’ grocery store. For Grapevine, it’ll be a retro recreational fave. “It’s actually based in a mall just outside of Dallas,” Stevenson said. “We’re leaning into the mall itself as a sort of destination, and trying to play with this reality unreality that gets people kind of excited and and engaged.”
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Garner shares how Meow Wolf is aiming to build on what it’s done so far. “We’ve tried a lot of different things, sort of in service of figuring out how we communicate story to participants. And the question that I’m really interested in is: how do we create the circumstances for transformational experiences? Because it seems to me that we need them more than ever right now. And I think that personal transformation is the the key to how societal transformation happens.”
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Stevenson was brought on to expand on Meow Wolf’s participatory story, “pick your own adventure” tenet. “We have embedded narrative throughout all over our exhibits. So there are characters that have very rich, complicated stories, they’re very fully developed. If you explore all of our exhibitions, you’ll find journals and photographs and all kinds of things that capture this very richly told story world. We do it through design interaction, we do it through costumed characters, we do it through holograms, we have artists of all stripes who come in and do live immersive theater,” he said. “It is essentially this very collectivist approach to to world building. It’s a collective approach to art and story-making. It also fundamentally includes participants and guests into the experience of being co-creators. You see these portals in all the work that we do, right? The whole idea is to keep drawing guests and participants into the story, to let you be the agent who is exploring, what the experience is.”
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Garner took us back to the start about what the core of Meow Wolf has been since the opening of its first portal, the House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “There’s kind of some key ingredients to what makes a transformational experience. Fundamentally, we say that it’s challenging a person’s beliefs, values, assumptions in some way,” she said. “For Meow Wolf, when people venture beyond their comfort zone, we know that transformation tends to happen when you’re in a place that is a little bit unfamiliar, unknown, maybe even uncomfortable. And then it opens these new pathways of possibility for you in your mind and maybe in your body. This is key: the transformation has to come from within.”
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She continued, “And that’s annoying because as experience designers, we can’t make you have a transformational experience as much as we’d like. What I think is really interesting as a storyteller [and] writer is that stories are what stick. We tell the story of the transformational experience. I did this thing, I went here, I saw these people. I felt different when I left,” Garner explained. “What is the ‘why’ and ‘why am I here’ intellectually? ‘What is the story behind this world or experience or performance and why am I necessary here?’ This is on a base level, setting it up for the audience, and then on maybe a more metaphysical level, the idea that we would create as circumstances for people to answer this for their own life.”
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I’ll never forget my first visit. It was New Year’s Eve a few years ago, and the moment above—where I was transported into a neon aquatic forest—is seared into my brain. I experienced a wonder, a complete surrender to a suspension of disbelief that I constantly chase when going to immersive activations.
“This is what we call the accessible unknown... a threshold for people to walk through and something they understand in this reality that helps kind of frame what the experience is as you move into the unknown,” Garner explained, referring to Meow Wolf’s varying entry points. It could be a refrigerator door or fireplace, “because unknown is scary. We as experience designers, immersive makers tend to have a little more tolerance for the unknown. In general, it is scary for us to move into unknown spaces, so [we’re] helping people ease into the mystery by giving them something that they’re familiar with. So in this case, it’s a house. And then in this story, you come in and you find out that the frame of the house holds the story of a family that accidentally broke open time and space when they’re trying to bring their son back from the dead. So it’s actually a pretty, like, dark story that gives some emotional resonance there. And when their experiment backfires, their house explodes from the familiar and the safe into the unknown.”
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In Santa Fe, it’s more of an experimental experience—an evolving structure that sets up the house you initially enter. “And then there’s the charter, this ancient, multidimensional organization of order-keepers. They freeze the anomaly to prevent more disaster. The family’s gone and their dreams and fears and memories. Random thoughts manifest in physical space, connected through portals from places like their refrigerator. That’s the general story. And so it’s a it’s a forensic investigation, meaning that you, as the audience, are uncovering the story by looking at artifacts, reading things, and the deeper you go into the story, the more opportunities for connection with the space. So that’s really what the House does,” Garner explained, noting this is where “escape room” elements that don’t lead to a clear resolution creates confusion about Meow Wolf.
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As the years have gone on, Garner and the Meow Wolf team have tried to anticipate how to move audiences through that initial itch to “figure out” the mystery. “There’s no real linear path to it, but we really try to figure out ‘how do we help people get into the story while not hand-holding them?’ So there is an expectation that’s set up. And then with that, the story really only exists for the most part in the house space itself. Once you go beyond the house, it’s j Source: Gizmodo