IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL MURDER A BOY BAND MEMBER.

WHY A BOY BAND?

For at least 70 years, the boy band industry has been a constant. Many things may come and go, but we can be certain that in 2050 there will still be groups of attractive young men singing and dancing their way into young women's hearts.

• Down Chevron

WHY A POLICE PROCEDURAL?

The time-honoured police procedural format offers us a cross-section of future society. As the police follow the trail from the city's criminal underbelly to the wealthy, the genre acts as a scaffolding from which to hang more complex discussions of the future.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Audiences experience the story of the police investigation as a theatre performance incorporating original music, audio design and custom-drawn animatics.

At key moments in the story, audiences make decisions regarding the future. We follow the consequences of these choices all the way to their impact on the homicide investigation in 2050.

In a nutshell, what choices could you make today that would give the police in 30 years the best chance of catching a killer?

FUTURES SCENARIOS

It's hard to think about the future. Hard enough to think about the world of next week, let alone the world in 20 or 50 years time.

For the last few decades, practitioners in the field of Future Studies have been developing methods to help us better think and plan for the future.

CrimeForce: LoveTeam examines one of those methods: the practice of creating future scenarios. These are imagined visions of how the world might look at a particular point in time.

The point of this practice is not to predict the future, but rather to help shape it in a more informed way. These scenarios aren’t meant to be accurate, or “correct”. Instead, the idea is to imagine best and worst cases, averages and extremes.

Rather than creating one single scenario, futures instead create a set of scenarios, a range of possible futures that embody the various ways our society might go.

This is what futurists call the ‘scenaric stance’ - holding multiple futures in view simultaneously. The idea is that it gives you greater emotional and intellectual rigour when considering your options in the here and now.

CrimeForce offers a hands-on introduction to the practice of creating future scenarios - an accessible toolkit for anyone seeking to grapple with questions of the future.

PROJECT HISTORY

CrimeForce: LoveTeam was researched and developed in 2016 at Melbourne University / Carlton Connect's Lab-14, with support from the City of Melbourne Creative Spaces program.

The first season of CrimeForce took place as part of Nesta's 2018 FutureFest in London.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

David Finnigan is an Australian writer and theatre artist. Working with research scientists in the UK, Australia and Sweden, he creates work exploring climate and systems science. David is a Churchill Fellow and an Australia Council Early Career Fellow.

Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based filmmaker, theatre-maker and performer, and a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts. His short films have screened at numerous festivals both locally and internationally.

Written and performed by Jordan Prosser and David Finnigan.
Original music by Nick McCorriston.
Artwork by Sacha Bryning.