After countless successes at international festivals and events, CONSENSUS GENTIUM is back, and this time it directly addresses the audience that needs a work such as this the most, namely the more mainstream and younger audience that is often cut off from such discourses.
Already last year, we shared with you our interview with the creator of CONSENSUS GENTIUM, Karen Palmer who, supported by an excellent team, gave life to a piece where agency is the focus and that has a precise goal: to democratize today’s technologies and the art that portrays them, so as to involve everyone in the debate around issues that are fundamental in today’s society.
When, in the past few days, we were informed of the new distribution initiative behind CONSENSUS GENTIUM, our enthusiasm immediately skyrocketed. Not only will the broader public finally be able to enjoy the story and world of CONSENSUS GENTIUM. Even those who are normally cut off from these topics will finally be able to participate: young people, minorities, all those who live far from the big centers and who rarely have the opportunity to see our immersive world connect with the world they occupy.
The tour of the experience in eleven shopping centres, mainly in the north of England and the Midlands, will bring this immersive work directly to the users, thus reversing a more usual distribution process that requires users to find the experience.
We caught up with Crossover Labs‘ Tom Millen and Karen Palmer to ask them directly about this initiative.

Extending art and technology beyond privileged spaces: on the democratisation of culture and knowledge
KAREN PALMER – CONSENSUS GENTIUM is a project I started working on many years ago, based on the idea of democratising AI and democratising the arts.
When my RIOT prototype was honoured as part of the Digital Dozen Break Throughs in Storytelling in 2017, someone in the audience noticed how artworks like this may be good but still occupy privileged spaces. I couldn’t disagree: all these festivals and conferences are great to attend, I love them so much, but it is to ordinary people that I have to bring this message. Even then I wanted to find a way to transform this art form from a privileged and inaccessible medium to something that could speak to a more mainstream audience, and in particular to an audience made up by the working class, minorities, people of colour, women… because these are the communities that will be affected the most by these issues, especially in terms of biases in AI.
Already when I was a residence artist at ThoughtWorks Arts, the topic of AI, surveillance, and biases was the focus of my research. Covid was almost a slap in the face, to me. It made me reflect on how the new world order required conformity or inspired dissidence in reference to the concept of limited mobility, autonomy and personal agency.
So, when I developed the concept of CONSENSUS GENTIUM and the accompanying technology in 2020, all of these thoughts were at the core of my thinking and all of them were heavily impacting ordinary people. That’s why from the very first moment I tried to find new directions for distributing this piece.
When AI became mainstream last year, it became even more urgent to do something. My work is about the social implications of these tools and the need to make sure common people are part of these conversations as well. For all these reasons, we decided to embark on this tour of shopping centres.
TOM MILLEN – CONSENSUS GENTIUM has toured many different events, but always in industry spaces and privileged venues, as is often the case with works like this.
As Karen was saying earlier, this is not the final target audience for her work. Her intended audience are the people who have the most to lose from the increased use of AI and decision-making by authorities, as well as surveillance and smart devices, and these are usually people from difficult socio-economic backgrounds: minorities, women, even young people.

So after winning the award at South by Southwest in 2023, we started thinking about how to get this product to that specific audience and also how to distribute it on the App Store. At Southwest CONSENSUS GENTIUM looked like a finished piece, but in reality it was a very high-level prototype and there were some things that needed to be changed in order to finalise it.
So we started discussing it with a colleague, Dr Rob Eagle. Rob is a researcher from the UK who was embedded in a young, diverse community in Bradford for a year and was doing research for the BFI in the UK, looking at young people’s screen habits on their smart devices and trying to figure out how we could access them through art and culture.
We soon realised that it was not possible to reach these people through cultural venues such as theatres, art galleries and centres in the UK, because these are places that have a barrier of access for the audience we are trying to reach. It was there, from that conversation, that an idea was born – to go on tour to shopping centres, which seemed to us the spaces that these people already frequented, the spaces where we could really intercept them.
We decided then to look beyond the big metropolitan centres in England and turn to the cities that don’t usually have any kind of art and culture. The tour will therefore take place in 11 shopping centres across England, located in areas where the population is large, young and diverse. The installation will be offered free of charge, for a few days, encouraging people to participate. This will be supported by a grassroots local marketing campaign: we’re basically handing out flyers at barbershops, grocery stores, etc… We want people to be excited about what’s coming to town, because that’s how word really spreads.
Discovering new forms of immersive distribution
K. P. – We love the privileged venues, mind you. SXSW, ARS Electronica, the many others we visited… As independent producers and artists, our distribution model is to go through the festival route and then to the people. It was necessary to showcase the work, to get recognition. Only after that could we show it to mainstream audiences. We couldn’t have done the opposite, taking it to the people without the exposure that these wonderful events gave us.
It’s a very specific and hopefully successful strategy that can be useful to other XR artists and communities, among which reflections on distribution and the more commercial aspects are still ongoing. People in this field are undoubtedly very good at innovation, at creating cutting-edge works, but we are still trying to figure out how to make all this work financially, and find the right business model for our needs, one that at the same time allows us to reach the people.
What we are doing with CONSENSUS GENTIUM is totally original and unique, and there are a lot of people I know, like Darren Emerson with In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, who are thinking about how to apply similar models to their works.
No one has ready answers, and Tom and I are trying to figure out how to move into this kind of international scene after the success we’ve had nationally. We want to understand how to amplify the message, take it across borders, take it to the community, but also, of course, make it work as a business. Me, Tom, Mark (a/n Mark Atkin, director of Crossover Labs) and the other team members are discovering it as we go. We’re really excited to do something innovative with distribution as well. In this regard, the support of the Arts Council and Tonya Nelson is crucial. They’re extraordinary partners.

T. M. – We will visit some of these shopping malls in person. We won’t be there every day, of course, because the tour will last more than three months, but there will always be two people from our team accompanying the installation to the various locations and they will encourage real conversations with people there. We realised that not only was it crucial to show them the experience, to discuss it with them. We also had to give them the resources to continue the reflection on their own and go deeper into the topic, so that they are better equipped to participate in this conversation. This is also part of the tour.
Impacting the story and impacting the future: the true meaning of agency
K. P. – My background is directing music videos, TV commercials, documentaries. For me it is very important that the end result is fresh and exciting, dynamic and cinematic. The story is always at the centre of what I do and the interactive element is something I developed very early on. This sort of fusion of technology, art and storytelling has been in my work since the early 2000s, because I felt the future was technology combined with film and with stories.
It is very important for me to create experiences that people want to immerse themselves in, first of all. Experiences where the substance prevails over the style.
T. M. – The style and the energy that Karen brings from her musical background, though, is something that really captures the audience and in particular the young audience, in a way that other things do not. There are other projects out there about AI and AI bias, but they often take a more journalistic, or documentary perspective, which is obviously fine on a certain level. But if you’re going to attract people, you have to bring different perspectives and approaches. And, first of all, you have to get people to look at something in order to hit them with the issues.
K. P. – As you know, CONSENSUS GENTIUM builds on an interdisciplinary perspective, and is based on the work of neuroscientists and behavioural psychologists. Its central aim is to activate agency in participants. To do this, I put them at the centre of the story and the narrative branches out according to facial detection and their gaze. I want them to understand that they are part of this story, in the same way I want them to understand that they are part of the future. What they do in the film will have an impact on the film, but what they do in this world will have an impact on the world.

My slogan, after all, is that the future is not something that happens to us, but something we create together. This is what I want the user to feel when they leave the experience: maybe they end up with a different narrative from their friend, maybe they change theirs day after day, because sometimes they feel more compliant and other times more dissident. People may feel differently day by day as they go through life, and what is important is to be aware that these conscious and subconscious decisions everyone makes throughout their lives influence the bigger outcome.
From this point of view, CONSENSUS GENTIUM is a kind of mosaic of meanings.
Creating a map for future distribution
T. M. – I think the first challenge, probably the biggest, is to get out of the places that traditionally host similar experiences to confront new spaces and new interlocutors. Of course, in shopping centres spaces are often rented by companies that want, for example, to present new telephone products. That means many of the centres we approached were really good and accommodating. Initial communication with them, though, was not always so easy, and there were many locations we could not come to an agreement with for exactly this reason.
What I hope we will get, at the end of this tour, are 11 shopping centres scattered around England that will now be open to present this kind of work. Basically a map for other touring works, whether they are ours or others’. This is probably the most important result this form of distribution could have.
However, it’s important to bear in mind that it is not necessarily cheap to do things this way. Personnel costs are very high, because we have two staff members who are constantly travelling around the UK. Then, when you approach non-traditional communities for this kind of thing, the different approaches to marketing and communication that you have to adopt also involve additional resources related to the public relations aspect. For example, for us, alongside the basic marketing I mentioned earlier, we had to shoot promotional videos, with all the requirements necessary to go viral.
Facilitating dialogue with venues to facilitate the audience experience
K. P. – There are four main perspectives in the work, the four main figures: the government, the technology, the activist, the influencer. I want to bring these entities to life through social media as if they were real. I want people to be really confused, to ask themselves “is this really happening or is this a movie?”. I feel that the world presented in CONSENSUS GENTIUM is very close to us, after all, and shows something very plausible. With these characters I am mixing fact and fiction, and social media is the perfect platform for this. There are going to be teasers to attract people and capture their interest.

T. M. – Also, this distribution operation can be replicated in other countries and malls, because the installation itself is designed in such a way that it is really easy to propose it. No special tools are needed to assemble and disassemble the set and everything works with a single power drop.
For many of these locations, the XR could potentially be complicated to set up. What we try to do is minimise organisational stress for these venues by offering them something that has very little impact on their daily activities. This also makes it possible for us to maximise the time we dedicate to the public.
An additional benefit we offer is that the experience runs on an iPhone and it is not uncommon for people to interact with an iPhone in this kind of mall situation, where mobile companies often have booths to present their devices. So there is an element of familiarity that helps draw people in. It’s not as if this strange, foreign world has landed in the middle of your mall in the form of a black box we try to lure you in.
I think this is also a very important design choice. In many exhibitions that are open to the public there is a kind of curtained box where people are encouraged to enter (perhaps to try an LBE). This, to me, is a real access barrier. People don’t want to go in because they feel that when they are inside, they can’t leave. Our installation, instead, is centralised and people come, sit on the outside, watch it from a store. This open nature makes people feel free to leave if they don’t like it, without feeling trapped. It stirs their curiosity, rather than forcing them into something.
K. P. – This is all thanks to Tom, I must say. It comes from his experience as an international curator. When we were at SXSW, he was the one who said, “Let’s break down the walls of this installation. Let’s make it accessible, so that people can see it from every corner of the room, going in and out”. We have benefited from his experience at all the festivals we have attended, from CPH:DOX to the Sheffield Doc Fest, and that’s something I’m grateful for.
Keep up to date with the CONSENSUS GENTIUM tour and news
T. M. – The website is now available and there you can see the list of malls involved and find the link to download the experience from the App Store for free.
In the meantime, we are really looking forward to see how this experiment will go and we cannot wait to share with the community all the knowledge we gain from it. I know that distribution is a huge challenge for our industry and I think it is important that anyone who is doing something new and trying new approaches shares all they discover!
K. P. – Also, the message of my work is for young people. I always put them at the centre of the narrative experience. It made sense to leave our walls and go to them, because they are unlikely to come to spaces where you find experiences like this. I know I’m speaking their language and dealing with AI issues that they probably don’t get enough information about from most mainstream media, unless they read The Guardian or The Times. So, to me, the real question behind CONSENSUS GENTIUM and the shopping malls tour is, “Can work like this catalyse change?“. This is what I want all my projects to do, the reason why we looked at new distribution directions, the reason why I am so strongly interested in the concept of community and creating a kind of manifesto for it.
I guess we will see where these three months will take us!
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