Theatre Maker, Experience Designer & Founder - Åste Amundsen

This week I’m joined by Åste Amundsen. She is a theatre maker, experience designer and founder (and so much more).

Åste shares growing up in intentional communities and attending a Steiner School, which validated the freedom to explore things she was interested in learning.  In her early teens and after hearing the scientist, James Hansen talks about the impact of climate change, she joined an environmental group and went to protest, in what was then Soviet Russia, scaling factories to hang banners by way of eco sabotage.

She describes 'career' as being foreign to her although she had an awareness at a young age; 'that you can’t tell people what to do or think’ combined with the profound understanding that we have a very short time on this earth to make impactful social change. This landed her in theatre. She shares how she saw theatre's potential to move people to act, to change, to conceive other ways in which the world could be, through transporting audiences into spaces that illuminated other pathways of thinking.

Åste has formed a number of immersive theatre and performances groups and arrived at the idea of developing performance participation through wearable tech in 2008. She has also developed a series of systems for audience data harvesting, that creates the potential for personalised audience interaction in real-time. She breaks down in detail how data can be used in a way to entertain and educate, as opposed to the current mainstream focus, using it to 'sell'.

She also discusses her current role as Immersion Fellow at the South-West Creative Technology Network and founding Computer-Aided Theatre (C.A.T), where she is focusing on developing a set of commercially available tools to address the limitations and challenges facing immersive event producers.

Åste is incredibly thoughtful, intentional and driven and completely opened my mind to so much I had not considered, specifically around the use of personal data. 

If you would like to find out more about Åste you can do so on her website:  asteamundsen.com

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