Interactive live painting: an artistic intervention for a fully engaged audience at your next event
As a live illustrator, I attended a lot of events in 2024, and one this that emerged is this: people want to experience humanity and connection.
Somehow in our AI-infused world, we appreciate things done by humans even more, who knew!
Artistic interventions at events
Hand-painted interactive mural at the Gender Equality Forum
This came into full focus at the Gender Equality Forum last year where several artists were invited to offer “artistic interventions” for the audience. One intervention was done by two artists who created slam poetry right on the spot, based on what they heard at the conference. It was pretty cool to hear their rhythmic verse that they created just moments before.
The other intervention was me, creating an interactive live painting on a large canvas. (This was an adaptation of my collaborative mural work, you can read about that here.)
Let’s make it interactive!
Because I’m a huge fan of audience participation, the attendees were encouraged right from the start to come over and share their ideas with me. The key question was simple: What is resonating with you today, what is something that should be on the mural? Based on what they said, I started to paint, and the result was a large-scale visual representation of what the audience thought and felt about the subject of gender equality on that day.
4 things that made this art intervention a success:
1 - Prime spot for the canvas
The canvas was close to the podium with the speakers, it was beautifully lit, and people came over throughout the day to chat and see the progress of the painting.
2 - Continued reminders from the moderators
The moderators continued to remind the attendees that they can participate in the mural and even showed the progress on the video, so the live painting activity was really top of mind throughout the day.
3 - An engaged audience
Participants were enthusiastic and wanted to have their say. It was clear that they were excited about the topic and wanted the mural to be as comprehensive as possible.
4 - Murals are visual, and that’s exciting to people
The visual nature of the mural made it easy to interact with. It showed participants what the group was thinking and motivated them to add another aspect, and another, and so on.
There were a lot more thoughts among the group that I couldn’t explore because I ran out of time, who new that Hand-drawn art can be so slow? But I still feel that I captured the essential ideas and both the audience and the client was very happy about the result.
If you are interested in other mural painting projects, here are a two post that you might find valuable:
The story of how a team offsite painting activity turned into a large-scale office mural and a team in Copenhagen turned their office wall into a beautiful visual memento of their special powers.