Cover Image: The Booster Protocol starts at Booster Travel. Photo: Stephen Bevis

The Booster Protocol – by PVI Collective
Streets of Boorloo/Perth CBD, Perth Festival
Wednesday, 26th February

I’m painting symbols of resistance on the paving outside the David Malcolm Justice Centre at night as a 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre survivor speaks into my ear.

It’s an arresting first task – to say the least – in my app-guided adventure through the streets of the Perth CBD as part of The Booster Protocol, a consummate demonstration of the importance of collective action.

The voice is that of acclaimed Chinese Australian artist and pro-democracy activist Guo Jian, whose personal story and graffiti instructions I follow as people casualty walk on by. Thankfully, my defacement of public property is short-lived as my brush is dipped only in water, which darkens the pavement and then fades away.

But the point is made. Marking out this ephemeral emblem of freedom – accompanied by a key participant in that student-led movement – is a poetic and affecting immersion into a seismic moment in protest history.

Our journey begins at Booster Travel, a low-budget agency in Barrack Street seemingly stuck in a mid-1980s time warp with its retro furniture, cheesy travel posters and old Bankcard stickers in the front window. This is a cool set-up for a trip backwards and forwards in time by way of a series of game-based tasks at various easily accessible locations.

Guo Jian is one of a dozen activists who have collaborated with PVI Collective to make The Booster Protocol such a deeply considered and stunningly executed exploration of the capacity for “ordinary” people to mobilise and achieve profound change.

We are each given a phone loaded with the self-guiding Booster app and a lightweight audio collar to listen clearly while still safely engaging with the city around us over the next 80 minutes.

In small groups at a time, we undertake a short and well-explained induction that includes an assessment of our hope energy levels before setting out individually  to explore a menu of hope-building encounters with leading lights of the past century and some very creatively imagined voices from the future. Sadly, my starting hope-battery level was registered as “desperate”. It was a low base from which to progress.

But the only way was up. After my inspiring exercise with Guo Jian, my battery increased to “dim” on the very user-friendly Booster app. After selecting a deep listening experience with Gary Foley, an activist behind the 1972 founding of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, it progressed to “flickering” and then on to “growing” after a scarily convincing conversation with a future data-mining activist called Mika from 2050.

It tipped over to “kindling” after a sew-and-tell moment with Claudia Coca from Peru’s 2001 pro-democracy Lava la bandera, coser la bandera (Wash the flag, sew the flag) movement and then up to “strong” after some breathing exercises with 2099 clean-air campaigner Aunty B.

As PVI note in their event page, The Booster Protocol honours the trailblazers that came before and imagines those that are still to come.

Perth’s remarkable PVI Collective has been pushing technical, artistic and sociopolitical boundaries for nearly three decades and it is great to see them back in Perth Festival for the first time since their 2016 street escapade Blackmarket.

The Booster Protocol is a great example of Perth Festival’s push to take more adventurous programming into unusual places outside traditional venues. Rarely has it been done with more focused and comprehensive application of technical expertise, artistic care and consultative rigour.

Participants get to see parts of the city in a different light and through the lens of possibility for taking action to improve the state of the world, beginning in our own backyard. We are reminded that the world is made up of a multitude of backyards in which individuals can join up to make a difference that can radiate out globally.

At the very least, we can find optimism in the mere fact that artists like PVI are fighting the good fight here in Perth, and that itself is reason to look hopefully to the future.

The Booster Protocol ran at Perth Festival from February 25-28