Cover Image: Members of PVI Collective, whose participatory works have challenged power structures and activated audiences for nearly three decades. Photo supplied.

If anyone knows about the power of positive thinking, it is Kelli McCluskey, Steve Bull and their fellow artists in Perth’s tactical media art group PVI Collective.

For nearly 30 years, McCluskey, Bull and an evolving squad of PVI collaborators have maintained their faith in art as a tool for driving change. Their subversive, games-based works have engaged audiences in ever-resourceful creative acts of demonstrative activism across WA, Australia and around the world.

PVI have demonstrated extraordinary resilience since forming in 1998. Funding battles, obstructive officialdom, policy indifference, personal exhaustion and other myriad challenges have not derailed their pursuit of saving the world through creative play and head-turning interventions in the public domain.

Working at the forefront of the digital and performance art worlds, PVI works Reform, Social Licence Watchdogs, Deviator, Resist, Blackmarket and other playful provocations have challenged audiences and public authorities from Northbridge and Albany to as far afield as Jakarta, Glasgow, Malmo and Taipei.

Their latest work, a 2026 Perth Festival commission called The Booster Protocol, has been just about the toughest one to undertake so far, McCluskey says, because of the seemingly insurmountable problems of today’s world.

Any sense of optimism or hope is under serious threat when each new day brings another outrageous example of untrammelled corruption, abuse of power, environmental vandalism or social and economic injustice. It is little wonder people are reeling from it all, overwhelmed by doom-laden apathy and helpless.

For The Booster Protocol, McCluskey and co are drawing on historic examples of people power to recharge participants’ emotional batteries and inspire hopeful acts of change-making in the present day. 

The Booster Protocol invites audiences onto the streets of Perth for an immersive part-performance, part role-playing experience in which they choose their own tasks guided by historic activist voices from around the world. 

McCluskey references the “radical hope” espoused by writers such as Jonathan Lear and Rebecca Solnit, who project hope not as naive optimism, but as a springboard for action to shape an as-yet unwritten future. 

Solnit writes: “Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action.”

The Booster Protocol is designed as a training app for players to complete three levels to build up their hope battery, achieve a greater sense of the place in which they live and a greater capacity to affect change in their community. In short, it encourages people to go from doomscrolling to hope-rolling.

“It leans into this idea that hope is a muscle and is something that we need to activate and strengthen,” McCluskey says. 

“The actual task itself is premised on the idea that throughout history there have been social justice movements and tipping points that have rippled throughout time to provide a sense of hope and optimism.”

Some inspiring examples are the early-1900s UK Suffragette Movement, the 1970s Chipko tree-hugging campaign in India – led by women to protect a Himalayan forest –and the 1990 Capitol Crawl, in which dozens of people left their wheelchairs and mobility devices to crawl up the 83 steps of Capitol Hill in support of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

PVI have collaborated with those activists or their descendants, such as the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, Dr Helen Pankhurst, and disability activist Jennifer Keelan Chaffins, who was just eight years old when she played a leading role in the Capitol Crawl. 

“And so we hear from Jennifer about what that experience was like on that day,” McCluskey says. “The invitation to audiences is to hear from these people and to undertake an action in the present in solidarity with them. You don’t come to see or watch or listen – you come to do.”

For The Booster Protocol, McCluskey, Bull and PVI members Rachel Arianne Ogle and Chris McCormick are working with games consultant Harry Lee (Play Reactive), First Nations indigenous collaborator consultant Fred Leone and access consultants Fayen d’Evie and Jon Thjia of AccessLab.

Perth Festival Artistic Director Anna Reece, who commissioned this world-premiere work, calls PVI the “tech-savvy troublemakers of Australian art, playful activists and fearless experimenters who make us see the world differently. 

“With The Booster Protocol, they invite us to plug in and participate in a thought-provoking exploration of how we might lift our hope levels (individually and collectively) in challenging times,” Reece says.

Reflecting on 28 years of creating PVI’s acts of intervention to inspire change, McCluskey concedes it’s been hard at times to keep her own “radical hope” battery charged up.

“It does feel as though this has been one of the hardest works to make because of the state of things,” she says. “I guess the flip side of that coin is the optimism that we know PVI still have more work to make. We’ve been around long enough to be able to back ourselves, know who we are and what we’re about. We have so many ideas to share that I feel like there is just this fire to just keep going. 

“Maybe that’s the hope – that there’s more work to make.”

The Booster Protocol runs 24 – 28 February at Booster HQ, Boorloo/Perth CBD. Details and bookings at perthfestival.com.au