9/11 Watch Party

Join Verdurin at the Adam Curtis Party conference in Bournemouth for the as-seen-on-TV event of the year. Twenty-five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center changed the course of history, relive the highest moment of hypernormalisation and experience again the fear, tears, and paranoia of the live news channel analysis and raw footage of the disaster. 

9/11 Watch Party reformulates the live responses of the mainstream media, twinning them with conspiratorial commentators in a polyphonic installation of sensorially overwhelming scale. By the end of the evening, you will have been taken in by the ineluctable seductive power of conspiracy theories popularised by “truthers” on social media and inspired to rebuild New York City’s skyline by artistic responses commissioned by the Port Authority. 

Were the attacks of 9/11 “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”, as the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen put it? If so, what part does art play in memorialising, investigating, theorising, or distorting them? How do the artefacts produced by artists and amateurs measure up to the experience of seeing the attacks on cathode ray televisions screens in 2001?

Note: attendees will be required to surrender their mobile phones for the duration of the event.

This staging is part of the Adam Curtis Party Conference taking place in Bournemouth on 12 September. 9/11 Watch Party was originally presented in London in 2024. The programme was organised with Ed McKeon and produced by James Youarn.