Risk, Creativity, and Collaboration in Public Art with Emily O’Brien

In this podcast you will learn how early risk planning can help you protect the creative objective, work through uncertainty, and deliver ambitious media art in public spaces.

Emily O’Brien provides risk, safety, and crowd management services for cultural organisations, festivals, and arts projects. Before specialising in these areas, she worked for around 20 years as a production manager across arts festivals, contemporary dance, theatre, and unconventional creative projects.

In this conversation, Emily explains why she believes risk management should begin with the first project discussions rather than becoming a document produced shortly before opening. She introduces structured what-if meetings as a way to identify unknowns, roadblocks, and resource requirements while there is still time to respond.

The conversation also examines the specific conditions of media art in public spaces. Audience dwell, pedestrian movement, long operating periods, power, neighbours, and unexpected increases in visitation can all affect how an artwork operates. Emily explains why an installation that becomes popular through social media may need to respond to audience patterns very different from those originally expected.

Drawing on projects including Melbourne's Flash Forward and festival installations involving fire, Emily discusses how artists, engineers, councils, and production teams can find practicable solutions together. Rather than treating risk as a reason to remove difficult elements, she argues that early collaboration can help protect both audiences and the creative intention.

 

Listen to this podcast to learn about:

• How to introduce risk planning during the earliest stages of creative development.
• Why public-space media art requires attention to audience dwell, pedestrian movement, and changing visitation.
• How artists, engineers, and other stakeholders can develop risk controls without losing the central creative objective.

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Chapters

• (00:02:13) Defining risk as uncertainty around project objectives
• (00:04:34) Treating the creative objective as part of risk planning
• (00:07:41) Starting with a structured what-if meeting
• (00:10:00) Why risk needs to be contextualised for every project
• (00:10:51) Balancing time, people, and money
• (00:12:51) Risk and audience dwell in public media art
• (00:17:46) How social media can change visitation
• (00:18:44) Using risk planning during Melbourne's Flash Forward project
• (00:22:40) Bringing different stakeholders into the process
• (00:26:57) Understanding actual and perceived risks around fire
• (00:28:55) Designing safety controls into the audience experience
• (00:31:51) Psychological hazards and changing safety practice
• (00:34:06) Using AI alongside standards and professional judgement
• (00:35:32) Using risk to build stakeholder support

About Emily O’Brien

Emily O’Brien is a risk, safety, and crowd management specialist working with cultural organisations, festivals, and arts projects. She previously spent around 20 years working as a production manager across arts festivals, contemporary dance, and theatre, including projects that required unconventional approaches to production.

As her practice shifted towards risk and safety, Emily completed a master's degree in crowd science and risk analysis through Manchester Metropolitan University. Her experience includes public-realm projects and festivals such as Flash Forward, Dark Mofo, Rising and Mona Foma.

Her work focuses on integrating risk thinking into project development, helping creative teams address uncertainty, crowd behaviour, safety, resourcing, and compliance while maintaining the central creative objectives of a project.

Takeaways from this interview with Emily O’Brien

Risk starts with uncertainty

“Fundamentally, risk for me is the impact of uncertainty on objectives.”

Emily describes risk in terms of uncertainties that may affect a project's objectives. This creates a broader framework than simply listing hazards and allows creative outcomes to be considered alongside safety and operational requirements.

Starting early

“For me, the most valuable time to start a risk assessment and analysis process is at the very beginning.”

Early risk conversations give teams time to change budgets, designs, staffing, and technical approaches. Leaving assessment until shortly before delivery can mean identifying useful controls when there are no longer enough resources to implement them.

Structured what-if planning

“What don't we know? What are the biggest unknowns at the moment with the project? ”

Emily recommends using a structured what-if meeting at the beginning of a project. A whiteboard discussion can expose uncertainties around funding, stakeholders, venues, and delivery before those uncertainties develop into major constraints.

The creative objective

“One of the biggest risks is failing to achieve the creative objective.”

Reducing every possible uncertainty is not necessarily the goal. Emily argues that successful risk planning also considers what must remain intact for the work to achieve its intended creative outcome.

Working in public space

“Something that is risky in one project won't be risky in another.”

For media artists, each site brings a different combination of audience movement, infrastructure, neighbours, and operating conditions. Emily stresses the importance of understanding the context rather than relying on generic risk statements.

Changing audience patterns

“It's really difficult to predict what that visitation might be when all of a sudden something blows up on social media.”

An artwork can unexpectedly become a destination after appearing on Instagram or TikTok. Changes in visitation can affect footpaths, traffic, and the surrounding site, making audience behaviour an important part of planning media art in public places.

Designing controls into the project

“There's always a way to deliver on things generally, unless it's a completely insane idea, you can find a way to get it done.”

Emily describes design and engineering solutions that reduce hazards while retaining the intended experience. Rather than automatically fencing off or removing an element, early design conversations can produce controls that work with the artwork.

Collaboration

“It's having the different viewpoints that makes the risk process such an effective one.”

Engineers, artists, councils and production teams each understand different parts of a project. Their perspectives can help remove uncertainty and produce practical controls when those conversations happen early enough.

Advice

“The more they understand what you're trying to do, the more they'll get on board.”

Emily encourages artists to use risk planning as a communication tool. Explaining creative intentions, uncertainties and required controls can help external stakeholders understand the work and participate in finding ways to deliver it.

Links from the podcast with Emily O’Brien

• Visit Emily O’Brien's consultancy website
• Learn more about Melbourne's Flash Forward program
• Visit the Dark Mofo website
• Visit the Rising website
• Learn more about PAC Australia
• Learn more about Creative Workplaces

Edited transcripts from this interview with Emily O’Brien

How do you manage risk in a public art installation?

Robin: What’s your role? What do you do?

Emily O’Brien: I run a consultancy providing risk, safety, and crowd management services for a range of cultural organisations, festivals, and arts organisations, mainly focused on risk management, safety, and crowd management.

Robin: With the work that you’re doing, what does risk mean to you?

Emily O’Brien: That’s a really interesting question. Fundamentally, risk for me is the impact of uncertainty on objectives, and that is the actual definition of risk in the Australian Standard as well.

A lot of the time, when we speak about creative projects and refer to them as risky, we’re using that term in a really positive way. When we talk about risky, exciting artworks, we know those artists are swinging for the moon and doing something really interesting, exciting, and groundbreaking.

But when we talk about risk as a [00:01:00] process, it tends to be a very frustrating tick-box exercise. So I really try in my practice to bridge those two things and enable there to be a process and a system that allows really interesting art to happen.

Robin: So it’s almost like the risk comes from something that isn’t firm—something unknown.

Quite often I get to a stage of a project, maybe 50% in, and think, “I’ve got a deadline. I need to get this out the door. What don’t I know before this needs to be finished?” I don’t actually think about those things as risks. I think about them as unknowns.

Emily O’Brien: Yeah, and I think that’s where everyone gets into the weeds with risk assessment and risk management. Everyone is so focused on a document that they don’t consider all [00:02:00] the things that are changing, dynamic, complex, or rare as factors that can really influence the capacity to deliver a project and achieve those objectives.

A lot of the time, I’m trying to undo people’s perceptions of what the risk process is so that it can be more deeply embedded in their own practice.

It’s something that starts at the very beginning, with the kernel of an idea. You take all the things that might roadblock or challenge the delivery of the project and the achievement of the best possible outcome, and make that the fundamental bedrock of the risk assessment process.

Because it really comes down to how you resource and prioritise your resources, making sure that the greatest challenges have the greatest amount of resourcing applied to them.

Robin: That’s how I think about it as well: “Okay, this is highly likely to go wrong. This is the one we need to try to address where possible.”

Emily O’Brien: Correct. And a lot of the time, one of the biggest risks is failing to achieve the creative objective. That actually requires a [00:03:00] large amount of resourcing when you’re deciding where your money, time, and people are going to be best utilised.

Having a way to embed the delivery of that creative objective in your risk assessment can also help external stakeholders understand what you’re trying to achieve, how they can help you get there, and how they can help remove those roadblocks.

Because a lot of the time we’ve got time and we’ve got people, but we usually don’t have enough money. So the more stakeholders can come to the party, the more likely it is that you’ll get the best outcome.

Robin: I was thinking about this in terms of a helicopter trip into the southwest to do a video shoot for the day job. I was given a 60-page risk assessment and told I had to read it all.

Then I got into it and thought, “Oh, actually, I now know how I need to behave. I know what I need to bring, what I’m responsible for, and what will happen.” It was interesting [00:04:00] because it took away all those uncertainties—to use that word again.

Emily O’Brien: I think a good risk assessment will hopefully do that. It will provide you with a framework and really clear guidance on how to mitigate the risk and get closer to achieving all the things you’re trying to do with a particular project.

It can be complex because safety clutter is real. Obviously, Australia’s compliance culture, our legislative structures, and the way people operate here can create this mentality of trying to remove as much risk as possible, which often isn’t practical, particularly in creative enterprise.

So it’s about trying to balance having documentation and systems that are compliant and can be easily read and understood by a wide range of people—particularly if they don’t know much about the project, the systems, or the technology you’re using.

It’s about balancing those things: not having everybody read 100-page documents all the time, but still creating things that [00:05:00] ensure we’re compliant with the law.

When should you start a risk assessment for a creative project?

Robin: So, moving away from the bureaucratic side of it: if it’s a collaborative piece or a piece of theatre, there’s normally some kind of workshopping stage. Is that where you’re thinking, “Okay, there may be three options. Let’s think about what might go wrong with each one”? Is that the sort of really early intervention you’re talking about?

Emily O’Brien: Absolutely. I very frequently get called a month out from an event and people say, “Can you write a risk assessment?” And I’m like, “Well, I can meet your tick-box requirement, but what’s the point?” You’ve already allocated all your resources. You’ve already come up with your plans and structures.

For me, the most valuable time to commence a risk assessment and analysis process is at the very beginning.

What is a structured what-if (SWIFT) risk assessment?

What I really encourage my creative clients to do is have [00:06:00] what we call a SWIFT, or structured what-if meeting—a whiteboard meeting at the very beginning of the process where you throw everything up on the board and say, “Okay, this is what we’re trying to do. Here are some of the parameters around the project. Here are some of the key details. What are we going to do? What’s the project going to be? Who do we need to deliver it? What do we think is going to be tricky? What don’t we know? What are the biggest unknowns at the moment?”

It might be funding. It might be stakeholders. It might be a delivery venue. That’s the point where you can start to tease out the threads: What are the roadblocks? What are the challenges? What is the key thing we’re trying to do? Let’s get everyone on the same page about that.

To me, that is almost more important than the final risk assessment document. Because if it’s embedded in the process—if it’s something people are talking about and thinking about—it gets factored into the resourcing.

So much of the time, I write a risk assessment and send it to people because they’ve asked for it a month out from their event, and they say, “Oh, we can’t afford this. We can’t afford that. We don’t have people to do this. Our supplier [00:07:00] doesn’t have that capacity.”

And I’m like, “Well, those are the mitigations. You needed to be thinking about this six months ago.”

A month out is too late. We can remove them, but it means your residual risk is higher. You’re not reducing as much of the risk as you could have if you’d looked at this at the beginning.

Robin: I really like the if-then framework. I’ve done risky things that could go wrong and, rather than even calling them risk plans, it’s simply: “If such-and-such happens, this is the response. This is what’s going to happen.” It makes people feel a lot steadier and more grounded.

Do you ever leave that kind of if-then thinking in the documentation?

Emily O’Brien: Yes, but it tends to be more on the safety side than the risk side, because for us that’s more about responding to a situation that happens, whereas risk is really about planning for an outcome.

At that initial phase, when we do a SWIFT meeting [00:08:00] and talk about what those threads of risk might be, the most important thing is to contextualise them.

Something that is risky in one project won’t necessarily be risky in another. You can take all the known risks about a particular project to a different venue and suddenly there’s a whole series of unknowns that come with that.

So being able to contextualise risk in relation to the specifics and parameters of a project is really key.

I read a lot of risk assessments that don’t contextualise the risks at all. They’ll have things like “performing at height.” But unless I know what they’re doing, how do I know if the controls are going to be effective? How do I know if they’ve sufficiently mitigated the risk?

For me, context is king. Having the capacity to look at all of those factors, with everyone talking and thinking about them throughout the whole process, is the most valuable way to get the most bang for your buck out of the risk process.

Robin: Something else that’s interesting is funding and budgets. Do you find that if risk is addressed earlier, there can sometimes be easier ways of solving problems than simply spending money?

Emily O’Brien: One hundred percent. I often talk about the resource triangle: time, people, and money. When you’ve got two of the three, you’re usually in a pretty good space.

You might not have a lot of money, but if you’ve got a lot of time and a lot of people, you can find solutions. If you’ve got tons of money and tons of time, but not a lot of people, that gives you other capacities as well.

One of the three, no matter how much you’ve got of it, is not enough.

There were definitely moments working with various clients that had very good resourcing and almost unlimited budgets—I won’t name names—and they would think they could just throw money at the problem. And I’m like, “Well, that’s great, but it’s tomorrow. We’ve got no people to deliver it. It doesn’t matter how much money you have; we can’t get this across the line.”

If people begin talking about those challenges and roadblocks relative to the objectives and what they’re attempting to achieve really early in the process, you can look at how best to use those [00:10:00] resources—how you can massage those three dollars you’ve got in funding, because let’s face it, nobody ever has enough funding—and make sure they’re going in the right direction.

It also means you don’t go too far down the track of contracting artists and staff, engaging suppliers, and putting yourself in a position to do something before realising you don’t actually have the money, time, or people to sufficiently mitigate the risk.

Otherwise, you have to go backwards, undo contracts, and unproduce elements of what you intended to do because you haven’t factored in those key mitigations.

Often, for me, it’s things like people not realising there’s a particular permitting process, or that they’re obligated to have a certain number of particular personnel for something they’re trying to do.

Then suddenly they’re looking at thousands of dollars of mitigations. They’ve already put it in the program, publicised it, sold tickets, and now they’ve got the really unenviable task of trying to [00:11:00] work out whether they go into deficit to deliver those mitigations or remove the element from the program.

That’s so easily avoidable when it’s addressed really early.

How do you manage crowds and pedestrian flow around public art installations?

Robin: From a safety perspective, what’s different about media art in public places compared with other kinds of work?

Emily O’Brien: Often it’s the duration of the installation and the duration of the experience.

The integration of technology into media art means that, particularly when you’re working in the public realm, you’ve got equipment that might need to operate for a long period of time. The hope is that it’s quite light-touch and doesn’t have too much impact on surrounding stakeholders, neighbours, residents, or businesses.

You’re looking at things like visitation, foot traffic, and dwell, particularly in the public realm.

For example, if you’ve got an installation work—I’m thinking of a beautiful piece we did [00:12:00] as part of Flash Forward by an artist named Yandell, which had a Doomsday Clock as part of the installation.

After a period of time, there was originally a projection, and the projection was taken away, but the Doomsday Clock remained. I kept seeing it pop up on Reddit for literally years afterwards, with people going, “What’s this clock about?”

It was in a location where, thankfully, you could step off the main little street—I think it was off Little Bourke Street from memory, Little Bourke or Little Lonsdale—and easily see it.

But often, if a piece of work is designed to have a reasonable dwell—a media artwork where maybe the loop goes for a minute—a handful of people dwelling on a footpath for a minute, every minute, over the duration of a day can actually cause disruptions to pedestrian flow or traffic flow. Where can people pull over a vehicle? What about deliveries? Where’s the loading zone relative to this? Where is the power source coming from?

There’s an endless array of things. And when you look at them all, you might go, “Well, those are just operational things, Em.”

And I’m like, “Yeah, but they’re all risks.” They’re all things that are a bit unknown or have complexities around them, and a failure to [00:13:00] sufficiently think about everything that could go awry could interrupt the delivery of the work.

Robin: And there’s the effect on other people as well. Crowd control and crowd planning seem to become an important part of what you’re doing. You used the example of people dwelling and potentially being in the way. What was your journey to that area of work?

Emily O’Brien: My career began as a production manager for about 20-odd years, and I still do a tiny bit. I predominantly worked as a production manager for arts festivals, contemporary dance companies, theatre companies, and weird art happenings that nobody else knew what to do with. I seemed to get a lot of those.

Then about 10 years ago, it became really clear to me that I would need a plan for the latter part of my career. Being a production manager is quite a physically and mentally demanding occupation, and that’s when I started to move sideways into risk and safety.

As I was looking at [00:14:00] different study pathways and trying to bolster my own knowledge, I became aware of a degree in crowd science and risk analysis at Manchester Met that could be done remotely. So I did that master’s program.

In Australia, because we have a very compliant culture and usually a very compliant public, when people come to things they’re generally quite well behaved. They’ll obey instructions. And there’s a great sense of communitas—they want to look after each other. There’s a degree of mateship in a crowded place.

Also, because we don’t have a huge population, we traditionally haven’t been the location of crowding incidents. But you can have a crowd incident with 1,000 people there.

So I wanted to bolster my own knowledge, and it has been fascinating because a lot of the projects I do delve into the public realm.

You’re trying to deliver works where people are just going about their daily lives, and the injection of some kind of cultural or [00:15:00] creative practice into that daily life is an extraordinary thing. But it needs to happen in a way that’s sensitive to how the flow and activity of that place works.

Things like dwell, the impact on pedestrian traffic, the impact on businesses and stakeholders, and people’s interactions with each other are all important. Post-COVID, people have a little bit less patience. There is a little bit less communitas.

So being able to think laterally about the ways a project might have both negative and positive impacts in the public realm, in a particular location, and about the behaviour of groups of people—whether they’re attending to look at the work or simply going about their lives—is really important.

Managing that well is a fundamental part of making the work successful.

Robin: Is the unpredictability of our behaviour as humans one of the things that can sometimes push a project in the wrong direction?

Emily O’Brien: Yeah. And there are also things like [00:16:00] the rise of social media and the capacity of the algorithm to suddenly put a work in front of tens of thousands of eyeballs.

The right person does a little screen grab and posts it to Instagram or TikTok, and suddenly you were expecting people to just wander past, maybe stop for 30 seconds to look at the thing, and keep going—but now you’ve got hundreds of people coming at particular times of the day because they want to see the work as well.

It’s really difficult to predict what that visitation might be when something suddenly blows up on social media.

I think media art and street art in the public realm are particularly susceptible to that. The right influencer puts up a little reel, and then it just goes and goes. You can never really know the trickle-down implications in terms of visitation.

Robin: Talk me through a project that possibly might not have happened if risk hadn’t been part of the early stages.

Emily O’Brien: I think Flash Forward is a really good example.

It was an incredible initiative of the City of Melbourne during COVID to keep artists in work. The initial concept of the overarching project was to install [00:17:00] around 25—maybe more, I can’t remember the exact number—street artworks in lanes around the city.

Simultaneously, around 25 musicians, bands, and musical artists were given funding to create some kind of recording. So the City of Melbourne essentially became a recording label. I think they even won some ARIAs, maybe, which is very exciting.

This all began while we were still in intermittent lockdowns. When the project was conceived, it was 2020, and we were off to the races and everything was looking quite good.

Then when the installation phase really kicked off in 2021, things looked quite different. Because of those intermittent lockdowns, nobody quite knew what the structures would be.

Embedding a really solid risk [00:18:00] process from day zero was fundamental to making sure we could do it. When new lockdowns started emerging, we were able to determine that what we were doing fell under the remit of external building works.

Installing an artwork was essentially the same as painting a building green. So we were actually able to continue installing artworks throughout lockdowns.

We definitely had to make some changes. The initial concept involved having little pop-up performances where the artists who had recorded music would perform some of that work at the locations of the artworks with which they were tangentially paired.

Unfortunately, most of those didn’t happen because of the complexities of social distancing and everything else at that time.

But it was amazing. The City of Melbourne resourced it incredibly well. We had a lot of personnel. We had the people, the time, and a decent chunk of money, which meant we could look at all the different threads of where things might go awry, tease those out [00:19:00] really well, and make sure the work could happen.

For the artists and crew, we were often working in places with large high-access plant and doing high-risk work in the public realm. Being able to do that when you had a lot of eyeballs on you had many layers of complexity.

On that project, I was predominantly focused just on risk and safety, and that was an incredible resource to have to make sure it got across the line.

Robin: That period was incredibly challenging in Victoria. I think someone said—and I’m not sure whether this is correct—that Melbourne had the longest lockdown of any city in the world.

Emily O’Brien: Yeah, my understanding is that when you cumulatively add all the days we spent in lockdown, it was the longest period in the world. What a time to be alive. But we’re alive, so double thumbs up.

When we delivered Mona Foma in Launceston the following year—and maybe in Hobart as well, from memory—I think my COVID plan ran to some 600 [00:20:00] pages or something utterly insane.

Doing a multi-day, multi-arts festival across two cities, with Tasmania having been quite protected from the mainland, they were very cautious.

So yes, risk really became the buzzword then. I definitely wasn’t lacking risk assessments to write in the immediate post-COVID era. But I’m glad we’ve moved past it now and can have groups of people out in the world again. I wouldn’t like to go back to that.

Robin: Even as you were talking about the laneways, I was wondering whether there were any performances in those, and then I thought, “Oh, probably not.”

Emily O’Brien: We wrote a lot of beautiful plans! There are some great documents. The plans are gorgeous, but they just didn’t quite get across the line.

How can artists manage risk without compromising creative intent?

Robin: Which comes to my next question. A project like that has lots of different people involved: artists, possibly engineers, the council. Each group sees things in very different ways. How do [00:21:00] you negotiate those different viewpoints?

Emily O’Brien: Having those different viewpoints is what makes the risk process so effective, because everyone has a different appetite for and tolerance of different types of risk.

An engineer, for example, is looking at their knowledge of the engineering tolerance of a particular structure, what is absolutely required as a mitigation to make sure the thing doesn’t fall down, what we would do if there were crazy winds—all of those factors.

One of the things I constantly speak to clients about is the transparency of the process. That’s why, when it becomes a tick-box exercise late in the piece, it’s not very valuable. There’s not a lot of visibility or transparency, and there’s not much guarantee that your stakeholders will have eyes on it and actually read the documents you produce.

Whereas if it’s something that’s in the conversation from the beginning, you have all those stakeholders and their different perspectives in the room, along with their different tolerances and appetites.

Everybody can arrive at practicability, because that’s the buzzword of both the [00:22:00] Australian Standard and risk practice in general: risk mitigations need to be practicable.

You can’t go to the ends of the earth making everything absolutely 1,000% as safe as it possibly could be, because it would cost you a bajillion dollars, take a million years, and you’d never get the thing across the line.

So it’s about finding a practicable balance between what is feasible in terms of money, time, and deliverability, and what is going to reasonably reduce the risk of harm to people or harm to the environment.

I’m always really excited to have those voices in the room and those conversations, because the conversation is about removing uncertainty.

Often, the engineer might not fully understand exactly what you’re trying to do. They might be working with artists who have done a sketch rather than a full CAD drawing with scale plans and all the things. My poor engineer, who I work with a lot, has had to interpret some very abstract drawings into some kind of engineered document.

So the ability to [00:23:00] have those conversations and get everyone to the table means that all of that uncertainty starts being removed. The complexity and all of those unknowns—you’re sloughing away at them through that process.

I love having all those different voices at the table.

Robin: I’m going to ask a question that I don’t know the answer to, and it might not make the final edit even if you do have an answer. Picking up on Mona Foma, Dark Mofo has had a number of fires around venues. Were you involved in the risk assessment for those?

Emily O’Brien: For Dark Mofo?

Robin: Yeah.

Emily O’Brien: Yeah. I worked on Dark Mofo for a number of years. I did the first Dark Park, which had a giant fire organ. That was pretty flamey.

If memory serves, I did write an initial risk assessment for fire pits, and it’s something we’ve addressed [00:24:00] for different festivals I’ve worked on, like the Yirramboi Festival, which has cultural fires burning.

We’ve had fire pits for RISING, and that’s why having the conversations early is really key.

One of the things with fires is that, fundamentally, humans have known what to do about fire for literally millennia. Everyone knows it’s hot: don’t touch it. Children learn that literally at their parents’ knee.

So what you’re really looking at are the other things that can happen.

When I talk about having a SWIFT meeting and that initial conversation, you’re teasing out: Okay, we put a fire pit in the middle of everything. People know fires are hot. They’re not going to touch it. But are there going to be children nearby? Will those children be running around? Where will the parents be? Could the children trip over and fall into the fire?

Somewhere like Dark Park is an old industrial site, so sometimes there’s gravel and unstable ground. It’s dark. They don’t want a ton of site lighting because that removes some of the fun from it. So could you easily trip over in the dark and fall into the fire?

You’re really teasing out all the things that could potentially happen, or that people could do, and thinking [00:25:00] about the actual reality.

I talk a lot about data being really key. I love incident reporting and issues reporting and trying to collect whatever data we have.

I can’t speak for Dark Mofo overall; I don’t know what incident rate they’ve had. But in the year, or couple of years, that I worked on Dark Park, I don’t believe we had a single fire-related incident. Nobody was burned.

I think the poor guy carting the wood around got a bit of a sore back—it’s a lot of wood!

A lot of the time, you’re trying to weigh up the actual threat versus the perceived threat. We think, “Oh, fire—inherently things can go wrong.”

Well, yes, they can. But if they’re not near anything flammable, if you’ve got a bucket of water, if you don’t have too many unattended fires in places where people are likely to be quite intoxicated, you can manage those risks.

At something like the Yirramboi Festival, the cultural fires are burning throughout the whole day. We have extra fire suppression. Again, over all the years that I worked on Yirramboi, not a single fire-related incident.

When we did RISING, [00:26:00] one of the designers built this fantastic seating structure around a fire pit. It had the fire pit in the middle, then a little bench where you could sit with your beer, and then seating around that. It was this big circular structure.

That made the City of Melbourne and their permitting team more comfortable because they knew nobody could fall into the fire. You still had the fire pits, but you had this extra layer of risk control.

Every different set of stakeholders is going to require different mitigations. They’re going to have their own different appetites and tolerances.

But essentially, I don’t know of many events that have had a volume of fire pits where there has been a significant number of fire-related incidents. Humans have got fire pretty squared away.

Robin: As you were talking, I was reminded of when we used to have an open fire in our house. My granddaughter was sitting in front of it and very quickly realised it was warm and that she needed to move backwards rather than forwards.

Emily O’Brien: I’m pretty certain all the cave people survived because, once they learned how to make a fire, they worked out real [00:27:00] quick how to behave around it—and lived to tell the tale. Most of them.

Robin: The seating arrangement is a lovely example. At one level it’s a safety control, but then turning that into something that adds to the experience is really nice.

Emily O’Brien: I completely agree.

One of the key factors of a good risk assessment is a hierarchy of controls. Depending on the scale of the threat and just how dangerous or potentially risky something is, you have the capacity to remove it entirely. That’s number one in the hierarchy of controls: get rid of it.

But if you’ve got an outdoor festival in the middle of winter and there are no fires and everyone is standing around freezing, it’s kind of a bummer. So getting rid of it entirely might not be the best mitigation in terms of delivering on the objective, which is an incredible experience for the audiences coming to the event.

As you move down through the hierarchy of controls, you’ve got different elements, including design and engineering solutions.

To me, that seating arrangement is [00:28:00] an absolutely pristine design and engineering solution that removes the main threat, which is children or intoxicated people tripping over and falling into a fire, or a piece of log becoming unstable and tipping out.

The sides of the bowl were really nice and high. They had the great seat around it. I can’t quite remember how you easily got into the middle to change out the wood and that sort of thing, but I know they had factored that in.

That’s the thing: there’s almost always a way to deliver on these ideas. Unless it’s a completely insane idea, you can generally find a way to get it done.

What it requires is bringing all those stakeholders to the table and workshopping a solution.

Robin: That was partly triggered by a photograph my wife sent back from an event in Melbourne recently. They had fire pits with fences around them. I thought, “That’s a pretty average way of making things safer. There must be other things that can be done.”

Emily O’Brien: Yeah. If memory serves, potentially the first year RISING was at the Bowl, I think they might have had fences around the fire pits. That might have led to the development of the seated solution [00:29:00] as a much more aesthetically pleasing and patron-friendly experience.

Often, fencing is a last-minute mitigation because somebody has looked at it and gone, “Oh my goodness, what’s the plan for this?” And everyone says, “Oh, I don’t know. We just thought it would all be okay.”

Again, it speaks to the need to have those conversations really early and get everyone on the same page.

Robin: Since Creative Workplaces Australia has been established, have you seen a change in how people are thinking about safety and risk in the industry?

Emily O’Brien: I don’t think there’s been a perceptible, documentable change.

However, I should preface that by saying I’m working with PAC Australia and Creative Workplaces at the moment on a nationwide [00:30:00] technical workforce safety initiative that has been born out of reporting and conversations around the post-COVID environment in performing arts venues.

So things are definitely moving. But it’s government; things don’t often move at a super rapid pace.

What is becoming really apparent is that the introduction of things like psychological hazards legislation has been really important. That’s having a knock-on effect in all the states around risk management processes for managing psychological hazards.

I feel like a lot of cultural organisations have actually been doing this really well for a long period of time, but now have the resourcing to manage it properly and are looking at things like fatigue, burnout, workforce overload, career longevity, and people’s capacity to stay in careers once they’ve begun them.

All of these factors are now really at the forefront of organisational planning, and I think that’s a really incredible and exciting [00:31:00] development.

Like all of these things, it’s a constant evolution and a battle to balance compliance against practicability, because for a lot of organisations it can be really difficult to have the resourcing to do things like risk and safety really well internally.

Hopefully, what Creative Workplaces can offer is the capacity to develop additional resources and information.

One thing that would be incredible is access to Australian Standards. I find it absolutely flabbergasting—and this is not a Creative Workplaces thing; this is a government thing—that access to Australian Standards has been privatised, yet organisations and venues are required to comply with them.

They cost hundreds of dollars each, and there are dozens that can apply to creative practice, production, and operations work.

I find that to be an incredibly flawed [00:32:00] factor. I feel like there should be a free library of Australian Standards for everybody. It should be free. It’s wild to think that people should comply with something they can’t access.

Robin: Yeah, there’s a barrier before they even get started.

Emily O’Brien: Yeah. And it’s also quite a linear way of thinking to say, “Commercial enterprises will pay for this.”

What about community enterprises? What about people of colour and cultural organisations and cultural communities that have not two pennies to rub together but are still trying to do things and do them well?

Everyone wants to do the right thing, but if you can’t access the information, that is egregious on behalf of the government.

Robin: I was having an AI chat at one point about media art, safety, and installations. What it spat out was a whole lot of information from the standards. And I thought, “Okay, so this is actually—”

Emily O’Brien: The robots know.

Robin: The robots know what’s in the standard! And the robot’s first reaction was to map things [00:33:00] to what the standard does. Chatbots tend to go towards the middle, towards the average, and in this case it centred on the standards first.

Emily O’Brien: Yeah, and I think that’s a really valuable tool for being able to synthesise what’s in a standard and apply it to a particular thing that you’re undertaking, especially if compliance language isn’t your background or area of knowledge.

What it does require, though, is the capacity to access the standards so that you can sense-check it and ensure that your robot has picked up the right information.

That’s one of the complexities of working in the AI space, and I find it really compelling. I really enjoy working with different sorts of AI agents.

But we need the capacity to ratify what’s been generated to make sure that it actually is compliant and correct.

Robin: Emily, what do you wish more artists understood about risk before they started a [00:34:00] public project?

Emily O’Brien: I would love it if media artists realised that risk is an iron fist in a velvet glove and a weapon of soft diplomacy.

Often, you can use your risk process as a mechanism to help your stakeholders understand what you’re trying to do and come to the party.

If you can have a process that begins to demystify your objectives and your creative intention, and is really transparent about the ways in which you want to remove barriers to access and barriers to achieving the ultimate outcome, your stakeholders will come along for the ride with you.

And the more they understand what you’re trying to do, the more they’ll get on board.