Abstract:
Music festivals are designed spaces that encourage people to think, feel, and behave in different ways to everyday life. Decisions around music festival organisation, management, and design play an essential role in shaping the experience of festival attendees and encouraging or curtailing particular behavioural practices. Despite growing acknowledgement, geographic scholarship has yet to critically interrogate the political nature of music festival design and the implications these decisions have on festival experiences. This thesis draws on the concept of affect and affective atmospheres to examine how music festival design influences the experience of attendees at New Zealand music festivals. Employing documentary data analysis and interviews with music festival attendees and organisers, I argue that organisers physically and immaterially configure festival atmospheres to provoke particular affective dispositions. Examining the politics behind design decisions, I examine how festival organisers knowingly (and unknowingly) construct and shape the conditions for affective change. Moreover, I exhibit how festivalgoers actively buy into a particular festival-going identity purposely shaped by organisers to influence cognition and behaviour. By critically interrogating how music festivals engage in this affective engineering, I argue that music festivals are inherently political and value-laden spaces where design plays a key role in altering the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of attendees. This thesis contributes to scholarship on the critical politics of design and the built environment, as well as research on music festivals and affective atmospheres more broadly.