9/11 Watch Party

The 9/11 Watch Party comes to The Wild Café in Boscombe on Friday 11 September, marking 25 years since the attacks. It's an immersive art installation that recreates the experience of watching the September 11, 2001 attacks unfold live on television, just as millions did on the day itself. The piece was curated by Pierre d'Alancaisez as part of the Adam Curtis Party Conference, and it's tied to Curtis's 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, which looks at how governments and media institutions have constructed simplified versions of reality in the post-Cold War era.

Inside, the setup is straightforward: you watch real-time news footage, live commentary, and the early emergence of conspiracy theories as they first broke. There's one catch, though — you're asked to surrender your mobile phone before the screening begins. The idea is to watch it all without modern distractions, the same way people did back then, when the only window into what was happening was the screen in front of you.

The installation first ran in London in 2024, organised in collaboration with Ed McKeon and produced by James Youarn. It's a piece that works best when you're fully in it, and that's where the phone-free part comes in — it forces you to sit with the footage and the commentary in real time, rather than scrolling through your phone while it plays in the background. It's less of a retrospective and more of a recreation, putting you back in the room as the news broke.

It's running at The Wild Café in Boscombe on Friday 11 September, part of the Adam Curtis Party Conference curated by Pierre d'Alancaisez.