Founder and creative director
Atlas Talisman
A founder, facilitator, game designer and performer whose work explores the relationship between human expression, social possibility and the realities people create together, on stage and out in the world.
Practice
Rewilding.
Atlas describes part of his work as rewilding: recovering capacities that get constrained by social programming, predictable roles and conformity. Spontaneity, embodied awareness, expressive courage, relational sensitivity, and the ability to respond creatively to an unfamiliar situation.
He creates experiences in which people can find those capacities through action.
Game design gives him tools for structuring participation, agency and progression. Communication design lets him turn ideas into accessible experiences. Performance and facilitation let him work with the living dynamics of whoever is actually in the room.
Training and experience
- Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development
- Bachelor of Applied Design in Communications
- 22 years facilitating creative expression, authentic connection and embodiment
- Founder of Open World Theatre, 2014
- Co-founder of PenguinWolf and Newkind Festival
Facilitation
Connecting people across social boundaries.
Atlas has worked with Musicians Making A Difference, The Benevolent Society and Word Travels, facilitating in juvenile detention centres, schools, universities, corporate boardrooms, retreats and festivals.
In one workshop, refugees and members of parliament came together to write a collective poem called Home. Each contributed their experience of belonging, displacement and having a place in the world, and the result was a shared work made from perspectives that rarely meet on equal creative ground.
In 2023–24 he established a training space in the Northern Rivers, welcoming more than 100 participants over eight months with around 30 hours of training each week.
That period of sustained practice, with people returning and deepening, shaped the curriculum, intensives and community model the Institute now carries.
Selected projects
Stage, room and road.
Performance
- Sydney Opera House
- Woodford Folk Festival
- Melbourne Fringe and Sydney Fringe
- Underbelly Arts
- Melbourne Overload Festival
- The Great Escape
- Melbourne Spoken Word Prize
- First place, individual performance, 2005 National Poetry Slam
Corporate creative work
- Experiential marketing campaigns
- Team culture development
- Creative innovation sprints
- Offsite experiences
- Work produced for Nestlé, Microsoft, Commonwealth Bank, KPMG, Arup and Tourism Australia
Journeys
- New York City to Los Angeles without using money
- Sydney to Adelaide, then through the red centre to Darwin
- Greece and Spain, arriving without the language or a local network
The question behind them: can the skills of a game designer and performer help a person read reality, recognise its invitations and navigate what happens next?
Names
Three public identities.
- Atlas Talisman
- Founder, facilitator, community figure and institutional representative.
- Atlasanta Chaosky
- Author and stage artist. The name on books and artistic performance.
- Danger DaVinci
- Chaosky’s questing character: the “Crash Test Dummy for the Human Heart”.
Speaking
Invite Atlas.
Atlas speaks, hosts and performs. His themes include life as a game, human capability under uncertainty, creativity beyond identity, participatory culture, and the relationship between technology and embodied human experience.
He speaks from a body of lived experiment, and keeps putting his own ideas into action.