Superblue, an immersive installation space in Miami, was launched in 2021 in a former 50,000 sq-ft fruit warehouse in the city’s quickly gentrifying Allapattah neighbourhood. It consists of several huge and completely different rooms, some of which are free to roam while others are guided in small groups and require a brief intro from friendly staff members.
Even for London with its unparalleled public access to extraordinary contemporary art including Outernet, Frameless, W1 Curates, and so many more, Superblue presents a unique opportunity for art lovers to burst the traditional boundaries between artwork and spectator at a very different scale and quality.
Walk through clouds
We started our journey with ‘Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life’ which on first glance looks like a foam party. Before entering the room we had to wear disposable boot covers, face masks and rain poncho (which guests can keep as souvenirs at the end of the experience), then we were given 7 minutes to explore a space filled from floor to ceiling with giant blobs of soapy foam – meant to recreate being lost in the clouds. You become mesmerised by the cloud formations with the help of tranquil music.
Visitors can immerse their entire bodies in the sculpture, and even if they break it, the clouds naturally reform like a living thing reflecting the installation’s main concept – the gossamer line between alive and inanimate. Even viewers who don’t relate to the concepts explored will find the experience magical and a lot of fun.
Interactive flowers
In the next room you will see computer-generated flowers bloom beneath your shoes and almost feel the digital waterfall flowing from the 30ft ceilings. It’s a huge space with progressively evolving projections that respond to your body movements. The viewer feels they are inside the piece, with projections on the floor, the walls, and even on themselves!
Glowing heartbeats
The next artwork is called “Pulse Topology” and is composed of 3,000 lightbulbs suspended at different heights, creating a series of crests and valleys – an intimate landscape that visitors are invited to traverse.
Visitors’ interact with it by placing their hand under a sensor which detects their heartbeat, which then triggers the lightbulbs to flash in sync. When the hand is taken away the lightbulbs gradually turn off until a single random lightbulb is left on, which keeps the pulse going – your own unique lightbulb. When multiple people are interacting, it can be quite the light show. For sure the coolest heartbeat monitor we’ve seen.
Optical illusions
Another installation explores optical illusions through light, volume and scale. Viewers welcomed into a room of monochrome lighting, are perturbed when the light gradually changes colour from pink to green to tan, tinting the room. The abrupt change in perception leaved us disorientated, and with nothing to focus on. This is an attempt to create the Ganzfeld effect where a lack of visual stimulation can materialise hallucinations.
Dazzling mirrored labyrinth
Our last stop was Es Devlin’s multilevel “Forest of Us”. In this experience, we watched a short film first about the relationship between human respiration and the breathing of trees. Then, to our surprise, the screens dramatically opened as doors to another room. Visitors of Gucci Cosmos will recognize Devlin’s style in this two-story brightly lit mirrored maze. Others might find hints of Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms”.
Every turn you take you see an infinite reflection of yourself, meaning it can be a bit disorientating on where you go. This artwork delighted both children and adults who found themselves wandering, meeting, and losing each other in shiny corridors.
Eventually everyone found their way to a mirrored digital wall. There, standing on a speaker renders a tree-like (or bronchial-like) shadow version of the viewer on the other side of a water feature, reflecting their movements.
Experience art in a completely new way
While there’s entertainment value in every installation, particularly the visually appealing aspect for social media, Suberblue aims to prompt viewers to realize they hold the power to challenge the world they live in, namely, climate change, society, circle of life etc.
Superblue Miami (1101 NW 23 Street, Miami, FL 33127, USA). Tickets start from $36, Florida Residents can get special price at $29. The clouds experience is an additional $12.
Tickets and more information can be found here.
Image credits: © teamLab
