A new immersive light and sound art installation developed by Milwaukee’s FuzzPop Workshop is up and ready for those attending Summerfest to experience.
“Astral Relics of the Great North Woods” is located on the north end of the grounds, between the Uline Warehouse and UScellular Connection stages. Summerfest kicks off on Thursday.
“Astral Relics” is designed to tell a larger story of ecological change, community and the cosmos, while providing Summerfest attendees with a visual and interactivev experience. This larger-than-life installation is over 30 feet tall and has millions of musical creations that can be activated by visitors.
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“This is an immerse, interactive art experience that our team at FuzzPop Workshop created,” Founder and Creative Director Daniel Murray said. “We’ve got a dozen artists working on this project – painters, muralists, fabric artists, composers, along with coding and lighting design people. We’re bringing all that together to create an experience that’s at once local and otherworldly. We try to take something familiar and make it crazy, wild and cosmic.”
The Northwoods served as the inspiration for the design of the project, which will light up at night, he said.
“We’ve used the textures and the patterns of the trees along with the aurora borealis (northern lights) and merged those together in this mysterious ritual, a gathering of these primordial beings,” Murray said.
There’s a musical element to the project, as well, with a number of panels around a tree stump put in place so that attendees can directly interact with the exhibit.
“I hope people come and get something totally unexpected,” Murray said. “I hope people stumble upon this and say ‘What the hell is that?’ And then they step into it and say ‘Whoa.’ That whoa moment is what I try to create. That’s the beginning of a deeper exploration.”
FuzzPop Workshop is a Milwaukee art studio founded three years ago that works with more than 30 artists who specialize in various media. “We create immersive art experiences and interactive environments,” Murray said.
Its first major project, “Deep Lake Future,” was an immersive adventure designed to transport visitors to be part of a surreal underwater future in which invasive species have overrun the Great Lakes ecosystem.
“Since then, we’ve been doing these pop-up commissioned projects that we can move around,” Murray said.
For last year’s run of Summerfest, FuzzPop Workshop created “Yield,” a cosmic cornfield with 192 stalks of corn and 75,000 LED pixels that was situated near the South Gate.
“We have a much bigger area than we had last year,” Murray said. “People coming into the North Gate will get to see this right away.”
FuzzPop Workshop is also behind the ArtBlaze on the Beach project on Bradford Beach, launched last year. FuzzPop and Joy Engine teamed up for the project, which featured interactive massive art pieces – fluorescent cephalopod tentacles measuring 30 feet – that provided an artistic backdrop for nighttime dance parties.
ArtBlaze on the Beach will return again this summer, with the first event set for July 24, Murray said.
“Astral Relics of the Great North Woods” will be featured later this year at the GLEAM, an annual outdoor art exhibit at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison that features large-scale light installations created by local, regional and international designers.
