Have you ever found yourself at a music festival – a few pints deep – looking for a particular off-the-beaten-path stage, when you come across some weird and wonderful creation? You know the sort of thing: a vast, mobile sculpture of some fantastical creature, lights which respond to your voice, or perhaps a toadstool made of smog (the last one is a bit specific).
Chances are, if it was a festival like Blue Dot or Shambala, that creation was made by Manchester-founded SuperMassive, a collective of artists, set designers, AV engineers and storytellers who used their combined creativity and technical know-how to create things and experiences which leave a lasting impression, even if you encounter them in a semi-fuzzy state.
But now, taking what they’ve learned from the festival scene, SuperMassive have brought things indoors, where the limitations of a three day festival, and the Great British weather, are no longer factors they have to deal with.
From their space inside a blacked-out shop unit in Salford Shopping Centre, the team – Ben Kercher, Joss Crewdson, Louis Schamroth-Green and Louis Morgan – have spent the last two years coming up with ideas, testing them out, building prototypes, and bringing them to life. The resulting creations, which are designed for both kids and adults alike, are destined for a semi-permanent exhibition in Manchester (location to be revealed) in the summer. But for now, they’re working away in their shopping centre test lab, tinkering and experimenting, and holding the occasional open days.
The first thing you encounter when you enter the space is a screen which projects your image back at you. Apart from, it isn’t your image at all. Called ‘Mirror.AI’, the image responds to your spoken commands, and turns your likeness into whatever your imagination can conjure, like baked beans or spicy margaritas or a pigeon made of oats.
As you can imagine, everything here is deliberately, unapologetically daft. ‘The focus is on interactivity and fun’ says Ben, who explains that the immersive experiences you usually encounter – like film screenings or huge projections – are corporate offerings, normally tied up with advertising for huge firms. On the contrary, SuperMassive are markedly DIY, doing everything on limited budgets and for the sheer joy of the craft.
Other exhibits include an ‘Augmented Reality Topographical Sandpit’, which is their take on a buddhist zen garden. You can create your own valleys and hills, and a multicolour light map will respond in real-time to the changes you make to the landscape. It’s a particularly addictive one.
There’s much more to go at too, from sound-based experiences to an insulting mouse you can have a conversation with (while you crouch down and talk into a hole in the skirting board, of course). What’s the link, or the theme? There isn’t one really, only that visitors ‘create and control their own environments around them’, as Joss explains. Or to put it another way, ‘you’re not a spectator, you’re creating the story’.
There’s an environmental angle to what they’re doing too. Much of the materials they work with are reclaimed. And while this could seem restrictive, Ben says ‘having constraints helps gets the creative juices flowing’. The weird and wonderful materials they stumble across help generate ideas, rather than stifle them.
You can find out open days at Salford Shopping Centre via their mailing list, or head down to their three month long residency, in a yet to be announced location, when it launches in Summer.
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