Playing with giant marshmallows and invisible robots

The Hothouse Laboratory – our new show in Undershed which is open now - is from brilliant Bristol artists the Air Giants. Made in collaboration with the creative team from Undershed, this new work stages their giant robotic inflatable plants inside an immersive environment with a story to discover and play with. It’s been designed for all ages with a particular focus on children and families – and has grown out of some unique relationships, nurtured in the Pervasive Media Studio over many years. 

When I first heard about Luma, their giant friendly snail, I immediately fell in love with this lumbering gorgeous beast. Then, before I was the Lead Curator of Undershed and still an artist making work with my old studio Anagram and occasionally as a freelancer, I did a MyWorld Fellowship with the Air Giants exploring how to integrate or work with interactive narratives when presenting their work. The 10-month Fellowship was concentrating on a new body of work called the Giant Tactile Robots - which included some strange and wonderful prototypes for new shapes, like the tube chair or the suits. More about that Fellowship is captured in this blog with lots of videos of the experiments we did.

What amazes me about artwork by the Air Giants is what happens to people when they come into direct physical contact with these wonderful inflatable creatures. 

It is all just so much more than an image, or an idea. It is a deep, evocative and wonderful physical experience, and the word ‘tactile’ can seem a bit intellectual for such a beyond-words quality of experience – as what happens with these soft and pliable forms is so rooted in the body. Words often don’t do justice to all this complexity that happens on our insides when we touch things. And then the fact that there are ingenious robotics integrated deep inside the soft marshmallow-like forms... all the work wears its expertise very lightly, hiding the complex and brilliantly-made technology in a way that means people just go along with the magic.

Finding the right story to go along with these sorts of physical experiences has long been an obsession of mine – the metaphors that work, the narrative lines that feel natural and complementary – it can be a real minefield. The story can end up bending away from the actual experience, and the two end up in conflict with each other rather than making something that feels fluid and coherent. 

For the Hothouse Laboratory, we had long conversations with Emma and Richard about what felt appropriate, fun, silly and also beckoned the right kind of interaction and behaviour in the space – while not distracting from the core intention (which is, effectively, to invite people to cuddle the plants in a slow and concentrated way). The story is to be discovered when you visit the show... so, without ruining the surprise, it’s enough to say that it’s been designed to motivate deep and luxurious cuddling of inflatables and generate some wacky conversations between audience members. 

To design and build the Hothouse Laboratory, we also needed some brilliant artists to bring sound, light and a sense of theatre to the space – so we brought in a small team with many years of experience to really bring the space to life:

• Chu-Li Shewring is a filmmaker, sound designer and sound artist. Her most recent work, Termites Speaking in Tongues, is a sound installation of fantasies on infestations of fictional insect, creature and humanoid colonies within the walls and ceiling of the Cinema Tower at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. Chu-Li’s history of artist collaborations is long and luminous - including Jeremy Deller, Steve McQueen, Siobhan Davies, Beatrice Gibson, Anagram, Ben Rivers, Frances Scott, and Aura Satz. She received the Jules Wright Prize at the Jarman Award 2017.
• Harriet Wallis is an architectural lighting designer who experiments with natural materials and diffusers and whose work responds to nature and landscape. Key collaborators include Greenpeace at Glastonbury, and the artists Jony Easterby and Liam Walsh.
• Lorene “Dee” Zantman is a scenic fabricator who works across theatre and festivals to produce props and immersive environments that conjure joy and delight. They are a long-time collaborator of the team behind the Kazimier Club and the Invisible Wind Factory in Liverpool. 

We’re super excited about the show and really keen to hear feedback! Don’t forget to fill out your botanical record card – and a comments card to go on the famous Watershed wall!