超蓝艺术中心 | 体验新时代的沉浸式艺术空间

Location: 1101 NW 23rd St, Miami, FL 33127, USA

Organization: Superblue

Located in London and Miami, Superblue venues comprise installation and event space for people to enjoy experiential art from the likes of teamLab, Drift, Es Devlin, Yinka Ilori and more.

Key features

Opened in May 2021, Superblue Miami was shortly followed by temporary outposts in New York City and London, the latter which is still ongoing. The organization's mission? To provide experience artists with 'expanded opportunities to transport audiences to the new worlds they create'. In Miami's Allapattah neighbourhood, this looks like a 4,645-sq-m industrial space, hosting over 2,787 sq-m of flexible installation areas that can be optimized to suit a range of different multimedia exhibitions, and generous room for indoor and outdoor events. The inaugural presentation at the venue – displaying works from teamLab, Es Devlin and James Turrell – comprised 7,500 sq-ft of projections, 22 projectors, 30 computers, 670 LED lights and a stupendous 199,999,999 pixels.

Superblue has ambitions for its experiential art centres to expand throughout the US, with international pop-ups as foregrounded in London. The UK event is an immersive, multisensory installation conceived by artist duo A.A. Murakami (AKA Studio Swine) specifically for central London street Burlington Gardens. Entitled Silent Fall, the installation pulls audiences into an ethereal forest landscape, in which nature and technology seem to become one. In NYC, Superblue teamed up with studio Drift to bring Fragile Future – a body of light installations – to art centre The Shed.

Frame's take

As we proceed into the age of the metaverse, spaces like Superblue – and its offspring – will become ubiquitous to the creative community. A platform for all things phygital to prosper, the venue marks an important turning tide in the global art and design worlds. That message is made even more powerful also considering the 2020 opening of Amsterdam's Nxt Museum, a centre entirely dedicated to New Media Art, with exhibitions akin to Superblue's. As cofounder Merel van Helsdingen was quick to point out: 'Digitization plays a really large part in how organizations are going to change [post-COVID].' Those words ring all the more true two years later. With an impressive roster of collaborators, Superblue's globally fixated scope could very well transform the cultural institution as we know it. Will the spaces fill that potential? And how will the further emergence of the metaverse evolve such venues? Time will tell.