Vole Explosion

   The Luminarium is an interactive art installation inspired by natural forms, geometry, and sacred architecture. It’s a fully immersive sensory experience and a place for quiet contemplation. What it ISN’T, and I really can’t stress this enough, is a bouncy castle. Got that? Good.

   It was designed by an artist named Alan Parkinson and made in Nottingham, by a company called Architects of Air, from thousands of pieces hand cut and glued together over a period of months. There’s a reason why I’m telling you these slightly uninteresting facts – I’ve just spent part of my weekend working in the Luminarium and I had to memorise this stuff in order to give a welcome speech to visitors. My first challenge was to get the name of the thing correct in my head. Having previously been referring to it as the Illuminarium, the Imaginarium and, occasionally, the Masturbatorium, it was important that I didn’t accidently call it by the wrong name. Especially that last one.

   The welcome speech is deliberately a bit boring because visiting families, after queuing outside, are in a state of excitement upon entering and need to be calmed down a bit. The children especially need to be kept under close control and not allowed to run around too much and bounce off the walls (did I mention that it’s NOT a bouncy castle?). Of course, this is easier said than done. Once inside they lose all control. Kids from different families find each other and form larger and larger groups. Once they reach a critical mass, they go over the tipping point and you’ve lost all control of the space, with kids chasing each other in all directions, rolling around on the floor, and pinging off the sides like pinballs. Essentially, they’ve created a soft structure that is perfect for children to run around in, filled it full of children, then left it to us to stop them running around. It was never going to end well.

   To be fair, most visitors were well behaved. From the outside, the Luminarium is a cluster of oddly shaped structures made from a grey flexible plastic. It looks like something you might see in a gone-to-seed seaside town – an attraction that closed down years ago and no one is quite sure what it used to be. But enter inside and it’s simply magical: a series of different ‘rooms’ linked by a maze of tunnels, all formed from a soft plastic, with no straight lines or angles, only curves, fluid lines and organic shapes. Each area is lit in a different colour, changing the skin and clothing colours of the people walking through. Some parts glow orange and red, with the intense ‘heat’ of volcanic lava, others are a calming green, and others a neon blue that can’t fail to remind any 80s kid of the movie Tron. The amazing thing is that all these intense colours are created using no electricity. It is simply natural light shining through the different coloured fabrics of the structure. The effect is most intense when the sun is shining outside, which it did for brief periods at the start of the weekend. By the end it had rained heavily and the ground under the rubber flooring had become soft and squidgy beneath our bare feet, adding to the womblike cosiness.

   The sound of rain showers on the outside combined with the relaxing sounds piped in to create a mellow, contemplative ambience which was appreciated by those enjoying the Luminarium in the way it was intended. Many visitors found quiet alcoves to sit and meditate, others laid on the floor and gazed up at the light. A few yoga poses were attempted, with varying degrees of success, and I think everyone left impressed. At least two dads came up and thanked me because the calming space had a positive effect on their neuro-diverse child.

    As well as giving the welcome speech, there was a variety of other duties to perform and my fellow Luminarium luminaries and I were placed on a rota in which we changed jobs every half hour. Without a doubt, the worst task was boot detail. As each visitor entered they had to remove their muddy footwear and place it in a rack. When all spaces in the rack were occupied, the Luminarium was at full capacity and it was then one out, one in. You would think that grown adults could manage this simple task, but apparently not. Boots came off and were dumped into piles, mud got everywhere, some people came out to find that their boots had walked home with a new owner. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the rack spaces were barely big enough for carpet slippers, when hiking boots and wellingtons were the order of the day. Trying to keep the visitors organised was like spinning plates – while your attention was on one part of the rack, boots would be piling up elsewhere. A surprising number of people found it impossible to recognise their own footwear after being separated for a few minutes. But then, how many of us can say that we truly know our own wellingtons?

   The Luminarium is kept inflated by continuously pumped air and it has an airlock system with two doors to keep it from deflating, so anything vaguely spikey was banned from entering due to the risk of punctures. This mostly meant umbrellas, but these guys were turned away at the door three times:

   After half an hour of stressful boot wrangling I needed to lie down in a darkened room. Fortunately the next task on the rota was exactly that. There was an emergency exit in a tunnel that had to be guarded to prevent small children from scuttling off into the outside world, so you got a peaceful half hour laying in front of the door like a human draft excluder. Bliss!

   While all was peaceful inside the Luminarium, outside chaos reigned. Or should that be ‘rained’? The Luminarium was situated in the middle of Bluedot, a weekend festival of music and science at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, UK, with the huge bulk of the Lovell Radio Telescope looming above. In between my two work shifts I was able to enjoy the rest of the festival, despite some torrential rain showers and an ever-growing mud lake in the main arena.

   Musically speaking, I got the worst of it out of the way early on. Composer Max Richter was the special Thursday night guest, playing a seemingly endless dirge while actor Tilda Swinton read out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was about as much fun as it sounds, but the virtue-signalling crowd seemed to love it – applauding all the bits about slavery, torture, genocide, etc. and patting themselves on the back for having basic human ethical standards and being against all that kind of thing. Stunning and brave! The only high point came when a friend and fellow blogger (who shall remain nameless) misheard Tilda Swinton’s name and thought it was Taylor Swift (hiya, Maxine!).

   There was more pointless virtue-signalling on the Sunday from Big Joanie, a feminist punk band who punctuated their mediocre set with a scattergun of tedious between-song identity politics, hilariously getting confused about which particular oppressed group they were supporting at any given time. Still, if your songs aren’t much cop you can always get a round of applause by spouting opinions with which everyone in the room already agrees. But that’s enough gammon-y moaning from me. There’s fun to be had!

   Jiving tardigrades? Malfunctioning robots? Squelchy synth sounds? Sexy mushrooms? It can only be Henge. These psychedelic space druids are such a perfect fit for Bluedot that I can’t imagine them existing anywhere else. They’re also not averse to political messaging, but they do it with such a light touch and wrap it in such a thick layer of daft fun and ridiculously catchy tunes that it never feels preachy – and if you haven’t got closing song Demilitarise still in your head by the end of the festival you can have your money back.

   Elsewhere, I enjoyed (in no particular order) Leftfield, Beak>, Georgia, Pavement, and Gwenno. Young Fathers, Creepshow, and Róisín Murphy were ok, and Grace Jones was, well, Grace Jones, which is always a good thing. The only act I really wanted to see but missed due to Luminarium duties was The Go Team. But for my money, the musical highlight of the weekend were the dignified elderly gentlemen of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop playing a pounding version of the Doctor Who theme. Whatever you think of the TV show, and I’m not personally a fan, the theme song is a solid gold banger by anyone’s standards.

   After the bands I always found myself dancing at the Orbit stage. 2manydjs on the Saturday dropped so many indie disco classics into their set that my shuffling feet began to drill themselves into the chocolate-fudge-cake mud. Like the vehicles in the car park, I feared I would have to be pulled out at the end of a rope. On the final night, Annie Mac played Higher State of Consciousness by Josh Wink and the place exploded. It was nowhere near the end of the set but it was never going to get better than that, so I decided to call it a day. Besides, as I was finding out, dancing in wellingtons gives you terrible blisters.