Summerfest Presents a ‘Cosmic Cornfield’
Festival will premiere immersive art installation created by FuzzPop Workshop.
“Yield” by FuzzPop. Photo taken June 18, 2024 by Graham Kilmer.
Visitors to Summerfest may encounter an experimental strain of maize, developed by ICORE Laboratories using acoustic resonance to improve yields and reduce pests, except that this cornfield experiment has gone oh-so-wrong.
That, at least, is the backstory for a new immersive art installation that is anything but agricultural and will premiere at Summerfest this year. Local multimedia production company FuzzPop Workshop is exhibiting “Yield,” an experiential art piece that attendees of the music festival can walk through.
FuzzPop Founder and Creative Director Daniel Murray described the installation as a “cosmic cornfield.” Summerfest visitors can find it near the Briggs & Stratton Big Backyard Stage, located near the southern end of the Henry Maier Festival Park.
Made of fabricated, translucent corn stalks and rigged with lights, “Yield” offers an experience akin to a haunted house production for Summerfest patrons. It can be walked through and creates an environment meant to transport the viewer somewhere a bit otherworldly. Adding to the spectacle is a soundtrack reminiscent of rattling cornstalks and layered with industrial noise composed by FuzzPop’s Brian Nielson.
FuzzPop spent roughly a year working on the piece, and has constructed and fabricated various elements in different studios in recent months, eventually using an abandoned school to fully assemble and test it, Murray said. It was created using primarily steel, pex plumbing tubing, molded plastics and rubber and not a kernel of corn. All of it was put together with “a lot of complex electronics and wiring,” Murray said.
“Yield” is FuzzPop’s second major project, after Deep Lake Future, described by the studio as, “an immersive art adventure into a surreal underwater future.” It was exhibited at Var Gallery, 643 S. 2nd St., in Walker’s Point last summer.
Murray said the studio looked to “important, key hallmarks of this region” for inspiration: first lakes, now cornfields
For “Yield” the FuzzPop team wanted to capture the experience of stepping into a cornfield, Murray said, “but make it wild and weird.”
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