About

 

Modular Art Pods (MAPs) is an open-source, collaborative art tunnel. Artists build pods, we connect them all together, and people crawl through. Think of MAPs as a community-driven immersive art experience, a scare-free haunted house, or an ephemeral theme park. Large pods are wheelchair accessible. Small pods must be crawled through, however they can also be experienced from the outside through peepholes and inside/outside interactivity.

The pod surfaces can be made out of cardboard, foamboard, canvas, conduit, pvc pipe, lattice, or anything you can dream up.

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, any person, any place, any time can host a MAPs event. Check out our Host Your Own page to find out how.

What types of rooms can the artists make? Here are some ideas:

• A sound art room with speakers embedded in the walls and ceiling.
• Two pods connected together — one where attendees put on a puppet show and another where other attendees watch
• A room draped with plastic table cloth liner, projectors shining through every outside-facing wall.
• A room with a musician playing music in the corner.
• A room with a dancer or performance artist using the space limitation to inform the performance.
• A room only lit with glow-in-the-dark paint.
• A room with a sunroof cut out where you can stand up and look out above the entire sculpture.
• A room with multi-colored flashing lights and dance music.
• Two rooms with telephones, so the crawlers can communicate with each other
• 2 rooms combined (4′ x 8′) or 4 rooms combined (8′ by 8′).
• A translucent room with no entry or exit used to project light outward to the surrounding rooms.

MAPs was created by Tony Youngblood with contributions by Sarah McDonald, Liz Clayton-Scofield, Erica Ciccarone, Adrienne Outlaw, Janet Yanez, Megan Kelly, Joe Clemons, Veronica Kavass, and Kyle Baker. The first MAPs took place at abrasiveMedia in Nashville, Tennessee during the February 2015 Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston event.