Last month, I came across this on my newsfeed, looked it up, and emailed the link to Amber thinking this looked right up our alley. Today we got to check it out.
MOA stands for the Museum of Outdoor Art and has been around since the early 80s here in south Denver, first as an outdoor only plaza of sculpture in Greenwood Village, but growing into its headquarters at the Englewood Civic Center, which means it's actually indoors.
To borrow from their brochure:
Natura Obscura is a self-guided exploration through a surrealist, dreamlike forest hat combines art, sculpture, and the latest in augmented, sensor-based, and digital technologies.
There's an interactive app you can download on your phone to interact with different creatures in sections of the forest. You hold your phone over their little round discs and the engraving turns to full color and moves, explaining their differing elements.
A few screenshots:
You are also given a small blacklight flashlight so you can explore all the dark areas, where different quotes about nature are hiding, as well as details on many of the "blank" forest creatures.
this little guy was a flat white to the naked eye, but with the blacklight, his features appear.
The entry room:
ceiling
Second room
Room 3:
Room 4:
the wishing well to the left
had this in its depths visible only by blacklight
ceiling shots
Room 5 is through the owl arch
so back through the owl arch we went
the next turn in the museum brought us to a long hall with a time machine at its entrance
The hall filled with the cabinets of curiosities (ie curio cabinets) harken back to the 17th - 19th centuries in which collections of all manner of oddities were found.
The tiles on the hall's ceiling were arranged to look as though they were falling away to reveal a night sky
I really dug this lamp made of old slides for its shade!
In one room at the end was another grouping
a final room
then it was back through the hall and out the way we came
you can just catch Amber's reflection on the left
more around the Civic Center
the crabapples stole the show
we made our way into Old Littleton to stop in at a tea shop
and then took part of teh scenic crabapple route to lunch, of which there are no photos because we were too busy stuffing our faces.
