Explore, play, and wonder at gigantic, fantastical, artworks at Inflatable — a new exhibition at the Exploratorium, opening on May 26, 2018. The renowned San Francisco museum is partnering with art, design, and visual culture blog Colossal to present a collection of large-scale, inflatable artworks.

Inflatable features artwork by contemporary artists Amanda Parer, Jason Hackenwerth, Jimmy Kuehnle, Shih Chieh Huang, and an art collective, Pneuhaus. Born out of thin air, these dynamic sculptures include otherworldly organisms, a forest of cushiony columns, an inflatable insect-eye room, and more.

Even visitors familiar with the Exploratorium will see the space in a new way. Museumgoers will be able to enter an inflatable multi-lensed camera obscura that feels like stepping into the compound eye of an insect. Massive crouching inflatable humanoids will fill the building from floor to ceiling, making the West Gallery feel at times like a dollhouse.

And visitors will feel they’ve entered a microscopic biological world thanks to a balloon artwork inspired by organic forms that will be constructed onsite, to deflate almost imperceptibly throughout the summer in a process that gestures toward biological decay.

Visitors of all ages can step inside a tornado, turn upside down in a giant curved mirror, walk on a fog bridge, and explore more than 650 hands-on exhibits.

You’ll find all of this plus unique programs, discussions, and events; a café and restaurant; two stores; and more at Exploratorium’s beautiful San Francisco bayside location on the historic Embarcadero.

• Daily Summer Hours (May 26–September 3), 10am–5pm (All ages)
• Thursday Evenings, 6–10pm (Ages 18+)
• Friday Evening Extended Hours (July 6–August 31), 10am–9pm (All Ages)

Located between the historic Ferry Building and Pier 39, the Exploratorium is a short distance from San Francisco’s top attractions: Fisherman’s Wharf, the Alcatraz ferries, and Chinatown. Entry to Inflatable is included with museum admission.

Learn more at exploratorium.edu/inflatable.

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This post is sponsored by the Exploratorium in San Francisco

Who can resist a gigantic bubble that’s big enough to climb into? Inflatables aren’t just practical, packing down to surprisingly small packages and then popping right back up into sizable structures, they’re also just plain fun, whether they act as portable temporary architecture, offer bouncing surfaces, react to movement with light and sound or just casually perch on top of buildings like it’s no big deal.

Stage for Oerol Festival by Plastique Fantastique

An entire island is used as a stage for events during the Oerol Festival in the Netherlands, and this year, Plastique Fantastique has crafted a special way to enclose some of that space without cutting it off from its surroundings or erecting a permanent structure. This inflatable creation is a transparent orb pierced by a single tree trunk, its skin reflecting the performers as they move

#FreeTheFeed Inflatable Breast Sculpture

A campaign by Mother London to normalize breastfeeding in public, called #freethefeed, placed a gigantic inflatable breast on top of a brick building in the east London district of Shoreditch during Mother’s Day in the UK. For anyone who might be scandalized at such a sight, nearby flyers explained the project’s educational motives. “It’s hard to believe that in 2017, UK mothers still feel watlched and judged when feeding in public, by bottle or breast. This was our Mother’s Day project. A celebration of every woman’s right to decide how and where they feed their children without feeling guilty or embarrassed about their parenting choices.”

Inflatable Infinity Space

Crinkled metallic fabric creates an inflatable silver sphere in which the cosmos seem to be contained. ‘Osmo’ was created by London-based studio loop.ph for the Light Night Canning Town 2014, placed beneath London’s high-traffic A13 flyover to recreate a stretch of star-filled sky that has been lost to development.

SiloSilo by Plastique Fantastique

Creating a series of conference spaces and acting as a backdrop for video projection, a bunch of giant inflated cylinders bring awareness to the use of recycled materials as part of the traveling project SiloSilo. For example, a donut-shaped inflatable called ‘MEDUSA,’ which packs down small enough to transport in a box, represents the amount of plastic garbage produced by the city of Pilsen, Czech Republic in just three days.

Inflatable Floating Playground in Dubai

Partiers bounce, jump and dive off a series of inflatable structures spelling out ‘DUBAI’ in the water at Jumeirah Beach residence. The ‘dubaiTAG’ installation by Wibit Sports is made from nearly 100 modular components to create an inflatable waterpark.

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When the hydrophobic NeverWet spray came out, it promised to waterproof everything, but users found they had mixed results in applying it to things like clothing and touchscreens – it discolored shoes and left films on devices. Then someone thought to create a stencil and tag sidewalks with the stuff, and a new type of visible-when-wet graffiti was born.

Since an initial round of stencils came out in Boston, others have gotten even more creative with the stuff, creating hopscotch boards and other water-activated drawings.

Recently, a series of works inspired by the popularity of the augmented reality game Pokémon GO have allowed people to throw gameplay-inspired water balloons to reveal characters on sidewalks.

Rainworks in Seattle has created an array of humorous messages and interactive games that only show up when the city’s famous fog turns into a downpour. Others have made poems and short stories spelled out light-on-dark against drenched backdrops.

Of course, the potential applications are endless – businesses could use the same strategies to offer rain-specific happy hours or other discounts to passers by, signs that only show up when wet. Graffiti artists could add new secret layers to their murals that also only appear in the rain. Fun in the sun is great, but this approach encourages people to get out on cloudy days … then rewards them for their efforts.

An abandoned Romanian casino long past its prime is infused with new life in the form of thousands of colorful glitter bombs in this striking ad by Sony for its range of BRAVIA 4K HDR televisions. The whole thing was shot in 4K, capturing every little piece of glitter as it explodes out of popping balloons packed floor-to-ceiling inside the aging structure. Over 4,000 balloons and 3,300 pounds of glitter were used to create the ad.

Onlookers began to gather outside the casino on the day of the shoot, drawn by the strange sight of all those white balloons stacked up inside the elegant arched windows. In the film, a single balloon begins tumbling through the space until it’s almost entirely filled with them.

As you can probably imagine, it would have been hard for a photographer to hit the trigger fast enough to capture the action at just the right milliseconds – but they found a clever way around that. High-speed photographer Fabian Hefner attached a noise sensor to his camera shutter so it triggered every time a balloon popped.

Sony commissioned singer-songwriter Tom Odell to re-record the Cyndi Lauper song ‘True Colors’ for the ad, which will be released as a single on September 30th. Watching the whole video is definitely worth a few minutes of your time, just for the satisfaction of seeing glitter spew absolutely everywhere – in 4K, if your connection allows.

The clown you hired for your kid’s birthday party probably can’t make balloon iguanas with tiny scales, swirling three-story inflatable sculptures inspired by mythology, or floating illuminated installations that blink along with the music. These blown-up works of art go way beyond standard balloon animals, elevating an iconic decorative element at parties to a respectable medium for sculptures of all sizes.

Amazingly Realistic Balloon Animals by Masayoshi Matsumoto

Our expectations of balloon animals will never be the same after seeing these incredibly detailed creations by Masayoshi Matsumoto. The artist uses nothing but balloons and transparent thread to replicate scales, toenails, whiskers, gills and other small parts of all sorts of creatures.

Three-Story Balloon Sculpture by Jason Hackenwerth

A swirling, organic form seemed to grow overnight in the Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland following the installation of ‘Pisces’ by Jason Hackenwerth. Made of 10,000 individual balloons that took three people nearly six days to inflate, the sculpture references the Greek legend of Aphrodite and Eros, in which they escaped the monster Typhon by transforming into a spiral of two fish.

Balloons Bursting at High Speed by James Huse

Balloons filled with milk are captured mid-rupture at high speeds by designer James Huse in a photo series entitled ‘An Abrupt End.’ It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on here, with all of those textures swirling and splashing, but it’s fascinating to look at.

Fruloons & Vegaloons by Vanessa McKeown

Artist Vanessa McKeown makes use of cast-off materials and items that can be found around the house, proving that ultimately, the most important aspect of creativity is the ability to stretch your imagination. In this series, ‘Fruloons & Vegaloons,’ she carefully attaches balloons in the appropriate colors to real fruit and vegetable stems, and inserts an orange one in the perfect size inside a peel.

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Blowing Up 16 Impressive Inflatable Works Of Balloon Art