Reaction! Factory Obscura’s Mixtape
I don’t know where to begin. My love and enjoyment of Mixtape at Factory Obscura is just bubbling over. Places like this really remind me that I love not just immersive entertainment but story-driven, immersive entertainment. I really enjoyed City Museum in St Louis and Artopia in Chicago, but places like Factory Obscura in OKC? I get all the feels.
What do you feel when you receive gifts of music? What do you feel when you give music?
These are the central questions behind Mixtape, Factory Obscura’s permanent installation in Oklahoma City. Enter the exhibit and you’ll be warmly greeted by an usher who will direct you to enter… an ear. Walk inside and you’ll find rooms and rooms of wonder, each with a different melody and mood.
Mixtape comes with a band of characters named The Feels. There are 6 characters each representing a different feeling. (Check their bios out here!)
- J-Skate — a joyful roller skate
- Star Wonder — a wondrous star (with a cape!)
- Lemmy — an angsty lemon
- Reign Beaux — a hopeful rainbow
- Mel — a melancholy cloud
- Lil’Dub — a heart with a whole lot of love
Understanding each of the central characters, in retrospect, gave me a helpful anchor in finding a central feeling and meaning in every room. I think each room in Mixtape emotionally aligns with at least one of the characters. Take Club Love: walk under the awning and you’ll find a circular hallway with 4 distinct sections where each represents a type of love — young love, heartbreak, deep-rooted love, and love’s memory tunnel. This aligns with Lil-Dub! You can keep walking in circles experiencing each type of love, over and over again, just like Lil’Dub might overwhelm himself with that big heart of his.
But hone in on the heartbreak section, and you’ll find a bit of Lemmy and Mel, too. This avenue has spirals of valentines on the wall that turn from affectionate to dramatic and devastated right before you get to a section of sweet potatoes.
Sweet potatoes? Yes! I racked my brain on this one, thinking “If the whole idea of this exhibit is how you feel when you give and receive gifts of music, then maybe this is about how gifts of music can make you feel like underground or cool, ya know? Like maybe they got a punk rock album and need a leather jacket, man.” Emily, one of the artists behind Mixtape, who was tending to the shop that day, was so kind and said that was a perfectly reasonable interpretation, but the intent was deep-rooted love. Ding! That made a whole lot more sense :).
Navigate through the young love tunnel and you will wind up in a teen girl’s bedroom where you can feel all her angst, excitement, dread, and her growing love for and obsession with music. Her room is where I could feel most of our merry band of emotions, The Feels. She is infatuated with a boy named Rusty and frustrated with her friends Kristi and Allison who didn’t invite her to shop for a prom dress. Rusty even asks her to prom but her dad rains on her parade and prevents that from happening! (There’s some talk about Rusty being bad for her, but like, let her make her own mistakes, you know?!?) I learned all this through her journal. And yes, I broke a golden rule of childhood and read someone else’s deepest, darkest secrets! But they were so enjoyable!!
Woven into her stories are bits of music like her reaction to women wearing whatever the flub they want on MTV and ripping her Guns’n Roses poster apart because her mom didn’t like that they were drinking. Look around her room, though, and you’ll see she’s been able to keep plenty hanging. View magazine cutouts of Lenny Kravitz, Madonna, Beyonce, Cher, Sinnead O’Connor and performers like Leonardo DiCaprio and…Conan O’Brien? Sure, why not.
The loveliest part of her room is her karaoke vanity. Open up a jewelry box to find a series of lit buttons. Press each one to hear a different pop song from Lizzo’s Good as Hell to Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure and more. Feeling the urge to sing along? Pick up that hairbrush and belt to your heart’s content! Yes, the hairbrush is really, actually mic’ed. I wouldn’t have known this, if it weren’t for a group of young girls who, with no question in their mind, picked up the hairbrush and started singing into it. Perhaps they already knew or perhaps it was just second nature for them to do this.
In this room, I think the Feel that was strongest for me was Star Wonder. As the lead singer of the band and a writer, both the diary’s stories and the vanity brought out the grandness and intimacy of this character and made me thankful for all the music shared with me growing up.
In a couple of the teen’s diary entries, she talks about her impending prom — who she is and is not going with and her dress. I took one of the rooms to be just that — a vision of her prom. The room itself is aquatic in theme — there are large, transparent sea horses hanging beside a projection screen with astrologic and glitzy-mermaid colors.
There are bits of reef, oysters, seaweed hanging from the ceiling. Throughout the room are tinsel curtains in blue, pink and purple which seemed the perfect backdrop for a prom photo shoot.
It was just so pretty and positive, and as such, I think this was Reign Beaux’s reprieve. A room full of hope with mesmerizing, chill sonic vibes to uplift anyone in its arms, like their bandmates when they’re feeling a bit down and out. Even though the teen girl had been banned from attending prom with Rusty, I hope she had a marvelous time and soaked up all the hopeful, sea vibes, too.
You may be thinking, “But prom shouldn’t be hopeful; it should be ratchet,” and sure, I hear that. You could very well interpret this room as having nothing to do with the teen girl and rather, have it remind you of your most cherished music, perhaps the way it made you feel when you heard Florence and the Machine or Arcade Fire for the first time. What’s so wonderful about these spaces is, while there is enough story to find a through line, at the end of the day, you can simply consider the main question: What do you feel when you give or receive gifts of music?
This doesn’t even come close to covering all the rooms and hidden treasures throughout Mixtape, but these were some of the rooms that impacted me the most and the ones I kept coming back to during my visit. There were also so many exquisitely thoughtful visuals throughout each area. Notice there is a little light coming from underneath the girl’s bed; pull back the bed skirt and lol, it’s a bunch of stuffed animals, the movie Matrix, and a leftover pizza box.
Peruse the many little portholes and find that, while many are quite lovely and positive, there is one showing a tiny house on fire amidst the serene, seascape.
Walk out of Club Love into the alley and find some mice partying it up next to the trash cans.
It’s things like this that made me never want to leave, but keep roaming and digging and wondering and pondering. There was clearly so much thought and love poured into all these rooms. So much so, that while you could follow a narrative, you could let go and land in an emotion all your own.
