FARGO -- The Goldberg Family Lounge at Fargo's Plains Art Museum is making some noise.
The second floor space is normally a family room with games and toys. This month, though, the room has rumbled with thunder, flashed lightning, twittered with birds and thumped to a disco beat with colorful, pulsating light.
The space has been transformed into the "Mood Room," an interactive, sensory project from Lesleyanne Buegel and Blaine Booher.
The exhibit opened at the Plains' Spring Gala on May 3 and the reaction has been so positive, it will remain up through the month.
Buegel is an artist and a programming curator at Folkways, the Fargo-based non-profit that hosts community events like Red River Market and Night Bazaar. For the past two Galas, Folkways created a tea ceremony experience, but organizers wanted to do something different this year.
"I knew that the (Gala) theme was color flings. I work with a lot of colors as a painter and I've dreamed about doing an experiential room with lights and interactivity ever since I went to Meowwolf in Santa Fe, a few years ago. I thought this would be the perfect time and place to make the space happen," Buegel said.
Buegel's art has been pretty public. She did the tile mosaic under the Skyway over Broadway and painted the outdoor mural on the east side of Black Coffee and Waffle Bar as well as one for the Moorhead High School production of "Big Fish" last year.
While she had the vision for the Mood Room, she brought in Booher, a software engineer, to help make it a reality.
Walking into the room, the first thing you see is a cloud made of Poly-fil hanging from the ceiling. Strings of bulbs woven through the material glow in different colors as other sculptures around the room pulse and sparkle.
The lights and sounds can be controlled by visitors who can follow a legend to create different atmospheres.
"There's a little bit of a puzzle, but it's pretty straightforward. You have a certain set of button combinations that activate new moods of the room," Booher said. "We're currently in sunrise mood. And as our guest is figuring out, it's only one mood active at a time."
He gestures to a young man checking out the displays and pressing the buttons.
"You're doing all the right stuff. You just have to wait a minute for this one to finish. You just have to enjoy the sunrise while it's here," Booher said.
The moods will last up to a minute or so.
"Our big, fun mode is disco mode and you need multiple people to press the buttons, because it's five or six buttons. The idea was, you can't have disco mode with just one person, but you have to have a lot of people in here and then it's a party," Buegel said.
Shortly after saying that, the visitor stretched to reach a number of different knobs and the disco rhythm kicked in, to the amusement of the creators.
Another interactive aspect is that many of the illuminated sculptures have voice-activated software, so lights react to speaking or even singing.
Visitor Don Bright, from Salt Lake City, Utah, was intrigued by that concept and sang, "La Vie en Rose," watching how the lights around the room reacted to his voice.
"I thought it was inspirational, calming and exhilarating," Bright said after leaving the exhibit. "To be able to sing and have it follow my voice and have it respond to my sounds was just kind of euphoric. It's great."
A handyman, he also appreciated talking with Booher about how he constructed the project.
"We had to do a lot of problem solving, like power system design. Part of what I was excited about with this project is creating that knowledge base. So we can hopefully teach other people too," said Booher, who works in software development for Emerging Prairie.
People are particularly taken in with the illuminated cloud.
"The most frequent comment I heard was, 'Can we put this in our basement?'" Buegel said. "A lot of hot glue and poly-fil and you're there."
"That was really cool," said Aspen Yanez, a Fargo artist who came with Bright and others to the Plains. "I liked that it was interactive. I like that it was like a long puzzle."
"It's pretty novel for Fargo. There hasn't been anything like this," Buegel said. "I think there's something rewarding about not understanding the puzzle at first and then figuring it out, seeing it (happen) with people of all ages, from kids to the elderly. Once they understand how it works, they just keep going, they've got to go through every one. The kids do not want to leave ever."
While the installation will come down on May 31, Buegel hopes to recreate and expand on this for a fall Night Bazaar.
"For me, one of my biggest takeaways is, you can have a dream that can feel really out of reach, but you want it really, really bad. You can do it," she said. "You find the right people, you find the right opportunity, and now there's this whole new medium unlocked."