If you ask most people to list three things the world needs less of, they’ll likely say war, disease, and spiders. In fact, arachnophobia is one of the most common fears in America. It’s practically stamped into our psyche. At some point in mankind’s evolutionary past, getting caught in an inescapable spider’s web was just a realistic possibility of any morning commute. Giant, fanged, eight-legged, thousand-eyed creatures must’ve once munched on our apelike ancestors from the inside out. Yet when the folks at Arcadia Spectacular looked upon a heap of scrapped industrial hardware, they felt compelled to create the monster of our nightmares — a 50-ton arachnid that lures us with music and shoots flames from its thorax and rear end.
“We did it just for fun, really,” says Pip Rush, one of the masterminds — or maniacs — behind the performance-art collective Arcadia Spectacular. “We were just a bunch of lads trying to have a bit of a laugh.” Rush and his lads have been throwing warehouse parties in the English countryside for years. At some point, they thought the quaint and rolling hills were in need of structures more extreme. Rush teamed up with Bert Cole and other sculptors, architects, and engineers to create “sculptures that were also structures in which events could be held around it.”
One day, they headed to a scrap yard to collect the raw material for what would be the first embodiment of their crazy dreams. “We just dragged some old bits of airplanes and things from a scrap yard, put it together into a structure, and called it the Afterburner.” The 360-degree, elevated stage first appeared at Glastonbury Festival in the UK but was resurrected for Ultra last year.
[/vc_column_text][vc_btn title=”More on Ultra 2016 ” style=”outline” color=”primary” size=”lg” align=”left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.miaminewtimes.com%2Fmusic%2Fultra-2016s-most-interesting-headliner-is-a-50-ton-spider-that-shoots-fire-from-its-butthole-8318631|title:More%20on%20Ultra%202016%20|target:%20_blank”][vc_message message_box_style=”3d” message_box_color=”turquoise”]By MiamiNewTimes, SouthFloridaReporter.com, Mar. 16, 2016 [/vc_message]
