SPECTRA SPECTRA

Immersive Dining Experience - Presented by UnitePlayPerform

‘Take a trip through a dopamine fantasy’

Sales start Tue 23rd Sep 2025, 12:00 am AEST

Sessions

Friday 12 December 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Friday 12 December 8:15pm - 9:45pm
Saturday 13 December 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Saturday 13 December 8:15pm - 9:45pm

(Limited spaces available - past events have sold out fast)

Twelve colours as portals, each one a frequency, a mood, and a flavour.

Spectra Spectra cracks open the spectrum of colour

Conceived by the Artist ‘OFFERINGS’ (Melissa Gilbert), the work slices into colour theory not as pigment on a wheel but as lived vibration. Each hue is choreographed as a multi sensory feeling you can taste, a sound you can wear, a frequency you can inhabit. Offerings threads colour into an edgy multi-sensory map from the blistering red of survival and desire, to the violet shimmer of transcendence.

Each chapter a collision of molecular gastronomy, performance, motion visuals, and sonic atmosphere. Sound becomes architecture, food becomes theatre, bodies become conduits. Within every colour lies a layered world of experience design. where archetypes surface and dissolve, where the boundaries between ritual, rave, and haute cuisine collapse.

This is not entertainment. This is a collective transmission.
An alchemy of shade, sound, and sensation that pushes colour into the bloodstream.

Program

90 minute experience

12 Food tastings

12 Original performance works

4 Adaptogenic beverages

12 Original music scores

Live sound tools and vocals by Offerings

12 Archetypes to explore

12 Colours of the spectrum

12 Provocations

The Artist

Melissa Gilbert (ØFFËRÎNGŠ) is an award-winning Australian contemporary artist, educator, and experience designer who has spent over 15 years engineering underground dining experiences that collide food, art, and performance into high-voltage, multi-sensory rituals. Founder of UnitePlayPerform (UPP) and Co-Founder of The Nest Creative Space, she transforms restaurants, warehouses, museums, and cityscapes into full-throttle fantasy worlds.

From the maker of Hyper Real (17 sold-out immersive dining sessions with Chin Chin) to show director of Hong Kong Design District’s iconic Heart of Cyberpunk (drawing 17,000 people), Gilbert’s immersive dining works have gained cult-like status for their unapologetic immersion and relentless participation. She has also performed in Kirsha Kaechele’s “Eat the Problem” at Dark Mofo / MONA, expanding her practice into global experimental dining performance.

Her method fuses 12 archetypes, colour theory, applied neuroscience, and play as pedagogy, culminating in the invisible archetype, quintessence, the space for possibility activated by human intervention.

Every concept a portal for transmutation. Every space a dopamine dream for deep, transformative experience.

Collaborators

Lord Fascinator

Lord Fascinator (Johnny Mackay) is a genre-bending composer, producer, and performer. Frontman of cult Australian band Children Collide, has re-emerged in New York with his alter ego Lord Fascinator, a kaleidoscopic fusion of psych, electronica, and dream-pop. His work spans film scores, fashion collaborations, and immersive sound design, with past projects connecting him to The Avalanches, Tame Impala, and international festivals. Known for his irreverent yet hypnotic live sets, Mackay creates soundtracks that feel like portals: playful, experimental, and impossible to categorise.

As longtime collaborators and friends, OFFERINGS and Lord Fascinator have joined forces to explore the spectrum of colour in a symbiotic way, weaving ideas and energy into a shared vision. The outcome is a 12-part cinematic sound score, deeply researched to reflect the sound frequencies, moods, and archetypes within the UPP system.

Mikaela Stafford

Mikaela Stafford creates motion graphics and biomorphic sculptural works, predominantly in the 3D digital art space. Her practice explores the opportunities and fractures of a cyber-physical world, offering portals of speculative optimism about the future. Drawing from bioluminescent organisms, the symbology of spheres, and imagined micro–macro landscapes, Stafford builds visual worlds that shimmer between alien and deeply familiar.

Her career spans major collaborations with Nike, Mecca Beauty, and Penfolds, along with large-scale public artworks, stage design, and immersive installations that collapse the boundary between digital render and physical form. Rooted in techno-biophilia, the merging of natural systems and emergent technologies, her work has appeared across galleries, festivals, and brand campaigns, establishing her as one of Australia’s most forward-looking visual artists now working globally from Paris.

For Spectra Spectra, Stafford was commissioned to create an otherworldly animation that mirrors 12 colours of the spectrum. This visual journey was born from her and OFFERINGS’ shared fascination with biomorphic design, biomimicry, and the layered cartographies of the universe. The result: a spectral landscape where light, motion, and cosmic archetypes collide, a visceral odyssey through colour that feels alive, feral, and futuristic.

Edible Alchemy

OFFERINGS works hand-in-hand with molecular gastronomers, chefs, and visionary restaurants to co-design the food element as an extension of her experimentation, aesthetic, show direction and artistry. In Spectra Spectra, the dining table is dismantled: no plates, no cutlery, no safe conventions. Instead, chefs are pushed into uncharted terrain, sculpting cutting-edge dishes that disrupt the status quo. Food becomes choreography, flavour becomes architecture, and each course is staged as living artwork, edible provocations that fuse ritual, theatre, and design.

Past collaborations have included, Chin Chin Head Chefs, Food Alchemist Annie Smoker, Inner Altas - Adaptogenic’s and International alcohol brands.

Venue

This immersive dining experience will be held at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in the architectually designed, high-tech World Heritage Centre. Prepare yourself for a fully immersive multi-sensory 90 minute experience.