Big mood: How Somewherelse tapped into a global moment with HUH

AFTER THE PANDEMIC SHUT DOWN LIVE EVENTS, TORONTO CREATIVE AGENCY SOMEWHERELSE CREATED HUH, A NEW PLATFORM THAT LETS AUDIENCES EXPLORE ART ALL OVER THE WORLD BY CITY AND MOOD. (PLANETHUH.COM)

When Toronto-based creative agency Somewherelse found out about the lockdown, they’d just logged a day at the Phoenix Concert Theatre for a site visit ahead of an Allie X show. Having spent formative years of her career living in the city, the Toronto stop on her Cape God tour would have been a homecoming of sorts for the now LA-based singer, and Somewherelse was tasked with providing stage design. Then Ontario joined the crescendo of regions around the planet declaring states of emergency as COVID-19 cases continued to present themselves across the province.

With in-person events in Toronto and cities around most of the globe off the table for the foreseeable future, the Somewherelse crew embarked on a series of design thinking workshops and virtual field studies. Looking to online event models like Club Quarantine, they brainstormed new ways to move forward in a digital landscape that were still meaningful. 

“We were feeling this disintegration of borders and physical experiences, and we wanted to connect with things that felt a little bit more out there and open,” Somewherelse creative director and co-founder Anna Wiesen reflects. “The idea of discovery came up a lot; discovering content from around the world, discovering art from around the world.” 

With no geographic boundaries or other obstacles to physical accessibility to maneuver, the only limit was an internet connection. The answer they landed on was HUH, a digital exploration platform facilitating connections and collaborations between artists and communities from different cities around the globe. 

After launching with a collaboration pairing Los Angeles rapper Def Sound and Toronto event producers It’s OK*, they’ve since expanded their reach to curating collaborations between creatives in Africa, Asia, Europe, and more hubs throuhgout North America.

“[The virtual events] have felt really good — almost as nice, and there are kind of nuances that feel even more beautiful than regular events,” Wiesen says. “You’re getting people tuning in from different time zones and from different places and we’re all sharing something together across time zones, and I don’t think any of us were expecting to feel that magic.”

Part of that magic is baked right into the design.

Named for one of the world’s most omnipresent words — a natural utterance with comparable usage occuring across languages — HUH strives for universal appeal, articulating itself through an emotional vernacular. Upon visiting the homepage, users are met with two spheres rotating in orbit: a borderless, minimalist representation of Earth with nodes marking different cities HUH has touched with its curatorial arm, and a more nebulous globe washed with pastels and nodes representing different moods. Selecting different nodes allows users to explore content archived under the corresponding city and mood tags, creating a kind of liminal zone where it’s possible to inhabit different psycho-geographies with scrolls and clicks. 

Arriving in the middle of a global pandemic, that makes HUH a fascinating sensory archive of one of the world’s most paralyzing crises. Its expansion is driven by collaborations, each prompted by a mutually felt mood the collaborators feel is representative of their respective cities, while local curators create virtual travel guides highlighting different artists, businesses, and culture hubs, tagging each with different mood and sense filters. HUH also encourages guests to submit moods through a form on their website. 

“It kind of speaks to this global mindset, this breaking down of physical barriers,” Wiesen says. For her, it’s also an experience that transcends language barriers.

“Regardless of which discipline they work in, I think [artists] speak the same language,” she continues. “We want people to feel a certain way, experience some kind of collective feeling together.”

After Toronto and Los Angeles, HUH has featured collaborations joining artists from Istanbul, Lagos, Mexico City, and Singapore, bringing in mood submissions from over nine countries, and 23 cities around the world, while the Mexico City/Istanbul collaboration was the first event to bring in more international visits than Canadian ones. This Saturday (March 20), HUH presents Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist Brandon Valdivia (Mas Aya, Lido Pimienta, NTWNTF, Above Top Secret, Cosmic Range) in collaboration with New York multimedia artist Enrique Alba, and Mexico City art director Orly Anan as part of the season finale of Long Winter TV.

“We try to stretch geographies as far as possible,” Wiesen says. Ideally, she hopes all of these connections forge pipelines for tangible contact once live events are safe to return to, noting past collaborators are already expressing interest.

For now, she hopes the platform helps audiences find artists they’re unfamiliar with, whether in their own communities or halfway around the world. She also hopes it helps prompt audiences to reevaluate the way they consume art. 

“I would like us to get past this transactional way of measuring what art is good or not and just being excited for the sake of new collaborations and new media, new creations, regardless of how popular they are,” Wiesen says. “I want people to take away a realization of how much talent there is in their communities and see their own city in a new light. I also think that artists that deserve to be on a global stage don’t necessarily need to have a million followers. They’re important; their vision and their creations and their outputs are important.”

HUH presents Brandon Valdivia (Toronto) in collaboration with Enrique Alba (New York) and Orly Anan (Mexico City) this Saturday, March 20 for the season finale of Long Winter TV. 8PM EST. Event link.

Visit HUH: planethuh.com

Visit Somewherelse:somewherelse.com