🪩 THE STORY OF THE BANNED ART
It started as a dream in a garage.
Not a mechanic’s garage anymore — a place being reborn into something wilder. The future Okemos Coffee Shop is still under construction, and that back room, with its cement floors and echoes of 1960s engines, had become our blank canvas.
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It’s still here.
Quietly.
Behind the garage doors The Alien Ocularium Funhouse still glows.
Dimmer than before — but alive.
The township said to take it down.
They brought code books and warnings, clipboards and caution tape.
They said it didn’t fit the code, didn’t belong in a space meant for coffee and conversation.
But art doesn’t vanish just because someone declares it unwelcome.
So yes, the installation is officially banned.
But in truth? It’s still breathing.
If you catch the right angle, you can see it — the flicker of a light, a sculpted eye peeking through shadow, a painted world refusing to fade.
People stop by.
Artists. Friends. Neighbors. Community. The ones who helped build it and the ones looking for community.
It’s part memory, part protest, part miracle.
A banned heartbeat, still pulsing beneath the dust.
If you look closely, you can see it through the cracks —
refusing to disappear.
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THE BANNED ART — WHERE ART MEETS CODE
We live at the intersection of art, imagination, and code.
Right here — in the garage behind the future Okemos Coffee Shop — that collision still hums.
The Alien Ocularium Funhouse was built with wire, paint, and wonder.
A space meant to remind us what happens when people create freely — without blueprints, without permission.
Then came the township, with its rules and codes and clipboards.
They said it didn’t fit.
We said that was the point.
So yes, it’s technically banned.
But it still lives — glowing quietly, half-shadowed, half-dreaming.
A heartbeat between creation and compliance.
We keep it this way on purpose.
We share our story, on purpose.
To remind anyone who steps close enough to look:
Magic happens in the friction.
Art is born where imagination collides with control.
And sometimes, the most beautiful things are the ones that weren’t allowed. But shined anyways. The statement made echoes the
If you are
If the garage light’s on, you’re welcome to peek in. if the pink wavy crazy guy is up, your welcomed to peek in.
Just remember — you’re standing at the crossroads:
art and imagination on one side,
code and conformity on the other.
And the line between them is glowing.
