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# Inflatable microbes toured all five Meow Wolf worlds
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/inflatable-microbes-toured-all-five-meow-wolf-worlds/
- Published: 2026-09-11T14:00:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T14:00:05.000Z
- Description: Nicole Banowetz and Devin Reilly sewed Phenomenomaly’s newest Leviathan from the anatomy of microscopic organisms.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: Meow Wolf, Phenomenomaly, Nicole Banowetz, Devin Reilly, Installation, sculpture, Puppets, Immersive, News

Before it folded its tents on August 9, Meow Wolf’s *Phenomenomaly* pulled off something quietly enormous: a single synchronized creature migration across [all five of its exhibitions](https://meowwolf.com/phenomenomaly?ref=killscreen.com)—Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Denver, Grapevine, and Houston—running on 90-minute loops from June 5\. The migrators were Flickerwerms, towering puppets paraded through each space in a finale procession. The season’s newest Leviathan came from sculptors Nicole Banowetz and Devin Reilly, who build room-scale inflatables from the anatomy of microscopic organisms.

Banowetz has sewn inflatable creatures for years—soft, pale forms that sit somewhere between decoration and disease—and [Meow Wolf’s interview reel with the pair](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZQIWNwj1Da/?ref=killscreen.com) is worth the watch for the shop-floor detail: fabric patterned like garment-making, then inflated into what the caption happily calls “wermz.” The replies did the taxonomy on their own—the crowd’s reflex was to file the Leviathan into a game bestiary, with *Zelda* surfacing unprompted. That reflex is the story. Meow Wolf’s whole model—persistent fictional worlds you walk through, quest structures, environmental lore—descends from game space, and its audience reads the fauna accordingly.

There’s a lineage on the puppet side too. Games have long envied puppetry’s honesty about artifice—Killscreen wrote about [*Puppeteer*](https://www.killscreen.com/puppeteer-shows-you-its-strings-and-gives-you-scissors/) making the stage machinery the whole point back in the PS3 era—and an inflatable Leviathan led through a crowd is the same trick at architectural scale: everyone can see the seams, and the seams are the magic. The migration has passed, but Banowetz and Reilly’s creatures feel like a preview of where immersive entertainment’s creature design is heading—biology from under a microscope, blown up to boss-monster size, soft enough to hug.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phenomenomaly-denver-2.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phenomenomaly-denver-3.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phenomenomaly-denver-4.jpg)

**Phenomenomaly* at Convergence Station, Denver. Photos: AtlasMedia/Eric Scire, courtesy Meow Wolf.

Play keeps escaping the screen, and we follow it—into museums, warehouses, and inflatable megafauna. Radar, our free letter, tracks it three times a week.

[Follow the migration ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta)