[Narrator] "Art Loft" is brought to you by... [Narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys & Key West.

[Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

Art Loft, it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, the art of collaboration.

We meet Whipple & Morales, an inventive piano duo, creating excitement on the keyboard.

Artist Tania Candiani communes with nature for a meditation on migration.

And the Perez Art Museum Miami goes all in on video and immersive art, two ways.

Composers Kirk Whipple and Marilyn Morales have been making music together for over two decades.

Whether it's choral music or musicals, this South Florida piano duo's performances are a rousing experience.

[Kirk] I'm Kirk Whipple.

And I'm Marilyn Morales.

We are a husband and wife team of composers and pianists and educators.

And we make music, we teach, we write, we arrange, and one of our mottoes is from Bach to rock and everything in between, Hopefully.

We're always learning.

Yes, we are.

Yes, we're.

Yeah, it's like the Cuban author said, "You're born learning and you die learning."

And that's our lives, you know.

Well, we met each other in 1988 at a piano competition in Portland, Maine.

I beat him.

Yeah, she did.

But I won The poor guy.

I won the prize.

And we got married in 1992.

We wrote a two-piano concerto.

And let me tell you, it was like we needed a marriage counselor before we got married, you know, so, because I composed and he composed, and so we kind of like collide.

It is almost like having two people cooking at the same time.

You know, it's really hard.

You'd better like each other's spices.

Yeah, well, we had a really great referee, our composition teacher, W.A.

Mathieu.

And he was like, "Okay, you do this, and you do that," and you know, he set us straight.

[Kirk] And that was for two pianos in a 50piece orchestra on our wedding.

[Marilyn] And we got married in between the movements.

♪ Always remember ♪ These are pieces that have been percolating for quite a while.

I mean, her musical "Always Remember" about the Cuban American experience, she had been working on that for over 25 years before we premiered it a little piece at a time, and after a while she got the 24 songs, all the incidental music.

And we were able to launch the world premiere production in 2022 in South Florida.

And similarly, my piece "Macabrifesto" had been percolating, and we did a workshop of it in 2012 for one piano, six hands and choir.

But I decided that the piece needed a little bit more of a fuller balance, and it gave me the opportunity for us to bring our friends across from Europe.

We call ourselves the United Nations Piano Quartet.

And so now "Macabrifesto" is for two pianos, eight hands, bass and percussion and choir and soloists.

We don't do anything small, you know?

I don't know if you noticed, but everything we do is [Kirk] Bang, bang.

You know, I mean even the We have small pieces too.

Yeah, no, we do, one piano, four hands or two-piano things, you know, but, I mean And we've also written a lot of pieces for two pianos, four hands that we play and one piano, four hands.

With two pianos, four hands, you have one pianist on each piano.

We're in our space.

It's nice and easy.

We have all the room we need.

We don't have to worry about bumping into each other.

Now, conversely, on one piano, four hands, one thing, it's a lot easier to find just one piano in a venue.

Also, there's an added challenge, and it's more immediate 'cause you're both right there, but there's a challenge because there's an intermediate step that we call traffic.

Before you can interpret the piece, you go, "Oh, there's your hand.

Oh, I gotta get around it."

Well, have you seen the size of those hands?

I mean, they're huge.

He took my pinky one time.

We both missed the last chord.

It was like, you know?

So traffic.

'Cause you got, yeah, traffic.

That's an issue with one piano, four hands.

And the sound is different, of course.

With one piano four hands, it's more intimate, you could say, because you have the, you just, I said just the one piano, but one piano.

With two pianos, you have an expanded range of sonorities.

It becomes more symphonic perhaps.

And then with two, yeah, the two pianos, eight hands is even harder.

Yes.

'Cause you have to, now you have to not only work the traffic, each one of us in each piano, but also the traffic and also The ensemble.

The ensemble is so hard, you know?

And we're very lucky.

I mean, it's like we really hit it on together great with Mark and, you know.

And we should say, too, that this setting of the United Nations Piano Quartet, there's three founding members, Marilyn and I and Mark SoleLeris.

Our other founding member, Frederic Chauvel, he's had to bow out for health reasons.

But we're thrilled that Soraya Zlitni is stepping in for him.

So when Frederic said, "I can't come, Mark," I said, "Oh, how am I gonna manage this one?

I need somebody who has a high-class piano playing, classical piano playing, but who could also play in different styles" because Kirk Whipple's writing is quite complex, especially rhythmically and also harmonically.

And I thought Soraya could do the job, and she's definitely doing a very good job.

Thanks, so my name is Soraya, and I'm privileged to play "Macabrifesto" of Kirk Whipple and honored to replace Frederic Chauvel.

The United Nations Piano Quartet is in here for the world premiere of "Macabrifesto."

And in fact, we have an international cultural exchange program between Miami-Dade County and France, which helped us to raise the funds to bring them out here.

And next year we're going across to do the same piece with French vocalists and instrumentalists.

So it's very, very exciting for us that we can do something that's international.

♪ Goodbye ♪ ♪ Doesn't seem like he's off them by far ♪ I mean, it's like, and if you wanna talk about "Always Remember" first and then "Macabrifesto"?

Sure, sure, sure.

You know, it's like, I love musicals, really love musicals, but I was searching, I was trying to do something that could stand the times like "West Side Story" or "Sound of Music," you know, something that really, really was strong and not just repetitive.

So I wrote, I have a salsa piece.

I have a classical piece actually that I used.

It's a Chopin etude, and then I wrote a trio on top of that.

I kept the Chopin etude exactly the same, but I did a thing on the trio on top.

I have a mambo.

I have a rumba.

So, I mean, I try And all very accessible to audiences.

Yeah, and It's not something that we're trying to get past the audience, that you're trying to get past the audience.

And at the same time, it's challenging for the musicians.

So it's not something that anyone can, well, they could sing it, but they have to practice, you know?

So I made it so, and it's tonal.

I mean, there's nothing crazy, you know, wild thing.

Well, and conversely, my piece, "Macabrifesto," eight pieces.

It's a smaller set.

"Always Remember," it was a threehour production including the intermission, and "Macabrifesto" is about a 50minute set of eight pieces I set to American and British poems.

And so it did a little bit of a different process.

She wrote all the lyrics, the story and everything for "Always Remember," and I helped her by orchestrating, and whereas with "Macabrifesto," the words were written for me by the greatest poets in history.

♪ Above me at my chamber door ♪ [Kirk] And then I scored it for the choir and two pianos, percussion, bass.

♪ Forever more ♪ It's even hard to play just alone with our metronome.

It's hard.

So with our partner, it's harder.

And with the other duo, complicated just to match the Exponentially.

Sometimes five times.

It gets more and more difficult.

With Marilyn being a passionate and romantic expressive pianist, and Kirk is the wild, I don't know, he's just quite a phenomenon, is Kirk Whipple.

And he's the rhythmical, energetic guy.

So it's a really, a subtle mix of different kind.

And Soraya in a way has some qualities also of Fred, 'cause Fred, she has a very good rhythmical sense.

So that's part of the things why it works well, and I'm more the maybe the more expressive kind of guy.

So it's, you know, and it's also a story of friendship and of love between people, and this is what do together today.

♪ Ah ♪ There's immediacy to being in live performance that you can't, I'm sorry, you cannot get from a screen, you can't get from an iPhone.

When you get into the space and you hear the sonorities and you see the other people who are sharing the experience, there's nothing like it.

Really what it is for us, the real excitement is being there in the flesh with real instruments and people.

Yeah, I actually had a student one time that the mother kept asking, I said, "When was the last time you took her to a piano recital?"

And so then she took her, and the girl was practicing, practicing, practicing.

So she comes in the next week, and she says, "I don't know how to make her stop."

And I say, "That's not my problem."

[Narrator] As the digital revolution continues, the Perez Art Museum Miami is embracing video art in all forms, launching "Sea Change," its first immersive video project that lives both in the physical museum space and online and launching PAMM TV, a portal to its bourgeoning video art collection with its first curated show, "Perpetual Motion."

Video is really an art form that's of the here and now.

It has a a long history.

We have experimental film, which also has a longer history because film's been around, you know, since the early 20th century.

The drive to experiment is there always.

What's been, I think, difficult for museums is it's time based.

It takes time to watch it.

It takes time for someone, either a contemporary curator or a curator with a special interest in this area.

It takes time to figure out what's good, what succeeds, how to program it.

And so if you're doing that inhouse, then I think the public is hungry for it.

Digital engagement at PAMM means extending the mission of the museum beyond the walls of the building, democratizing access to our collection and our purview of Latin American artists, South Florida, Caribbean diaspora, African diaspora.

Immersive is, though it seems to be having a renewed attention in the last few years, it's been around for a long time now.

What makes this particularly interesting is that it's I think the first time that we've really displayed a survey of art from artists working natively with the screen.

Part of this new frontiers is that we also want to include the audience, right?

We can't do this without them, and they're very important.

And so there is, what we are conscientious of is user experience, making things easy for people to use and understand.

They use their own devices.

They don't have to learn how to use an app.

And that's very important to us that we bring everybody along with us when we do these things.

I mean, one of the most amazing things I think about experiencing art in a museum as opposed to your home or books is the experience of participation, the experience of seeing things in real time with other people.

And oftentimes that's kind of against sort of the digital experience that many of us have because of our handheld devices.

And so we've been interested in, first and foremost, just how do artists use digital, use video, use screens in ways that are innovative and constantly trying to push the medium forward.

And I think one of the ways in which we've been interested in exploring that is what does that mean in a physical space, you know, something that we talk about as being enveloped in the palm of our hand, right?

We're really happy and proud that we have 3,500 objects or something available for people to see on their computer, but we know that that's one way of experiencing the collection.

And that's great in some ways, but we also privilege a participatory experience.

And I think that's, you know, that's what we're happy to be exploring in this moment with "Sea Change."

[Jay] What we're looking at right now is called "Fifteen Terrariums" by Rodell Warner, an artist from Trinidad and Tobago, and Rodell works with the native plant life of the Caribbean.

And you can see how he crystallizes them as a way of an act of preservation almost.

And so the result is a beautiful tour through a sort of naturalistic or digital naturalism, you might call it.

My name is Fabiola Larios, and I'm an interdisciplinary artist.

So this is like years of working with the themes of internet and how we converge with the internet, how we grow with the internet.

It talks about surveillance capitalism, that is, how a user pays with their own data to have a service.

So and that's how it just like jumps from the, like the online experience of just like having fun and stuff and then like how it starts surveillance capitalism and then how we, like, I started like getting like into a lot of different platforms to use, to have access and use it and like how, like this is like just an interpretation of how I felt the internet.

I'm obsessed with the concept of being surveilled constantly, like online, like surveillance cameras.

And that's also my body of work, having like all these eyes and surveillance cameras in my pieces.

My name is Leo Castaneda, and I'm a video game designer and multimedia artist.

"Levels & Bosses" is a series that I started back in 2009 to try to bridge video games and fine art, and over time it developed into virtual reality experiences and actually trying to make art out of video games themselves.

And then here in this piece, you see the prologue of the game, which is this village of these beings that could be interpreted as future robots or future humans, but they're these amphibious beings.

But it also fits the exhibition in terms of a technology-based piece that also addresses climate change in a metaphorical way.

I felt like the structure of worldbuilding of video games was a way to be able to do paintings, drawings, interactive sculptures, like anything that would kind of fit this overarching built mythology.

And also thinking of like what is the idea of an open mythology where there's no limits of what can be a valid part of a storytelling practice.

It's becoming more and more material to the goings-on of a contemporary art museum that we engage with digital artists and we display their art natively as they have made it.

And so I think more and more museums will be catching onto this, and I think there is, you know, with the museums, there's always that sort of lag of like catching up to where people are.

But I think, you know, we are taking a big leap forward with projects like PAMM TV and with our augmented reality gallery, New Realities, and we are trying to appreciate digital art as a variety of mediums.

So it's fascinating to see, say, what's going on.

It's fascinating.

I was thrilled to be asked by the Perez Museum when the Knight Foundation gave the grant for them to start the online platform.

To me, I guess what I'm always looking for is the poetry of the soul of the artist.

You know, I wanna be knocked over the head.

So I chose work that I thought was very strong.

It happens, and I thought, because it's online, because I hope they bring it into the collection, I really thought about 10 works from around the world representing very different points of view, and they're different ages, and so I thought it's a really good look at what's going on.

A few are very, in quote, realistic, you know, shot with a camera.

They're political.

They're very beautiful.

My name is Richard Garet.

I am a multimedia artist.

I work with sound and moving image and visual arts in a wide spectrum, we can say.

The title of the piece is "Painting By Numbers: Composition Number 6," and it's a series of experiments on sound and moving image.

But the workings in itself is heavily inclined towards the digital and the glitches and the artifacts and all the information noise that can be encountered in the processes of working with digital media and the translation to sound, to moving image as well.

So there's this connection in his practice, visual, that has this abstract sound and image, and the color is just drop-dead gorgeous.

So there's something that's so sort of visceral in the way it looks, and so that's what I thought, it's very painting-like, and it does have duration.

And you call it, it's not a video.

You don't call it a video.

You call it, what do you call it?

Moving image.

So in a way, I embrace technology and the methodology that now permits to turn anything into a video per se, or a moving image, you know?

People talk about, you know, the death of painting.

I know about death of painting.

Like, there's always something interesting to explore with simple tools.

So we wanna to continue to do all of that.

And I think what we're trying to do and what we're trying to say, you know, it goes back to that experiential conversation, is that there's a history here.

There's a long history here, and digital is at the forefront or at the present of what is the medium that is most democratizing and also the one that has the greatest promise of innovation because it literally is being innovated constantly, and artists need to use it so we understand what it is we actually have.

[Narrator] At Locust Projects, artists get the opportunity to work big.

Recently, Mexican artist Tania Candiani brought her project "Waterbirds: Migratory Sound Flow" to the space.

The arts incubator documented the project and brings us this film.

[Narrator] "Art Loft" is on Instagram, @artloftsfl.

Tag us on your art adventures.

Find full episodes, segments, and more at artloftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

Art Loft is brought to you by... [Narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.