[Female Announcer] Art Loft is brought to you by.

[Male Announcer] Where there is freedom, there is expression, The Florida Keys & Key West.

[Female Announcer] 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, we get immersed as Broward sparks a passion for the arts with its ignite art and light festival.

ICA Miami introduces us to painter, Emma Webster, and her process painting from the virtual world, an artist and architect, Cornelius Tulloch welcomes us to pull up a chair in his Miami.

What do you get when you combine, large scale projection mapping and interactive light sculptures and installations?

The answer, the Ignite Broward and Light Festival, put on annually by the Broward Cultural Division and Mad Arts.

Thousands flock to this week-long festival featuring artist and installations from around the globe.

I've always loved the concept of projection mapping and light festivals that utilize outdoor and public spaces and creating really unique environments.

Technology is so great and so much a part of our lives that as we looked at Ignite and creating these experiences, we've really evolved the festival over the past few years to create something truly unique to Broward County.

This is our third year of Ignite, and we've essentially doubled the number of art installations that we have between downtown Fort Lauderdale and here at the location at Mad Arts in Dania Beach.

This artwork, it's called Resonances.

It's by the French-Canadian artist, L.P. Rondo, and it's a play on memory.

So basically, when you pass through this triangle, your image gets recorded and display in the screen, and it's a play on memory.

So some things stay in time, and some things just disappear and get blurred.

I'm a fan of this type of artwork, I'm a fan of these artists.

I'm constantly engaged in looking and talking to artists that work in this medium.

I oftentimes see who they're fans of and then we reach out.

We do just a lot of conversations with a lot of artists.

We have artists from the US, artists from around the world really, and we focus on art that is at the intersection of technology and art.

You'll see light sculptures, you'll see projection mapping, you'll see interactive pieces, you'll see things that you sit in the environment and enjoy.

We have three local artists that we're working with.

I feel like each piece is very unique, and you don't have much overlap at all in the different pieces.

[Sofia] So basically, all of these pieces are analogs.

So he's recreating something, basically, a lot of things is computers and electrics and things like that, but he's doing all of it analog.

In this artwork, Richard Burgess manipulates live sound and light to create intermediate audiovisuals installation.

He works with surveillance cameras, projection mirrors, and contract microphones to create an immersive hallucinatory reflection and refraction experience.

And all of the work is analog in a way.

And so he can play with it, and he just choose it.

And it's constantly, you know.

We are Davy and Kristin McGuire, founders of Studio Maguire, and we do immersive art.

[Davy] We have three pieces here.

We've got a piece called The Hunter, which is a paper diorama that comes to life with projections.

[Kristin] We've got Ophelia, which is an underwater projection of Ophelia, which is a Shakespearean character of a young woman drowning herself.

And then we have sirens, which is mermaids projected into water.

The public perception of immersive art has really changed, and I think, there's kind of an explosion at the moment.

Just watching a couple of people, I have noticed what I expected, which is a lot of immersive art is very big and spectacular and colorful, and made for amazing Instagram moments.

And this piece, I think, is an antidote to that.

It's very small, very detailed, it's very slow, it's [Davy] Quiet.

It's quiet, it's intimate.

You need to sit down, you need to contemplate it, and just immerse yourself for 15 minutes, and think about what you're seeing.

That is something that we really like doing, is combining analog physical with digital.

So the two they work together, and we love doing that.

We love animating surfaces and objects and water, and all sorts of things with projections.

This artwork is called Core, is by Adrian B. and Claire.

They are a group, an artist collective from Paris, and it's a play on sound and the reaction of light.

It's very meditative.

We have to be really conscious about the accessibility of art and art experiences, and technology and art has a unique way to engage people in a way that traditional museums don't.

But since technology is such a prevalent part of who we are as humans and how we've evolved, technology-based art helps break down a lot of those barriers and create accessibility in a way that isn't necessarily possible with other art forms.

This one is called Luminescence Sylvia, and it's actually our work by our Mad Labs, which is the partner of Mad Arts.

And this one is interactive, so.

Mad has been a great partner in developing Ignite.

We wouldn't be able to do it ourselves.

Mad knows the technology, they can talk to the artists.

They bring such a wealth of knowledge that compliments the cultural division and what we're able to do.

After Ignite, some of the exhibits will go, and then a lot of the exhibits here will stay as part of the museum.

This is a permanent commission of the museum by artist, Miguel Gonzalez, he's local, and it's a play with music and also light.

So the music and light are synced.

When we had the first Ignite Festival, it just felt like it was for everybody.

And I saw the engagement with the art, and you had people that were definitely fans of this type of art, knew the artists and came to see the work specifically.

And you had other people that just came take Instagram photos, and you know, I thought that either of those were great.

And then if you could convert the people that didn't know anything about the art into fans of this type of art, you know, all the better.

You know, we want everyone to enjoy themselves when they're here.

No pretentiousness, you know, you're here to enjoy it however you enjoy it, and that's fine by us.

[Female Announcer] Up next, we're excited to share this film from the ICA Miami, a museum known for pushing the boundaries of contemporary art.

Here, artist, Emma Webster, explores the intersection of painting 3D technology and virtual reality.

This is where technology and painting dovetail multiple spaces intersecting, spaces that are not inhabitable, but can be on demand.

I make paintings from virtual reality.

I used to paint from dioramas, but I felt like I was limited by my physics and by the hands.

I'm trying to create a world that doesn't exist.

It's as if these are postcards for places that you can't visit.

They have to exist as an expectation, instead of a tangible reality.

There's something intoxicating about seeing your sketches come to life.

What starts as a temptation of a window evolves into a location that I want to be in.

In these 3D worlds, I get to be a master of the universe.

I control all the lighting, I control the object placement.

It creates opportunities that I can't anticipate.

There are nuances that begin to happen that aren't incorporated in my initial sketches.

Sculpting and virtual reality offers the opportunity to lose your body, to be as big as your sculpture, to prowl into facets of your sculpture.

It is the algorithm of the computer that brings everything to life in a way that I can't anticipate.

It would be impossible to make these paintings without VR.

Art, to me, is a moment where we can stop and observe the world, reflect it, digest it, and spit it back in whatever form we want.

Once I have the VR renders, I'll project onto a canvas and sketch out where things fall.

The sketch then lays the groundwork for me to just have fun with the paint, and I can just enjoy the process of painting.

Sure, the paintings aren't real places, but were born in my studio, and they always feel like they're tied here to this home.

[Female Announcer] Locust Projects, the artist face dedicated to large scale immersive works, gives artists the opportunity to create their own worlds.

Here, the artist and architect, Cornelius Tulloch, asks us to ponder the poetics of place as we pull up a chair on the porch of a disappearing Miami.

[Cornelius] MIAMI, Miami.

There's so much history of Miami that isn't spoken of.

[Female] Miami, what can I tell you about Miami?

Hot sausage and pickle legs and pig feet and fabulousness?

Miami has been a good place for me.

I want people who have lived and grown up in this city to feel like their voice is heard.

I'm Cornelius Tulloch, and I'm an interdisciplinary artist and architect.

In a time in Miami, where many of black and Caribbean neighborhoods, are facing cultural erasure through new development and things, it was really important for me to think about how does architecture feel?

How does architecture begin to emit emotions, human characteristics, and culture?

For me, you know, the porch is this space, between a very private intimacy of the home, but also the public space.

I was thinking, how can I make the stories of Miami feel present, and how can you look at it and feel that vibrancy, that buildup of culture and history and place in a gallery space?

And I feel like being here at Locust Projects, it really has allowed me to focus more deeply on how people experience it.

I really wanted to push the ways that I was working, to really step into this next phase of what my work looks like.

And so I began to bring in methods of digital fabrication, CNC milling, but also playing with the scale of it.

Really pushing my work in that way so that it had these spatial notions that people can experience.

I wanted you to be able to feel like, you can meander through it to really become a part of the space.

I'm beginning to see how I can continue to push the different disciplines within my interdisciplinary practice, because I'm making you think not only about the built constructed environment, but also, these other factors that really bring the space to life, but also contribute to the ways in which the space was made.

It's allowing me to reinterpret all these things that can be seen as vernacular, as I reinterpret the domestic space of Miami into the installation.

For the opening night, this is probably the largest grouping of artists that I'm bringing together, where they all begin to build off their own melodies and performances where there's poets and dancers and musicians and singers, really bringing to life the architecture of the exhibition.

I just can't wait for my own family and my mother to come in and see this installation right here where she grew up.

[Female] We used to walk the tracks to Little River.

♪ Little River is the school of pride ♪ ♪ You get a deep warm feeling when you step inside ♪ ♪ You learn how to read, you learn how to ♪ Change has to happen, but you know, I like reminiscing about the old days and how it was and what then changed now.

And we just see that life is just evolving.

[Female Announcer] From starring nights to sunflowers, Imagine Van Gogh takes you into the final years of the artist's life as WGBH Boston's Jared Bowen reports, you can literally step into these masterpieces.

[Jared] For the last two of his brief 37 years, Vincent Van Gogh moved to the South of France.

There in the blazing sun, and amid flower fields, his own life as an artist bloomed.

You can see in his paintings that there's a lot of positivism probably to balance with what he experienced in his everyday life.

[Jared] Speaking to us from France, Julien Baron is the codirector of Imagine Van Gogh, illuminating a onetime subway power station, projections of Van Gogh paintings splash, across this cavernous space.

People can dive into Van Gogh masterpieces.

It's a journey where they can discover a panorama of the main masterpiece in vivid clothes and in a poignant, vibrant way.

I think it's a feeling experience.

[Jared] Annabel Mauger is the show's codirector.

In conceiving the installation, she's concentrated on Van Gogh's end of life work.

That's when struggling with ill health, the painter produced the bulk of his paintings as he traveled throughout Provence.

[Anabelle] Those last two years was when he really decided to be a painter.

He really was the painter of all those landscape around him.

You know, Vincent Van Gogh paints a dreaming landscape, but he also paint people like you and me.

[Jared] Build as an immersive experience, Imagine Van Gogh is comprised of 57 HD video projectors, rendering the artist's work on more than 20 towering screens, accompanied by a soundtrack of classical music.

But what you won't see here are Van Gogh's works strictly as he painted them.

Instead, it's Van Gogh in pieces, faces rather than figures, flowers rather than fields, and just a sense of the sea.

[Anabelle] When you look at all those details, what you'll see is that Vincent Van Gogh was painting with very straight brush strokes.

Sometimes it could be very violent, but at the same time, when you take just a little distance with those details, you will see that this painting is curved all the times.

It's very soft.

So as you're doing this, are you mindful of changing Van Gogh's work?

I'm very aware of that.

I'm always remembered that I'm not an artist, I'm a director.

The artist here is Vincent Van Gogh.

[Female Announcer] The Florida Keys are a world of flipflops and lazy days.

That feelings captured in this piece from the Art Loft archives with the Coconuts Ukulele Orchestra, a tradition still happening monthly on Big Pine Key.

[Female] This is Coconuts, it's Coconuts Bar and package store in Big Pine Key.

I've been playing here for about a little over three years now.

I got started in Key West at the Green Parrot, playing as an open mic there.

I talked to the owners here.

And a few years back, he asked if we could do something, and we said, "Sure, Bobby, you know, why not?

Let's do it."

♪ Let's talk about hey now, hey now ♪ ♪ Hey now, hey now ♪ ♪ Let's talk about hey, oh black Movino ♪ ♪ Down Movino again ♪ We've been here since we were kids.

We went to school together, we grew up together, and we're so fortunate to be able to stay on Big Pine.

Yeah.

It's been a real hood for us.

We both are musicians and played all over, so we're partial to music Yeah.

And the lifeblood of the art of music.

♪ There's something going wrong in my eye ♪ ♪ Let's talk about ♪ ♪ Hold me down, we gonna live a while ♪ I bring ukuleles, I bring music cord sheets, and we help people learn how to play the ukuleles.

We talk to them, we give them the chords when we start singing and stuff, how to play along.

If they need help, there's usually somebody in the audience to help them.

It's all about sharing the music with the public, and it's having a great time.

A lot of people would be surprised at the kind of music we play.

We play Gnarls Barkley "Crazy."

We play Willie Nelson.

We play Chuck Berry, a CCR.

We play a lot of rock and roll in a lot of country, a lot of different things.

You'll see when they start playing and just look around, and you'll see the smiles on people's faces that the ukulele brings to everyone.

It's just a wonderful thing.

I just enjoy working with people, teaching people how to play the ukulele and sharing the music with people, 'cause music is a universal language of the world.

Everybody loves music, and this is kind of a different kind of music.

So, it's really spread.

The last five years or so, the ukulele has gone a long ways.

It's been brought back, and it's just a wonderful, and been easy instrument to learn how to play and everybody enjoys playing it.

♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ [Female Announcer] This Sarasota Orchestra, recently welcome to professional self-conducted chamber orchestra.

It's breaking barriers by recognizing and celebrating the power of diversity in the arts.

The Sphinx Virtuosi is an 18member ensemble of musicians of color and Latinx, and they speak the language of today's composers.

When the opportunity came along, we thought absolutely, it made great sense for us to be a host presenter because of the wonderful tradition of the arts here in Sarasota.

The Sphinx Organization was founded in 1997 by Aaron Dworkin.

At the beginning, it was just the strings competition, sphinx competition.

It was really the first to showcase African American and Latinx string players in this country.

It was always an opportunity for these musicians to be heard, to network, to be able to meet other musicians of color, which is huge because in this industry, you stand out.

[Joseph] Some of the statistics that we've seen from the League of American Orchestras, have shown that there's 1.8 to 2.5% representation of black and Latinx musicians in American orchestras.

I think that a lot of the ways music has been presented, has turned it into a bit of a closed off sort of medium, when in fact, the communicative power of the music is quite vast.

I don't think I realized how much I stood out, until going to Sphinx because you're just kind of conditioned, this is just how it is.

Nine times outta 10, so to find that one time out of 10 where all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh, you look like me.

That's great."

[Bill] A performance by Sphinx Virtuosi, is not like any other orchestra performance.

There's, for one, we are a self-conducted string ensemble.

We use that word intentionally, self-conducted, not unconducted, 'cause each one of us is our own conductor.

It's a hyper democratic process, our rehearsals.

Are we ghosting that one?

Every single person shares something.

I never played in anything like that.

Like, I was very shy in the beginning, said, "Thierry, what do you think about this?"

And I was like, "Really?

They really want to listen to my opinion?"

Balancing 18 ideas and personal opinions can be tricky, but I think what's so amazingly unique about this group is that we do it.

It's peaceful, it's respectful, and in return, the performances we give, they're live.

And the audience, I think, really enjoys to see the way that we communicate on stage.

[Bill] When we get together at the beginning of our tours, there's no really like icebreakers.

When I perform with other groups, other orchestras, other places, you kind of have to like have small talk.

You talk about the weather, you talk about traffic, all that kind of boring stuff.

Here, we drop all of that because we already know why we're here.

It means a lot having this group come to our Sarasota community and bring their passion and their love for the music and their love for all people.

That's really the key, is really making sure that we bring organizations like the Sphinx Organization to these communities so they can see what is possible.

For me, I have a mission with music to encourage people from my country that they can pursue what they dream.

Our community is not just Detroit or Michigan, we've embarked on this global mission that is the entire world that identifies with our goals.

So if the Sarasota Orchestra or whomever can identify that there are people who can be impacted by having a more global reach and effort in our goals of inclusion, then you shouldn't just stop at your town or your neighborhood.

You should be able to go all the way.

[Female Announcer] 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.

[Male Announcer] Where there is freedom, there is expression, The Florida Keys & Key West.

[Female Announcer] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.