(drums rolling) - [Mark] In this edition of "Artistic Horizons," a collaborative sound experience.

- [Aleksandra] It's really about forming a community and having people come together and uniting around a frequency.

(gentle music) - [Mark] Building worlds through photography.

- So I'm taking my cues from this real intimate place, you know, that I call home, and I'm applying it to the space beyond this space.

- [Mark] Exhibiting digital art.

- How do artists use digital, use video, use screens in ways that are innovative.

- It's all ahead on this edition of "Artistic Horizons."

(upbeat jazzy music) Hello, I'm Mark Cernero, and this is "Artistic Horizons."

In Ohio, the Cleveland Museum of Art hosted the world premiere of "Antennae" by composer Aleksandra Vrebalov.

Inspired by a 15th century Byzantine icon, this sound experience featured singers, trumpets, organs, and percussion.

We listen in on a rehearsal with local musicians.

(instruments tuning) - So the first part will be happening in the galleries.

And the only two things that you're required to do musically is to hum G. Wherever in the range, it's good for you.

And we have hand percussion instruments so that we have just the right amount of other stuff going on on top of the drone.

One element of the Byzantine chant is a long held drone.

So I decided to have local vocalists, people from Cleveland who would join us and throughout the galleries hold that basic tone.

Try to explore all possible ways of interaction with space.

So be stationary.

Move through your space.

Be as an individual, just looking at objects or whatever and humming and interact with others.

It's really about forming a community and having people come together and uniting around a frequency.

If you need to breathe, go to the person who holds the pitch.

It's almost like having candles, you know, yours goes off, you get closer, get the pitch, move away.

Just make it as organic and as alive as possible.

So to have these two mosaics in this room in a way.

So the Byzantine gallery is the starting point for the piece.

It was really a powerful way to connect the physical world with the spiritual world.

I realized that the icon that's in the Byzantine gallery that I chose is actually not an art object in the tradition where it comes from.

We see it as an art object because it's in the museum, but it's actually an entity that's seen in the tradition where it's coming from as an object of power.

It's associated with miracles.

It's considered to be able to heal, to grant wishes and prayers.

And I thought how amazing it would be to treat it in that power and to connect it to the sound that it originally would come with.

(people chanting) Also at the same time there will be four trumpets.

(soft trumpet music) And two organs in other parts of the building.

The sound will be coming from all over the place.

So as we move through the galleries, there will always be something else to pay attention to.

- Okay, ready?

Go!

(people humming) Feel free to change flow.

One.

- [Aleksandra] All these different patterns that we'll be hearing from different points in space and time will be brought all together in the atrium in the second part of the program that's more stationary.

- [Speaker] Three, four.

(soft music) - I'm hoping that there will be a sense of togetherness and care and listening for each of us to connect with something larger and more important than just our immediate physical existence.

(people humming) (upbeat jazzy music) - And now, for the artist quote of the week.

In this segment, we take a trip to Windsor, Virginia to meet photographer Tom Siegmund.

In addition to building worlds through his image making, he also teaches students at the Visual Arts Center at Tidewater Community College.

Here's his story.

(soft music) - So I'm taking my cues from this real intimate place that I call home and I'm applying it to the space beyond this space.

We kept moving further and further out trying to get more space.

And you know, when I am here, you know, I'm pretty content.

(upbeat music) (camera shutter snapping) ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ - I never really did a lot of still lights, till my first home I bought and I started actively change that home and renovate, you know, and where a lot of things came together.

I became real aware of objects.

I'd find things, strange things.

I like having a bunch of stuff in the studio that are, this little pile's growing and that little pile is growing and I sort of get to feel it out, you know?

And then eventually I realized I think I could do something with this now.

♪ Whoa ♪ - I like the ideation phase.

I like this incubation period.

I like the studying and thinking about the work, the individual pieces and how it's all coming together.

As I began to figure things out, you know, I think I've become more sensitive over the years.

I think it all comes back to home.

You know, a home, a nest, roots.

(upbeat music ends) I might stay enough just for a test shot.

I want the thing to look like what I want it to look like.

And I want the shadows to be set and I want the lighting to be set and I want the composition to be what I want it to be, the cropping and the framing, I want that all to be the way that I imagined it to be.

So as I kind of make stuff and I work, I'm doing test shots along the way just to see photographically if it's going to look like what's in my head.

I'm constantly running back to the house to check it on the big screen and see what it looks like.

For the most part, the thing is built the way I want it to.

So I'm just getting some light on it and seeing how that looks.

And then, you know, you can see here I've made some notes based on my observation, you know on the printed set up on some things I need to lighten up or darken or so forth.

So I think that's really important.

Once I get it off the table and I get it on the computer and I think it looks good, then the detailed work can be kind of exciting.

That straight horizon line really bugged me.

So that was one of my earlier kind of changes.

It's almost like the curvature of the Earth.

And then everything else is sort of piecing it together.

(pleasant lo-fi music) You know, the older you get, you become a better teacher and it's probably because, you know, at some point in time that you realized that there are probably relationships, the most important thing.

I characterize myself as a teaching artist.

So, I'm working and I'm teaching.

So I get to tell that to students, it's like, "Hey, I'm working hard to, you know, I have the same schedule you have.

You know, the same deadlines and hey, welcome to deadlines, you know, because I understand what you're going through."

So I just think that, to be fair, I should be working hard if I'm expecting them to work hard and I think that's worked well for me.

I think they've seen that, you know, they can see that around town and they can certainly look at my website and see that and so I think they feel better about it.

You know, the first day at school, I said, you know, "Hey, you should look at my website.

You know, I really liked doing this.

I really do."

And if someone were going to be bossing me around for the semester, I'd want to know what they did and so, it's like, "I think you should take a look."

So I think it helps out.

I really tried to take my cues from the world that I live in.

What I'm supposed to make, what I'm supposed to do.

Some of the work that I've done is speaking to current events and this political place that we're in, this awful political place, kind of working through that.

Some of this work has probably helped me do that.

You can see that in some of the titles, "Land of Promisem" "No Hope Road" is probably that.

Frustration and anxiety, you know, building these houses on these cliff structures.

I think, you know, it's coming from that.

I feel genuinely, you know, sad about the fact that we can't treat each other nicely.

(gentle music) That's probably one of the things with animals.

I can do something, I can make a dog's life terrific.

I can affect that.

You know, dogs, I think they want to be in the same space as you are generally.

So I think they're pretty trusting for the most part.

I think the first dog that Missy and I got together was Casper, this Weimaraner.

And when we just started to photograph him just in the normal kind of snapshot way that you photograph your animals and realize that he's really photogenic.

And we realized that not only that, but he'll do whatever you want him to do, you know?

I mean, I literally like tell him, "Look at the camera" and he would just stare into the camera until I tell him to do something else.

(gentle music continues) Come in.

I have some horses here and I'll tell you, horses are totally different.

You know, they're skeptical of everything.

The first time I ever thought, "Oh, cool, we've got horses," I'm starting to take a picture, waving the camera around, you know, they just get really weird.

I'll be photographing them a little bit, but they're quite different.

It's amazing how you do what I would characterize as a nice piece of work that kind of stays relevant.

A nice piece of work stays relevant.

I guess that's the work that I reflect on the most.

The idea is to kind of make the work that will speak that way and it doesn't always work.

You know, it's not always, I don't know what the word is, temporal or timeless, but some of the work is and that's really rewarding.

(upbeat jazzy music) - Now, here's a look at this month's fun fact.

The Perez Museum of Art in Miami, Florida is putting digital art in the spotlight through various efforts.

This includes the immersive exhibition, "Sea Change," which features generative art, video games, virtual reality, and so much more.

And the launch of PAMM TV, which presents video works in the museum's collection.

Take a look.

(upbeat digital music) - Video is really an art form that's of the here and now.

It has 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 in-house, 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."

(light upbeat music) - [Franklin] 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.

(phone dialing) - 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 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 world-building 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.

(light digital music) - 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.

(light synth music) - 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 the death of painting.

I don't 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.

(upbeat jazzy music) - And now, here's a look at a few notable dates in art history.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "Artistic Horizons."

For more arts and culture, visit wpbstv.org.

Until next time, I'm Mark Cernero.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat jazzy music continues) (soft music)