
Experiential Art
Season 2 Episode 8 | 26m 53sVideo has Closed Captions
Visit three spaces that understand the benefits of immersive work.
Very few museums and institutions have devoted their focus to immersive works. Step inside three spaces that have and get a better understanding of the benefits of investing in this style.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
IMMERSIVE.WORLD is a local public television program presented by WLIW PBS

Experiential Art
Season 2 Episode 8 | 26m 53sVideo has Closed Captions
Very few museums and institutions have devoted their focus to immersive works. Step inside three spaces that have and get a better understanding of the benefits of investing in this style.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship♪♪ Woman: I think with experiential art, we're only seeing the beginning.
I can remember how I felt standing in front of a Van Gogh painting, or in front of Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" when I was in high school, and that's what changed my life.
I feel like this is the way I can translate that to so many family members, I grew up trying to explain to them how powerful art was, and now they feel it, they see it and they understand it more, has a deeper meaning.
Man: Immersion is something that a viewer can also bring to a work.
I think it's about your receptivity to an experience as well.
What we understand as immersive installations, I think can sort of tune us in to other ways of experiencing the world around us.
Man: Artists are creating works that are offering these prompts for conversation, creating these moments that make you turn to the person you're there with and sort of have this, "Are you seeing what I'm seeing" moment.
And if artists are creating works like that, then why can't art be for everyone?
Why isn't art for everyone?
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Woman: Super Blue is a company that's really dedicated to artists that are working in shared experiences.
Traditionally artists worked in their studios.
Their artwork would go through a gallery, museum, a show, and eventually end up in private hands or in occasions, museums or institutions.
So these artists are really prioritizing, sharing and experience with the public and the public as a participant in the artwork, completing the artwork.
Our founders are executives of Pace Gallery, and over the past ten years, they were just working more and more with artists who were prioritizing these large shared experiences over the object-based practice of the past.
So, as they started working with these artists, they realized that there needed to be a whole new commercial engine to support these works.
So with that, Superblue was born.
And the big thing is that we share our ticketed revenue or the revenues of these venues with our artists.
So there is a revenue share model with each artist.
♪♪ The minute you arrive to the area, we're in a new arts destination, so people are really coming to us or the Rubell Museum across.
You're arriving to a 50,000 square foot facility, an old produce warehouse that has been transformed within.
The show is called "Every Wall is a Door."
And what we were really trying to do is tell the story of experiential art.
Lay the foundation being the first exhibition in Miami of this kind.
So we have the pioneer, James Turrell.
So where the movement came from.
We have folks like teamLab who would look at themselves as a bookend to James Turrell.
Like, "We're taking this to new heights," and through technology.
And then Es Devlin, who is really between the two, is showing those varied techniques that these artists are using.
So if you look at Superblue's roster artists that we work with, you see that story.
As soon as you walk into the teamLab space, you're seeing these large flowers.
This is "Proliferating Immense Life."
The work shows a bloom of flowers, and your interaction with them causes them to fall over, wither, die.
If you don't interact with them and you're a passive viewer enough will grow in abundance that they will wither and die on their own.
A lot of teamLabs work is about the life cycle: birth, life, death and regeneration.
So even though you're -- you might be killing the flowers, they do regrow and a whole new flower grows from them.
We have one debut, which is the "Massless Clouds" experience.
So we were the first to debut this work.
It's now popping up globally in other venues of theirs.
And that is a really out-of-this-world experience.
We give you ponchos and booties and you just kind of dive into this room full of these massive clouds, essentially bubbles, but they really look like you're on another planet.
♪♪ Once you've finished with teamLab, you're heading through the Suspension Program piece by Drift.
So that's the Meadows.
It's a poetic landscape it's actually floor to ceiling reactive.
So your presence and where you step actually reacts as well.
It's two pieces in one.
So there are flowers and waterfalls.
And if you're standing in one place idle, you're going to cause a bloom around you.
That bloom will eventually connect you to others in the room.
So going back to that shared experience.
If it's in a waterfall state, your presence will obstruct the waterfall and will flow around you.
Each of these works has its own music, and what's really key about them is that they're generating new code in real time.
So the imagery might be the same, but the experience will always be different when you come depending on how everyone around you is reacting to the work.
After that, you're going to James Turrell.
We have one of his Ganzfelds, and Ganzfeld is the German word for complete field.
So it's a series of -- this body of work he's done, which is really supposed to make you feel like you're losing depth perception, this whiteout effect, like you're driving in a snowstorm and you can't see anything around you and you don't know how far/close things are.
For me, having a James Turrell in Miami is like, I'm born and raised in Miami, and growing up, now everybody talks about this art Mecca here, but we still have a long way to go.
And growing up, I never thought I'd see a James Turrell here.
So seeing that in this space and being able to bring that to the people of the city is really special to me.
♪♪ After James Turrell you're heading to Es Devlin.
And that's kind of our finale.
She's really making this entry into experiential art.
And we felt it was important to include her in Superblue's roster as showing the varied mediums or techniques these artists are employing.
So you have teamLabs, super advanced technology.
James Turrell is very scaled back.
It's about light and space.
And then with Es, it's a combination of the two.
It's a sculptural environment with some technology components.
Can you feel it?
Do you breathe it?
Can you find it?
Go and find it.
[ Whooshing ] Rodriguez: It starts with a film that grounds us in nature and our place in the Earth.
She does that by the striking similarities between the bronchial structures within us and our bronchial tree, which are called that because they are so close to the geometry of trees and the root structures.
And then you enter this space and it's a multistory mirror maze.
You navigate that, and if you make it to the end, you are confronted with an image of yourself that shows your bronchial structures projected in the mirror in front of you.
♪♪ A lot of her work has been about Earth and the need to protect the Earth around us.
Humans don't realize how connected we are and that we're doing damage, but we could also be the change.
So this work is connected to Sebastiao Salgado's reforestation project.
Before you enter, you're seeing light boxes of where the reforestation project was many years ago, and where it has come.
So it kind of reflects on, "we caused this, but we could also be the change and make an effort to revive the -- and care."
♪♪ I like to say that Superblue is opening the gates to the art world for everyone.
It's really engaging.
The artwork speaks a very universal language.
We grew up going to museums.
"Don't touch the art, put your hands behind your back."
And I think that made the experience of going to a museum very, um, kind of isolating.
It was just observe.
And not everybody can understand what these artists were trying to convey.
So now these artists have an opportunity to create a whole environment for you to navigate.
And whether, you know, you came just because you saw it online and want to take some photos, or you know these artists, we hope that everybody walks out with a new perspective.
There's people who come and are completely -- who I'm not expecting to understand something -- and they're in tears.
And then there's those who don't understand certain rooms.
And we'll say, I mean, you know, James Turrell is kind of that old art world peeking its head in, and they'll say, Well, what is this, a social experiment?
They put me in a room with a light.
And, you know, and that's the point, right?
It's supposed to have that debate.
And it's exciting to see people who normally wouldn't go to a museum to look at a Turrell get kind of forced into the -- to the motion of it through our experiential arts center.
♪♪ It's your senses being ignited.
So either way, your -- your mind and body and you as a participant are changing the way the piece works each time.
We like to say the artists really create the environment, but the work isn't complete without your participation.
When the -- when the center is empty, it's not really like the artwork is there.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Camille Norment: "Plexus" is a two-part sculptural sound installation.
When the viewer enters the space, they encounter a large brass bell and it's just placed in the center of our very sort of industrial art space.
As you walk in, your body, whether you realize it or not, is sort of modulating sort of the sound that you're hearing as you're approaching this bell, and the sound that you're hearing is actually sort of feedback.
It's actually the sounds of the ambient sort of sounds of the space being summoned by the bell and then sort of re articulated into the space on an ongoing loop, if you will.
♪♪ That's something that Camille Norment, the artist, is very interested in, this idea of feedback.
Feedback is something that can be sort of a compositional tool for sound and engagement, but also sort of something that structures our everyday life, something that really speaks to possibilities of agency as sort of a negotiation of control as we move through the world, and particularly as we experience sort of the embodied act of sounding and listening in her artwork, it's something that's open and generative and something that you can't really escape.
It's something, you know, we're always in sort of a state of continual both composing the world around us and responding to it at the same time we're receiving and constructing.
So I think this sort of cyclical activity is something she wants to plug you into, make you aware of, and therefore open up possibilities for engagement.
[ Chiming, thrumming ] The bell that you experience in that first gallery for her really speaks to sort of an urgency.
You know, the bell is something that we experience throughout our lives as something that sort of marks a significant event or sort of marks the passage of time.
But in addition to that, it also demarcates a social space, a space of community, and that, you know, it's something that we all hear and we understand it collectively.
[ Metallic thrumming ] As one gets closer to this bell, then can begin to sort of -- hear sort of these spectral sort of tones, these artifact tones that were actually taken from records of sort of public broadcasts of protests around environmental and sort of political struggles from the '60s and '70s.
So that sort of layered and embedded within the piece itself.
She's thinking about, you know, our relationship to historical sort of issues as well.
You know, this idea of the radio static, bringing, you know, environmental political struggles from the '60s and '70s into the present, this idea of, you know, the history always being present, which is, again, returning to this sort of conceptual strategy of feedback, which is, you know, so central to the work and really an operative strategy in the work.
As we enter the second gallery, we sort of go from the minimal to, in a way something far more diffuse, and we enter an installation of relatively monumental structural wooden growths.
And in this space, she's really been thinking about the history of the site, Chelsea being a site that, you know, was once a shoreline that then would become a port.
So in this space, she's really thinking about our relationship to the environment as human bodies, our relationship to the space and the architecture.
When she walked into this space and looked up, there's this big vaulted ceiling that in many ways sort of almost resembles a capsized ship or sort of the ribbed frame of a ship.
So that's sort of related to these ideas of the maritime, of water, of migration across water and bodies of water and ideas that the transatlantic slave trade and sort of other sort of exchange and economies, both ecological and human.
So she's thinking in this way about sort of evolutionary feedback, the way in which, you know, what we put out there comes back to us in terms of the environment, in terms of time and history and how sort of the contemporary is always related to the acts of the past in that way.
What she decided to do is again, using the inherent sort of ambient or sort of resonant frequencies of this space, work with a chorus of 12 vocalists to actually rehearse or sort of emulate the sounds that she sort of specified from the space.
So they're using their own human voices to mirror the sounds that are made, are produced, by the space itself, sort of using the body to connect in that way, and sort of sound, the space.
And what you feel is the sounds of each of these tones coming through the human body by way of these wooden structures into your own body and you feel this vibrational connection.
[ Voices droning ] You know, I think that what the artist wants, and if you were to take away from the work, is their own sort of agency in the work itself.
And within that agency in the work, an agency in the world we live in.
♪♪ It's a very open-ended installation, what you're meant to take out of it, there is no fixed meaning, it's very immersive, and in this nature of feedback you sort of get what you put out into it.
But there is sort of these possibilities of thinking about the Anthropocene of our responsibility to the environment, you know, understanding what our role is in this very contingent life that we live in terms of the actions that we make and the responsibilities that we have therein to each other, to humans, to non-humans, to our environment.
It's about a heightened awareness of, you know, both our own individual place and relationship to a complex network of actors and agents, both human and non-human -- that's this idea of Plexus, sort of this complex network, and understanding that we're always in relation to one another, that we're always in a state of being, a sensitive state of being, a vibration, connectivity and possibility.
There are opportunities for thinking about relationships and connections that I think can motivate people in various ways to sort of leave the gallery and think differently about the world we live in.
♪♪ ♪♪ Man: Wonderspace is an art show, it's built around the idea that there's art being created by artists around the world that could be appreciated by more audiences if we brought it to them and made it welcoming and accessible.
And that's what this show is.
There's a lot of artwork that's created in the world that is for an art audience, needs to be put in a context of other artwork.
We're focused on artwork that meets people where they are, takes them from there to somewhere else.
Never presents a moment where... make someone feel excluded or insufficient because of a certain knowledge they don't have or they're not bringing to the art show.
This show, you don't have to have an art history degree to be able to understand, to experience, to enjoy.
And that is the case of all of our shows, and will always be the case.
This company is built on the idea that it's a fundamental human thing to care about our relationships and want to deepen them and further our connection with other folks through shared in-person experiences.
There's an installation by New York-based collective Illegal Art.
The prompt is to think about a moment where you held something back, you had something to say in a conversation, but bit your tongue for whatever reason.
And through this installation you have an opportunity to unburden yourself of that -- that moment where you wanted to say something and you didn't; writing it down anonymously and inserting it into a wall of -- of messages that then can be read by other folks.
So you also have an opportunity to read other folks' messages.
Just through our life experiences, you're well equipped to enjoy this show because all of the artwork is meeting people where they are and then taking them down, down a path that the artist intends.
And people can engage with that as -- as they please without ever feeling like they're presented with an idea that -- that's so abstract, they -- they needed to bring some other knowledge or some other kind of life experience to be able to enjoy it or understand it.
It becomes a vehicle for empathy.
We're delighted to partner with artists working in a variety of media.
There are several pieces here that use creative technology in different ways.
In this show, there's virtual reality, short films, several projection mapped pieces, combining them to create these accessible and extraordinary experiences that, whether visitors want to dive into the technology or not, offer these moments that take folks out of their day to day, offer new perspectives, offer prompts for new conversations about new ideas.
It's been really fulfilling to see these moments of magic where families going into works like "Body Paint" and having this very natural conversation between grandparent and grandchild, where before they explore what is going on and how it's done, they just have this moment of play despite, you know, 70 year age gap, and feel like in that moment, this family came together to have this experience together, and in "Body Paint" that Memo Atken has created that moment for them to do that.
And through this show, looking to present moments like that 15 times over the course of 90 minutes, and whether it's families gathering to spend time with each other or friends coming to hang out instead of going to a bar, that new conversation that brings people closer together and new interactions that artists around the world are creating moments like that, that could fit those occasions so nicely.
One installation we've been showing for several years is called Submergence.
It's by UK based collective Squidsoup.
It features over 8,000 individually programmable LEDs and includes an audio experience that their team has built as well.
And so as you walk into it, into these 20 foot tall hanging light strings, you get this sensation of lights crashing over you.
And it's an experience that visitors have never felt anything, have never felt or experienced anything like before.
Works like Submergence by Squidsoup, it's visually beautiful, it's visually arresting, and folks come in there and often they do take pictures.
People ask us all the time, you know, is this a place that's about pictures?
Many of the works that we're showing are visually striking.
It certainly helps us that there are channels, actively used channels, to share visually striking images.
But it's not what we're about.
It's fundamentally not what we're here for.
There are some works that are visually striking.
There are many that are much more intimate.
Smaller or not don't lend themselves to pictures.
What we're focused on is for delivering to this to our visitors is a place to connect in person and share quality time, to have new conversations that artists have -- are prompting through their sort of perspective bending or widening artworks.
And that's our focus.
You know, we measure the quality of the conversation and trying to improve at that.
♪♪ There's a lot of folks who aren't going to art shows who might be, and we're starting to see evidence of that, not just with the regular visitors coming into our show on a day to day basis, but through their feedback.
We surveyed our audience shortly after we opened our first permanent year-round location, and 44% said they had never been to an art show before.
Last night, some visitors walking out that were visiting from Cleveland talked about how they hadn't been to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland in forever.
But now they were curious about what they had after having leaving this show, and they remarked that they had gone to, like, they were regular concert goers, but sort of contemporary art sort of for other people, not for them.
And they're going to go head back to -- head home to Cleveland and check out what was in their local museum.
Carter: I think this idea of immersion is really interesting in relationship to the moment we're currently in, coming out of isolation, being in the world again.
And I think people are hungry for things that really excite all of the senses and really make us think about our body as something, you know, fully plugged in to something again.
Rodriguez: People who maybe felt a little bit intimidated by a museum, going to galleries -- now they feel part of the art world and would be more inclined to do so on their next trip, or to learn about collecting or more about what artists are doing.
I think that there's this kind of misconception that all of the art world is intimidating or all of it is meant for a few -- very few people.
But the power of art is -- is critical to us as a society to make change and move forward.
Shin: I don't have a good answer for why experiential art seems to have greater popularity today than it has in the past.
Because to me, there's always been a really great fit between extraordinary and accessible artwork and this role that folks have in their lives of this -- the occasions to gather with the people that they care about and enjoy in-person shared experiences.
We're trying to get better and better at figuring out how to be that bridge every day.
It's a forever kind of exploration and something that we'll work at forever.
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