Cities as Instruments: Miami's New Wave of Immersive Artists

By M. Moreno

In Miami, the most interesting art of the last months has not been something you simply look at—it is something you walk into, hear, and feel in your body. Marco (Marko) Guglielmi Reimmortal, Resident Artist at Florida Grand Opera and longtime presence at Art Basel Miami, embodies this shift, but he is part of a wider ecosystem of artists turning the city into an instrument made of light, sound, and movement.

Marco Guglielmi: from sonic sculptures to opera and beyond

Guglielmi has built his international reputation on “vibrating sonic bodies”—large conceptual installations where sculpture, light, and immersive sound fuse into environments rather than objects. With roots in Italy’s experimental audio scene since the 1980s and exhibitions ranging from the Venice Biennale to Macro Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome and SCOPE New York and Miami and overseas EXCO Daegu in South Korea, he treats space itself as a resonant chamber.

In Miami he now plays a double role: visual and sound artist active during Art Week, and Resident Artist and Museum Director at Florida Grand Opera, where he helps redesign productions as multimedia experiences and curates a museum initiative on opera’s past and future. His ongoing “Megagong–Megabell” research—monumental sound sculptures and the “Megabell Templum” concept for U.S. sites—pushes this further, imagining public plazas as programmable, appconnected instruments tuned to human emotion and spirituality.

Florida Grand Opera has formally appointed Marco Guglielmi as its Resident Artist and Director of the Opera’s museum initiative, a dual role the institution describes as unique and specifically created for him. In this position he holds a central, “starring” responsibility in every stage of production and creative planning—from the conceptual and aesthetic direction of major works to the design of immersive sound and visual environments—while also curating exhibitions, leading educational outreach, and shaping how the history and future of opera are presented to audiences in Florida

Es Devlin and the architecture of light

A natural point of comparison is British artist and stage designer Es Devlin, whose works have recently appeared on Miami Beach during Art Week. Devlin’s largescale installations—such as the kinetic, illuminated structures installed on Faena Beach in December 2025—use rotating volumes, mirrored surfaces, and text to create spaces that feel like openair stages or temporary cathedrals of light.

Like Guglielmi, she comes from a performance background, designing for opera houses and pop tours, and her Miami projects show how stage sensibilities can migrate into public space. Both treat audiences less as viewers and more as participants whose movements and presence complete the work.

Timebased immersion: “Time Drop” and Mana Wynwood

In the last month, one of the most talkedabout experiences in Miami has been “Time Drop,” an immersive installation at Dorsia’s Miami HQ that invites visitors to “turn back time” by interacting with controlled flows of water, sound, and light. Participants step into a choreographed environment where sensory elements respond to their movements over timed sessions, echoing Guglielmi’s interest in audiencedriven, performative installations.

At Mana Wynwood, largescale works promoted during Art Week—including an experience marketed as “APOTHENEUM”—fuse light, projection, and sound into walkthrough environments designed to envelop viewers. These projects share with Guglielmi’s Miami practice a logic of modular “rooms” or “portals,” where each zone is tuned like a musical passage rather than hung like a static artwork.

Soundforward practices: from festivals to galleries

Miami’s performance and experimental scenes also host artists whose work parallels Guglielmi’s soundbased approach. Performance initiatives and festivals documented in the city bring together practitioners working with spatialized audio, live electronics, video, and bodies in motion, blurring distinctions between concert, installation, and theater—exactly the territory where Guglielmi positions his projects.

During Miami Art Week and the weeks around it, private galleries and project spaces have leaned into immersive sound and video pieces, according to local cultural listings and reports describing 2025 as “Miami’s most immersive Basel yet.” In this context, Guglielmi’s work at Florida Grand Opera—using sound and image to reframe operatic narrative—sits alongside gallerybased experiments as part of the same citywide shift toward sonic and cinematic environment.

Miami as an urbanscale stage

Press and guides to Miami Art Week 2025 describe a city where art spills well beyond convention halls: rooftop bars, design showrooms, hotel lobbies, and beachfront promenades are all commissioned as curated experiences mixing design, sound, and visual art. Public installations on Lincoln Road, interactive timelines at “Time Drop,” and lightdriven pieces in the Design District make it increasingly hard to say where exhibition space ends and everyday life begins.

Within this landscape, Marco Guglielmi is both a protagonist and a bellwether. His trajectory—stretching from European museums to Miami’s fairs, from Edgewater showrooms to the orchestra pit of Florida Grand Opera—mirrors the broader evolution of Miami’s art scene: away from isolated objects and toward cities understood as instruments to be played, tuned, and listened to.