get america's fastest internet. only from xfinity. ♪ narrator: the contemporary art world is vibrant and booming as never before. it's a 21st century phenomenon a , global industry in its own right. "brilliant ideas" looks at the artists at the heart of this, artists with a unique power to inspire, astonish, provoke, and shock. to push boundaries. as questions. and see the world afresh. ♪

narrator: luke is the famous artist you never heard from -- you never heard of. mainly in sculpture and installations, his work has been seen by millions of people across the globe. you may not know his name, but chances are you come across his artwork and -- ♪ >> some of the project i make are quite fun and have a playful element. inre is multiple narratives different strands that have been

developing over a number of years. some of my projects involve science and engineering. in perception. and others involve music interesting sound a playful , public engagement as well. hayley: i think he is a unique visionary. he always comes up with new ideas. >> his work is about perception. he creates really interesting and engaging artwork that communicates with his audience on many different levels. dr. alford: he is able to take obvious things and use them in effective ways. luke: as an artist i am happy to apply my creativity to anything, really. and by working with a specialist, whether it is an engineer or a composer, or a glass blower, that means anything is possible.

♪ narrator: u.k.-based artist luke jerram is preparing to install "withdrawn," a new work that opens to the public in just a few weeks. luke: you coming on? [laughter] narrator: he has collected old fishing boats from around the country and plans to place them , deep in the woods outside bristol where he lives and , works. luke: "withdrawn" came as an idea by all flooding we had last winter in the southwest of england. you would see houses underwater, cars floating down roads. i think with those extreme weather events, you end up with this very sublime, almost poetic imagery.

it is awful, but at the same time, they are very strong, powerful images that come out of tsunamis or tidal surge. the imagery for a set of fishing boats abandoned or that have , been dumped perhaps in the middle of the woodland came from that kind of experience. the boats will act as a venue for all sorts of lectures and performances. but one of my slight concerns is, if people have heard about the project and they go to see the boats in the woods, then maybe a percentage of population that goes, "well, that is just some boats in the woods," but there is some self-doubt about it. we got all these theories on events. at what do you start making point artwork for other people? what i try to do with all of my artwork is i try to have different points of entry. so that a four-year-old child will be able to appreciate and

explore this installation in one way. but a marine biologist will think about it in another. and an art curator in another. so that there's enough for everybody, really. i suppose all the art projects i create are ideas-driven. so they are -- they stem from a particular concept or a brief that i am given. ideas can come from anywhere. i would be quite happy to create an artwork out of a sense of ladders. you know? i think we can -- we are all innovative and can come up with an idea in a pub on a friday night. the trick is being able to take those ideas and actually make them happen. the idea for sky orchestra came from visiting tunisia. i was staying in a small town on the edge of the desert right in the south of tunisia. and in the middle of the night

as i was laying in this sort of , dark hotel room, a minaret started calling right on the edge of town, and a few minutes, another one started calling slightly closer. and after a while, there were 10 minarets calling from different parts of the town across the city. it was a very beautiful experience. and it just sort of lifted me into a space on the edge of sleep. i came back to bristol and bumped into a hot air balloonist. the sort of came to me, this idea that i could re-create that edge of sleep, musical sculptural experience by strapping speakers onto hot air balloons and playing music to affect people's sleep. and we would fly over cities to sort of inspire people's imaginations. ♪

that was probably the first artwork that i made where i realized that actually instead of inviting the public to come into a museum, or an opera house, or a theater, that actually we can deliver an artist experience to people at their own homes and communities. narrator: but luke did not stop at the artistic experience. he wanted to go deeper. so he contacted an expert on the , science of sleep. dr. alford: luke has an interest in consciousness, that feeds into the psychology background, so we were trying to look at what would be the impact of these sounds and how could we maximize if you like the pleasant affect of the sounds in terms of people's dream waking

experience? we live in a high-tech society and we have all of these gizmos, , but somehow i think luke often freshnto a beverage of new aspect. very fresh, new aspect. you have to stand back and say, i know the components. he put them together and created something different and new. that is one of the best things about what he does. ♪

♪ narrator: artist luke jerram grew up in a small village in the west of england. as a young boy, he was fascinated by how things worked.

luke: i was interested and quite curious in the world around me. i suppose i was one of those kids to take apart the radio, you know, and just try to work out how it was working. i have always had a fascination for perception and how we see the world because i am colorblind. which actually means that -- yeah, my paintings are awful, to begin with. but i suppose that colorblindness has given me an interest in visual perception. coming from a small village, there wasn't much going on really. i remember when i was about 18, going to the tate in liverpool and seeing an exhibition. there was a little moment, sort of a spark that occurred, that i was somehow fascinated. the sculptures that looked ordinary, sort of figurative sculptures from one angle. and then you look at the artwork

from the front, and you realize the sculptures is incredibly thin. minute, thin figures. so sort of -- they were playing with perception, i suppose. but there was something there that sort of caught my imagination. narrator: years later, luke would apply that same fascination to a sculpture of his own. luke: i made "mia" through my concern for my daughter's upbringing, perhaps, in this digital age we are in. we are all infused to these little gadgets, so she is holding onto, engrossed in her mobile phone standing on the train station.

the interesting thing is from a distance, it does look like a little girl standing alone. as you get closer, the image fragments into all these little cubes. so i was interested in the perceptual phenomena of that. we actually scanned my daughter with an xbox and took that 3-d model and pixelated it. the entire artwork was made by cutting layers and layers of aluminum. and sticking all of those together. then we spent a month putting on all the different squares. my wife came over and saw the artwork, and she said, you cannot use that. because i was colorblind i had been putting on the odd green sticker. so i had to take off all the green stickers, and i got technicians to do the job properly. but the artwork is now in a station. at art college, i studied

sculpture, but also performance art. so what i find now is a lot of , my art projects have a live art element. so, there sculptural, but live in some way as well. also, when a steady performance you would often find yourself in , an audience looking at a performer onstage. and i realized then that the performer was often having the most fun. so there are a number of my art projects now that actually turn s the general public into the performer. so with "play me i'm yours," the pianos act as a blank canvas. and it places the audience at the center of things to make sure they have the most amount of fun. ♪ "play me i'm yours" came from , the laundromat. where i would see the same people every weekend washing their clothes, but nobody was

talking to one another. so i realized there must be all , these invisible communities. people waiting for a bus every day or waiting for a train, and they would recognize each other, but they would not talk. so, i thought by putting a piano, it would act as a catalyst for conversation and get people talking to each -- talking to one another. and in 2007, i installed 15 pianos across birmingham as part of an art project. and the idea seemed to sort of capture people's imagination somehow. so, the pianos left on the streets for the public to play for two or three weeks. each piano got the words "play me, i'm yours." that is an invitation to the public to sit down and engage with it, so saying look, i'm here for you to sit down and engage with. ♪ narrator: after the success of his first pianos in birmingham, luke took his idea to the world, and it soon became a global phenomena.

luke: we have installed "play me, i am yours" in london, in los angeles, new york, toronto, sydney, paris, and geneva. and what is interesting is the experience and the interaction changes from one city to another. so, in london, people will sit down and play a piano. quite shyly, they might film themselves a little bit. in new york, the public would turn up dressed like pop stars, and they would be introducing themselves into the camera. sort of pouting, you know, as if it were a giant "x factor," television competition, they wanted to be discovered. ♪ >> ♪ now we are 1, 2, 3 you cannot stop us now ♪ hayley: he really genuinely wants to engage people with new experiences and questions about

the world that we live in. sarfraz: art is often seen as a bit distant and aloof from ordinary people. but something that engages and create a conversation. makes you think about the urban space you live in. for me, that is to be applauded. ♪ luke: by the end of this year, i will have installed more than 1500 pianos across the globe. more than 10 million people will have played of the pianos over time. they have really kind of connected people. in sao paulo, we put a piano in a train station. and i came across a mother and a daughter. turns out, the mother had worked as a cleaner for four years to put her daughter through school to play piano. a piano in sao paulo, it cost about a year's wages, so she had never seen her daughter play. they came across this piano, and

her daughter sat down, and played beautiful music for her mother. and she burst into tears. with that art project, we reach so many thousands of people. it has connected and changed a lot of people's lives. so, yeah, i am quite proud of that. ♪

>> ideas. ♪ narrator: after finding success with large-scale public engagement artworks, luke jerram knows it is not just the art that is important, but the audience, too. luke: a part of the job for me, apart from making the artwork, my job is to have it communicated, and give it

commissioned, and get it out there. so a lot of people will know about it. a lot of the work i make generates a huge amount of both national and international publicity. narrator: after the extraordinary, public response to this piano installation "play me i'm yours," luke embarked on , his most ambitious artwork yet. luke: "park and slide" came about -- it was just a small, fun idea really. my office is based on the streets where "park and slide" took place. i thought, wouldn't it be nice during the heat wave to commute home on a giant waterslide? narrator: in 2014, luke's vision became a reality. but not even he could have predicted just how big it would become. ♪ luke: on the day, we ended up with 60,000 people turning up to

watch the slide, but also hundreds of journalists. and it led to about 500 news articles that reached more than a billion people around the world. ♪ i tried to make the whole event as cheap as possible so that the slide actually could be repeated by other cities around the world. so, instead of taking money from advertisers, we decided to raise the money through crowdfunding instead. it actually worked really well as a way of kind of creating a sense of ownership. people felt like the slide belonged to them. so, yeah, it made people think about their city in a different way. and i think that is quite important. i think each artwork that i make sort of expresses a different side of my personality, i suppose. so, some of the artworks i make are quite generous.

it is a gift, you know, to a community. whereas others are perhaps an expression of my interest in science, or visual perception. ♪ the idea for these sculptures came from looking in a newspaper and seeing images of viruses , used to illustrate stories of the latest pandemic. so, at the moment, obviously, we got ebola that the world is dealing with. you would often see a brightly colored image of ebola used to illustrate the story. but i realized quite quickly through doing research, that , viruses do not have color. they are smaller than the wavelength of light. so about 10 years ago, i made a , small, glass sculpture of hiv as something to contemplate and think about. and people seemed to like it. it was bought by a museum. now it has led to a body of , glass microbiology artwork that is presented in museums around the world.

what i am doing is i am just making accurate renditions of the virus about a million times larger than the real thing. but it makes an incredibly beautiful. so you are attracted to them. but then when you realize this sculpture is actually representing hiv, for instance, you are kind of repelled by it. so, that creates tension. i suppose i am interested in that tension. the photographs of these glass sculptures actually have become part of the vocabulary of virology. so they get used by scientists all the time, go on book covers and go into medical journals. so there is an unexpected , outcome to lots of my art projects, and i think good artwork will do that. as an artist, at the moment, i am managing about 16 different art projects with -- that i am developing concurrently.

they all have their own timescale. it is a bit stressful at times, but generally, i have a lot of fun. a lot of my art projects, they seem sort of disconnected, but there are narratives that connect them. narrator: today, luke is installing his latest artwork, "withdrawn." he has gone back to his roots and created a large-scale , installation that he hopes will spark the public's imagination. luke: i am interested in the whole experience of an artwork. so for some people, the journey , toward this artwork will start when they hear about it in the newspaper, and go with their kids. they might drive up or there will be a walk to get here to discover it with their kids.

and that journey is all part of the artist's experience. what you end up with is a set of memories. it will be the memories fundamentally that is the legacy for this project. narrator: and just like luke's other artworks, today he has attracted a lot of press, much to the delight of those who commissioned the piece. hayley: personally, i think it is absolutely exceptional. we are trying to recall if we have ever seen anything quite like this before. bringing real-world objects to the woodland. it is a vary -- it is a beer he dealt particular -- it is a magical experience. ruth: the way luke works, he has fabulous ideas. the right person, the right time, and the right place. he will just grab it.

we will work with him collaboratively to deliver it. that is exactly what happened with "withdrawn." luke: i feel like i have just learned how to be an artist, i suppose. and i am sort of beginning to open my wings, spread my wings, and get a sense of what i am capable of doing. to create artwork, it does not have to be huge. or large-scale. you can do outrageous innovative artwork on a work as big as your hand. so it is not always about scale , or complexity. , it can be about simple ideas that can change the world. ♪

♪ ashlee: one of the basic truths of the human condition is that people look to float. and there's no better place to float than here at the dead sea in israel, where large mammals -- where, without any effort at all large mammals can achieve , buoyancy. there is a ritual to doing it the right way.