Digital Display City Programming

In December 2025, the Santa Monica City Council adopted a Digital Display District Ordinance that allows large scale, digital displays on specific locations on Third Street Promenade. 

The ordinance dedicates a portion of the time on these displays to city programming that supports artistic expression, public communication, and community engagement. As the first two digital displays near completion, on the northeast corner of Arizona Avenue and Third Street Promenade and the southwest corner of Wilshire and Third Street Promenade, the city has launched a new Art in Motion Program, or AMP, showcasing the work of local and national artists. A portion of the display time will also be dedicated to city initiatives, events and alerts.

Art in Motion Program (AMP) 

AMP presents high-quality moving-image artworks at set times throughout the daily display period, which varies from 19 to 20 hours a day seasonally. AMP presents a public art experience that is free and accessible to residents and visitors, while supporting artists, cultural institutions, and the local creative economy. There will be an AMP feature at the top and half-hour marks every hour. 

Artworks currently on view:

September program at top of the hour: 

Nancy Baker Cahill, “Petit Mort”, 2026.
“Petit Mort” attempts to collapse traditional moving images and screens with a living, breathing artwork that threatens to spill out and into open shared space. Graphite drawings, torn into sculptures which form the shifting landscape in the video, glisten as they breathe, expand, and contract. “Petit Mort” invites conversations about what is real, what is alive, and what we see and feel when digital/analog boundaries are blurred. Hybridity is the artwork’s beating heart. “Petit Mort” is a part of Cahill’s “Slipstream” series (2021-2023), and a version of this work is in LACMA’s permanent collection. 

Ranu Mukherjee, “Ensemble for Non-Linear Time”, 2019-2023
“Ensemble for Non-Linear Time” (2019-2023) engages speculative fiction as an embodied process to address themes of time, rupture, migration and our deep relationships to the natural world. This work was made in collaboration with choreographer Hope Mohr, dancers Belinda He, Irene Hsi and Karla Quintero, performing artists Beatriz Escobar, Sunroop Kaur and Claudia Soares and sound artists Charlotte Law and Mike Maurillo (note the AMP presentation is offered without sound). The work evolved by engaging imaginary forests in residencies and workshops that put dance, visual art and social practice in conversation. Forests hold dynamics of survival, histories of colonization and lush internal spaces of desire, leading us in imagining differently tuned worlds. 

Maggie West, “Terra”, 2026
Maggie West uses light and color as tools to transform familiar elements of the natural world, encouraging viewers to encounter them with a renewed sense of attention and wonder. Timelapse photography is central to this process, allowing West to reveal movements, rhythms, and patterns in nature that occur beyond the pace of ordinary human perception. By shifting nature outside of its expected visual and temporal context, the artist’s work explores how perception can be altered through illumination, color, scale, and time. West meticulously crafted the video by employing time-lapse photography to capture the delicate blooming of real, individual plants, including cacti, under vibrant, multi-colored lighting. The cacti, known for their rare and brief flowering periods, add a sense of fleeting beauty and resilience to the scenes. 

September program, on the half-hour:

Arte Museum presents "WAVE" and "JUNGLE 'TROPIC'"

Artist: Arte Museum; Project Managers: Jae Hwang, Hye Park, Alex Ryu; Project Executives: Jin Lee (Vice President), Victor Choe (Vice President)

A colossal wave approaches the viewers from within a giant glass tank, extended using anamorphic techniques. Finally, it crashes against the glass wall. Viewers can experience the paradoxical resonance of the wave as it constantly rises and seemingly overflows, only to crash into foam on the glass wall. WAVE was initially developed for display in Seoul's Samseong-dong area in 2020 by d'strict. It brought the raw power of Mother Nature to the center of a city offering solace and comfort to countless viewers during the pandemic.

JUNGLE ‘TROPIC’, 2026

The dazzling jungle constantly changes colors. Meet mystical animals that change their body color to become one with the ever-changing jungle.

Arte Museum is an immersive media art exhibition created by d’strict, a South Korean digital design and art company. Centered around the theme of ‘Eternal Nature,’ Arte Museum transforms natural elements and spaces into immersive media art, combining large-scale visuals, sound, and scent to create a multisensory experience. Since opening its first location in Jeju, Korea in 2020, Arte Museum has expanded to a total of eight locations around the world, with each location presenting a distinct concept and exclusive artworks inspired by local flora and fauna and cultural heritage. Established in 2004, d’strict is a South Korean digital design and art company that creates innovative spatial experiences through content powered by digital media technology. In 2020, d’strict gained recognition with the launch of WAVE, a public media art installation that became a global sensation. Arte Museum in Santa Monica opens within the Digital Display District at Santa Monica Place in November 2026.