The Miami Design District & EDGLRD Reimagine a New Creative Future

On the heels of an incredibly electric Art Basel, the Miami Design District has partnered with EDGLRD, the groundbreaking creative studio founded by acclaimed filmmaker Harmony Korine, to unveil a pioneering short film that reimagines the neighborhood’s future. This ambitious project fuses AI-assisted animation with handcrafted visuals, marking a novel approach to blending tactile artistry, real animal motion, and speculative storytelling.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Miami Design District

The film portrays the Miami Design District as a surreal biophilic dreamscape—a lush, breathing ecosystem where digital nature erupts from storefronts, iconic buildings pulse with life, and the urban environment evolves in harmony with a solitary character’s introspective journey. Vibrant oranges and teals dominate the palette, echoing the district’s maximalist ethos of “always more,” while paper-like textures intermingle with high-fashion displays and fantastical organic growths. The result is a visual poem that marries digital couture with speculative ecology, inviting viewers to envision a world where nature and high design coexist in vibrant, unexpected harmony.

“The goal wasn’t to showcase technology for its own sake,” explains EDGLRD’s creative director. “It was to explore how emotional, human-centered storytelling can emerge from it. We used AI as a collaborator to discover, not just execute.” This philosophy underscores the project’s innovative techniques, including the groundbreaking use of AI to animate authentic animal movements within holographic-inspired projections. Prompt-engineered AI styleframes enabled rapid iteration on visuals rooted in biophilic architecture and mixed-media composition, seamlessly integrating real footage of the Design District’s facades with handcrafted elements and digital surrealism.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Miami Design District

Harmony Korine, founder of EDGLRD, adds, “We were inspired to play with the visual energy inside the Design District and to integrate new animated forms and explore the feeling of sensory exploration.” Known for pushing boundaries in film and multimedia, Korine’s studio continues to pioneer AI-driven creativity, building on its reputation for immersive, boundary-blurring works.

Set against the backdrop of the district’s renowned architecture, the short film crafts a fictional yet profoundly resonant vision: a neighborhood transformed into a symbiotic paradise of nature and design. This collaboration not only celebrates the Miami Design District’s forward-thinking spirit but also signals a new era in artistic expression, where technology amplifies human imagination.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Miami Design District

As the project debuts, it promises to captivate audiences with its poetic collision of the real and the speculative, reinforcing Miami’s status as a global epicenter of creativity and innovation.