You're listening to Offside Ventures, presented in Alliance with Capital One business.

Three minutes leading up to midnight. The countdown starts, and there's this moment of hush that goes over the crowd as people are all trying to figure out, What am I going to be witnessed to? Something's about to happen, and they all just freeze.

I'm in New York, the city that never sleeps. And tonight, I'm not sleeping either. My business travels take me between Asia and the US, and my jet lag is never-ending. So I've given up on a good night's sleep and ventured out. A friend recommended a late-night event that starts just before midnight. But it's in Times Square. Overcrowded, touristy, full of blindingly bright advertisements. Times Square Really?

I can't think of more than a handful of places in the world where people flock to see advertisements. But people come to Times Square specifically to view the ads, to take photos of the ads, to talk about the ads, and the giant billboards.

Mike McGraw works in the Times Square advertising community.

You can see Times Square from space, which is amazing. It's one of the brightest spots on the planet, which I think is really cool. It's a beacon.

All right, countdown. Any second now. And no, this isn't New Year's Eve. This event happens the 364 other Nights of the Year.

The Midnight Moment is a great opportunity for them to be exposed to art, not what they expect.

The Midnight Moment is the longest running digital art exhibition in the world, stopping everyone in their tracks. Broadway theater goers, night shift workers, people in prom gowns, and wedding dresses, international tourists, and soupless business travelers like me. I'm here.

This is it. This is it. This is it. So you see it, right?

Oh, my God. Yes. You see the whole thing? Travel is something I do for a living, so it's easy to take it for granted. I grew up in Texas to parents from Taiwan. As a family, we traveled all over, from local road trips to destinations like Cancun and Cairo. I got the travel bug early. And for the last 20 years, I've worked mostly out of Asia, hosting a travel show. But if there's one thing I've learned in my journeys from Taipei to Tonga to Toronto, it's that just when you think you know a place, there is always more to discover. All it takes is a second look. When you're traveling for business, your trips don't have to be just about meetings and deadlines. I can help you inject a sense of delight and discovery with these off-site adventures. Trust me, it'll do wonders for your creativity. Trying new things, exploring, and improvising a bit, these are the kinds of soft skills that can be transformative for your life, even if all you have to spare is three minutes. What exactly is the midnight moment? I have to be honest. Every time I tell my friends, I'm going to be in New York, the midnight moment, they're like, What?

Yeah, it's like the world's most monumental well-kept secret in plain sight.

I'm here to see Times Square transform into a vibrant canvas for contemporary art. I'm Janet Shay from Masters of Scale. This is off-site adventures.

The intersection of Broadway and seventh Avenue, which is what creates Times Square, it's often nicknamed the Bow-Tie, because when you look at it from above on a map, it looks like a bow tie.

Mike has worked for 25 years in Times Square. With its gargantuan LED screens running along either side of the street, some call it the Digital Grand Canyon.

It's one of the most open spaces in the city that's not a traditional public park. People can gather, they can relax. There's places like the TKTS, Red Steps, that allows people to just sit and absorb all of the chaos. There's always events and things for people to do, so they never really know what they're going to see on any given day.

Mike's part of the selection committee that chooses the public art that is displayed here every night at midnight, 364 days out of the year.

The only day it doesn't is New Year's Eve. It's really amazing to be able to see works of art by people that normally wouldn't have an opportunity to display it in a space as large as Times Square.

With over 45 million visitors a year, Times Square is the most visited destination in the entire US. So you're saying this is one of the busiest places in the world?

We have, at this point, around 400,000 people coming through the district every day.

Jean Cooney is the Director of Times Square Arts. What exactly is the Midnight Moment?

Basically, what it is, is a video program that's been running for 10 years. Every single night of the year in Times Square on now about 100 billboards.

A hundred billboards. Jean says the Midnight Moment is an opportunity to flip the script on this mecca of consumerism.

Times Square is known also amongst many things, a place for this spectacular commercialism. It's really great when artists can come in and play with that a little bit and critique it even.

Was that a difficult thing to initiate? Because you're taking away prime, billboard, real estate, and also just the cost of running it.

I'd never thought I would say this before working in Times Square, but some of these billboards are beautiful. They're gorgeous platforms for video art and the moving image. And so on the one hand, if you're really about your bottom line, we can play to that because it shows off your assets in this gorgeous way, in this unexpected way. But also, I think that creating something that is really special and unique that you could find nowhere else is not only good for the general public, but maybe even good for business.

Every midnight in Times Square, well, actually at 11:57, for three minutes, art and commerce converge, which for me raises the question, what happens when a place that's so monumentally commercial, the Digital Grand Canyon, gets taken over by art? We'll find out shortly when we meet an artist whose work is being displayed at a midnight moment and experience it alongside her.

Our 10-year anniversary as a company was coming up, and I said, I really want to do something big. We settled on the idea that we were going to take a grand vacation together.

That's Capital One business customer and Pinnacle Company's founder Chris Renner, with a real-life inspirational travel moment.

At the time, we had about 23 employees, and we chose to invite them and their significant others to a tropical vacation to Mexico. Everyone honestly thought we were crazy. It was 10 years, and it was time to celebrate as a team. We had survived the first few years of every small business, the uncertainty of, are you going to make it or not? So we planned this amazing trip. We ended up at the little beachside restaurant with margaritas in hand and toes in sand, and the sun was setting. It was magical just to be there together.

Using his Capital One Venturex business card, Chris was able to apply his travel rewards to fund his first company trip, which has become an annual tradition. This inspirational travel moment is part of Capital One business's spotlight on real entrepreneurs and their business's off-site adventures. To hear more stories from real business owners, visit capitalone. Com/business-hub. Again, that's capitalone. Com/business-hub.

There's something powerful about New York at night, and your vision goes right through the architecture into the night sky.

Tonight's Midnight Moment is a stunning piece by artist Shazia Sikandar. She's a Pakistani-American visual artist, and her work moves between different formats and mediums: painting, sculpture, mosaic, installation, animation, and video.

I used to have a studio here, just two blocks away, and I enjoyed looking up at the screen, so I never imagined that I would be showing works on those screens.

Shazia Maria's work has been shown in the collections of the Met, MoMA, and the Whitney, among many others. Now her exhibition space is all of Times Square. You've been displayed all over the world in museums. What is it about Times Square that you're like, Okay, this is different. I've done something incredible, absolutely incredible with this space that you have here?

Well, the most exciting thing of showing the work in Times Square is that my work forces some of the advertising madness to stop even for a moment. And of course, access to the state-of-the-art technology, all these fantastic LED screens, the newer ones, getting access to that. I think any artist would love it.

Starting at 11:57 tonight, her work will take over nine blocks of commercial billboards.

The work that I have on display here is really about offering a quieter moment, and just that tension with the stimulus that's around us makes having the work here a Perhaps a little subversive but enjoyable for me.

Shazia began her practice in art school studying miniature painting. It's there that she became fascinated by deconstructing the incredible puzzles of manuscript paintings, which she now brings into dialog with her contemporary art. Shazia's piece for this Midnight Moment is called Reckoning, imagined as a fictional, Indo-Persian-Turkish miniature painting come to life, all created from ink drawings. Well, I'm also so excited to see the crowd's reaction because there are so many people here. I know. I know. I know they're like most people. They have no idea what's about to happen in one minute.

Yeah, I want to see that, too. Do people- Do they stop?

Stop.

Or nobody even notices it. I have no idea.

No, no. There's no way. The signal to the crowd that something unexpected is about to start is when a hundred giant screens above their heads switch to that old-style black and white film leader, Counting Down. All right, Count Down.

Oh, here. This is it. This is it. So you see it, right?

Oh, my God. Yes. You see the whole thing? Reckoning starts with a shower of illumination that comes down from the top of each screen. Look, everybody's looking.

Yeah.

And as these giant screens synchronize with Shazia's gorgeous art, this crowd of strangers from all over the world somehow do, too. Listen to that sound. Within the first 30 seconds, the crowd in Times Square spontaneously breaks into applause and real tears.

They're cheering. Oh my gosh. I love it.

Shazia describes her piece as stepping into a miniature painting and just letting it sing.

The ability to see works that were made at a very small scale have an infinity about them that here it just feels like the images have taken off and they're just floating in space.

Her art is accompanied by the music of her longtime collaborator, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Du Yun. For the premiere and for One Night Only, the audience in Timesquare heard their collaboration.

The whole crowd was in sync with the music and moving. Their bodies were in sync with it. That was really gorgeous. My drawings almost function as the libretto.

Shazia says the point of origin for reckoning is a female face.

It's composed of millions of particles. It's descending and initiates a rite of passage. And that's where the score and the chanting is all based on. But as it splinters into these million particles, that's where you see the two figures emerge in a dance or a joust or a wrestling match. They are tumbling and moving in space, but you can't fully gather who they are. But it is that moment of reckoning or it's that moment of a struggle.

And then an uprooted tree he floats away into space. Shazia says each of these images can represent so much.

It could be the human struggle for truth. It could be the creative spirit.

And then two trees come together, and for a moment, they touch, creating this ending of nurturing and abundance. Everybody has their cameras on. Everybody is filming.

That's so cool, right? Yes.

For nine blocks, there's a sea of people holding their phones above their heads, not knowing exactly what's happening all around them, but wanting to capture this moment of beauty.

See how fast it goes?

Yeah, there.

Reckoning fades to black in Times Square. Oh, my God. That was amazing. I embrace Shazia as this entire crowd has embraced her exquisite Midnight Moment. They're cheering for you.

I know. I have no idea what that was.

You can't experience this in a gallery.

We have no idea what that was.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Super. Shazia laughs as she leaves, thinking about how this crowd might explain what they just saw. But I stayed behind, where others like me were certain of one thing. We were in awe of what just happened. My producers were also taken aback. To be honest, I was a little sentimental when all of the art disappeared and then all of the ads came back. I'm not going to lie, it made me a little sad. It was their first time experiencing the midnight moment in Times Square. Even though they both live in New York. It changed me in that way that I saw what beauty could be in this place that appears only for this few moments once a day. I wish there was more space for that.

I know, but what I feel like was so special is that no matter how commercial it's gotten, no matter how expensive everything is, no matter how much the city has changed, there is still a pulse. There's still something underneath all of that which is exciting and vibrant and intentional and powerful. It's almost like you're seeing a beating heart of New York.

Times Square Arts presents a new Midnight Moment each month. Over the last 10 years, they featured the works of more than 100 artists, all of which you can watch online, including Shazia Sikandar's Spectacular Reckoning. A public arts program and the advertising community, Jean Cooney calls their collaboration a no-brainer to offer this three-minute break each day from the usual sensory overload.

In terms of offering free public art in that very commercialized space, yeah, I think that's really important. To have something on offer for free and making sure that we're inviting the public here in these very unexpected and unforgettable ways, it's hard to not get on board with that.

When Times Square transforms almost into a town square with people from all over the world standing together and cheering for art. Maybe it's a no-brainer. I'd call it genius.

It's one of those experiences where you carry it with you and you're like, What are the other things that are happening in the city that are unexpected? It gives you permission to be blown away, and that's really awesome.

And that's the essence of off-site Offsite adventures, where any of us as business travelers might find extraordinary escapes to replenish the mind and spirit, even for a moment that might just last three minutes. For Offsite adventures, I'm Janet Shay. See this story come to life in our video series on mastersofscale. Com/offsite. Offside Ventures is made in alliance with Capital One business. Marybeth Kirschner produced the show with support from Juliet Louini. Our executive producers are Jay Punjabi, Erika Flynn, and Marybeth Kirschner. Offside Ventures was made with John Hershian, Samantha Samantha Johnson, Chris Olson, and the team at revelator. Original music and sound design by Ryan Holladay. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pew. Our writers are Kate Turgownik May and Dan Neelen. Our head of podcast is Litaal Malad. Special thanks to Jordan Larson-Werner, Alfonso Bravo, Katie Blazing, Anya Profumo, Jodin Dorsey, Sarah Tartere, Chaz Edwards, Samantha Hennig, Nikki Williams, Kelsi Capitano, Tim Cronin, Sammi Uputa, Justin Winslow, Colin Howarth, Brandon Klein, Brad Wurl, and Lori Hoffmann. I'm Janet Shay, your host and perpetual business traveler. Visit mastersofscale. Com/offsite to learn more about the show. Keep traveling.