Technosoma — Sensitive Circuits in the Flesh of the Machine

David Da Paz

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – WORKSHOP
Electronic Language International Festival

Tecnosoma — Sensitive Circuits in the Flesh of the Machine – Brazil

In this workshop, participants will explore the fusion of body, technology, and artificial intelligence, creating interactive experiences with capacitive sensors and real-time generative models. Inspired by the concept of the Technosome—the machine as a sensitive, pulsating organism—the workshop explores how human touch can generate electrical signals that trigger audiovisual, auditory, and light responses. Microcontrollers (Arduino and ESP32), generative AI, and sensory interactivity will be covered.

BIO

Artist, researcher, and developer specializing in AI, machine learning, and IoT, he has worked for over 10 years with interactive art, generative systems, and sensory installations. He participated in the Artropocode residency (Spain) and the Spontaneous Combustion Residency (London), exploring cyberurban performances and locative media.

Digital Origami: Exploring Procedural Animation

John Otero

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – WORKSHOP
Electronic Language International Festival

Digital Origami: Exploring Procedural Animation – Brazil

This workshop introduces procedural animation, a technique that uses mathematical parameters to create automated movements. Using the free version of Houdini software, participants will learn how to digitally assemble and animate origami, exploring the software’s features to simulate movements and behaviors. The creative possibilities of this approach will also be discussed, highlighting applications in animation, generative design, and visual effects.

BIO

João Otero is a visual artist, illustrator, animator, teacher, and visual arts graduate student at ECA-USP. He is a member of the Realidades research and outreach group. He holds a scholarship from the CAPES Teaching Initiation Program in the arts field; he also received a PUB scientific initiation scholarship, researching digital techniques applied to comic book production.

Surfaces

IED Partnership

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – LED SHOW
Electronic Language International Festival
 

Surfaces – Brazil

Concrete beams, glass, brick walls, cement… Buildings are built to last, to withstand time. LED screens, on the other hand, thrive on the light they emit—they turn on, blend, and fade. They are ephemeral. When a building is clad in LEDs, the permanent and the transient meet, between what already is and what might become. In the iconic FIESP building on Avenida Paulista, surface design transforms architecture into a field of experimentation. There, students from IED SP explore new possibilities for this building’s existence, redefining the structure through animated light and design.

BIO

Students of the Bachelor’s degree in Graphic and Digital Design at the Istituto Europeo Di Design (IED SP) have come together to create a collective work of animations inspired by surface design, its redefinition, and media materialization, seeking to explore language for visual communication projects. IED is an international training and research network in Design, Fashion, Visual Communication, and Creative Management.

Approximations of a Body Part

Jon Chambers

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Video Art
Electronic Language International Festival

Approximations of a Body Part – United States

A machine learning experiment that takes custom model outputs trained on 3D body scans and uses them in other model inputs. After a few cycles, the resulting videos depict terrifying, seductive and uncanny distant echoes of the original body.

BIO

Jon Chambers is an artist and educator based in New Orleans. His work explores how we negotiate our physical and virtual lives to highlight a fractured sense of self as we attempt to coalesce disparate echoes of reference into something coherent amidst the difficulty of manifesting or orienting oneself within approximation and simulation overload.

Impression: São Paulo

#FFFF00

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Video Art
Electronic Language International Festival

Impression: São Paulo – Taiwan

This is a silent video of colors sourced from São Paulo, which #FFFF00 have never been to, photos found on the Internet. While Impressionists painted outdoors in order to capture “the realistic scenes outside the studio,” today’s artists no longer do this — for the world now comes to us in the form of image. The work highlights this mediated reality, evoking the impression of the place with a hypnotic atmosphere.

BIO

#FFFF00 is imagining another art. Her mi̍h-kiānn swings between joke and protest against institutions. With appropriation, multiplicity and low-budget as main tools, strives to pave the way for outsiders. Graduated from National Taiwan University of Arts, has participated in group exhibitions in Asia, Europe, and America.

Green Light

Seongmin Kim

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Cine SYN
Electronic Language International Festival

Green Light – South Korea

With the ecosystem destroyed after a nuclear war, Mari, a survivor, does everything she can to rebuild it. When she encounters a robot soldier in an abandoned city, everything changes.

BIO
Seongmin Kim is an animation film director. Born in South Korea, he studied 3D animation and earned a master’s degree in digital media. He has worked on several projects at VFX and animation companies in South Korea. Green Light was completed in 2016 with the support of KOCCA, and has won awards at numerous film festivals, both national and international.

Aquarela de Íons

Arthur Boeira e Gustavo Milward

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Arte e Tecnologia
Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica

Aquarela de Íons – Brazil

Aquarela de Íons is an artwork-device that translates solar flares and magnetic activity cycles into forces within the exhibition space. Inspired by satellites, the sculpture captures real-time data of solar activity, creating a data-driven artwork that reacts to the presence of viewers in an immersive and generative environment. The system translates spatial information into sound, light, and image, establishing an interface between the cosmos and human territory. The piece invites reflection on the impact of space weather—an aurora borealis brought to life, transforming astronomical data into an aesthetic experience.

BIO

Arthur Boeira has been conducting transdisciplinary research since 2015, exploring the philosophy of science and technology as applied to artistic practices. Gustavo Milward (Drawlim) specializes in interactive art and algorithmic narratives, investigating the relationship between body, space, and code.

Synthetika

Unlike Hegel, who called the set of ideas of a given era the “spirit of the times” (Zeitgeist), we could call our era “Zeitsynthetik” (the time of the synthetic). In the classical period, art was inseparable from religion, whose essence was spirituality; in modernity, spirituality was replaced by the ideologies of grand narratives (capitalism and socialism). The classical arts invented poetics and aesthetics: the beautiful and the sublime. Modern art invented the avant-garde that proposed to be revolutionary, its driving force was the dialectic of the new without the old, and on the other hand, postmodernists mixed everything with everything, including the old with the new. Today we live in the era of synthetic technologies, the era of disruptive technologies. In which the new of modernity is no longer sufficient or surprising. Syntheticity is the new vector: synthetic algorithms; synthetic virtual realities; synthetic intelligences. The driving force behind synthetic art is: 1) the fusion of new art and technological innovation, and 2) the inter-creativity between the artist and artificial creativity. Prompt engineers strategically simulate personas for AIs in order to move away from triviality and thus obtain more creative results. Synthetic intelligences are no longer just instruments, but partners of artists in the construction of a creative and innovative symbiosis.

Art and culture are going through a moment in which creativity ceases to be just human, it becomes artificial; syntheticity thus prospects a post-culture, a new FORM: the form SYNTHETIKA.

Ricardo Barreto

Curator and co-founder of FILE

Electronic Language International Festival

f5x5x5
f5x5x5 is a kinetic light sculpture conceived of and realized by the belgian design studio lab[au]. the project was most recently installed in the basilique de saint denis in paris for nuit blanche 2009. the design consists of fixed and kinetic aluminum frames that can move randomly or be programmed for use as a low resolution display. the piece is designed as a framework, taking inspiration from software development
frameworks. in the case of the project, the framework is a five by five module which is repeated five times to create the final form. one side of the work is white, while the other is black. the 125 pixel screen works on binary language and can transform captured data from the physical environment into kinetic actions.

LIGHT

“Helen Pashgian is a pioneer and pre-eminent member of the California Light and Space Movement. Her signature forms include columns, discs and spheres in delicate and rich coloration, often with an isolated element suspended, embedded or encased within. Pashgian’s innovative application of industrial epoxies, plastics and resins effect semi-translucent surfaces that simultaneously filter and contain illumination. Activated by light, these sculptures resonate in form and spatiality, both inner and outer.” Dimitris Lempesis

퐁 치 웨이

‘Time is a Dimension’

The beauty of photography, in its essence, is conveyed by capturing a moment in time and freezing it out of its context. Singapore-based photographer Fong Qi Wei, however, uses photography to show the passage of time. In his time lapse series called ‘Time is a Dimension’, Fong doesn’t use a typical long exposure trick. He captures the passing time by layering different photos of the same spot with clear edge lines of each frame. Each collage is digitally cut and created from pictures Fong takes within 2 to to 4 hours. Fong usually works at sunrise or sunset, as the light and color palettes are most varied at those times.
“The basic structure of a landscape is present in every piece. But each panel or concentric layer shows a different slice of time, which is related to the adjacent panel/layer. The transition from daytime to night is gradual and noticeable in every piece, but would not be something you expect to see in a still image. Similarly, our experience of a scene is more than a snapshot,” explains Fong.

parallel image
This work consists of 2500 magnetic wire cables that connect an emitter (one square meter made of epoxy resin) that consists of a 50 × 50 grid with photo sensors that have their counterparts in the receiver with a grid of bulbs. Thus the sensors detect the light and transmit in parallel each pixel (“image element”) with its corresponding brightness effect to the light bulb in the receiver. Unlike conventional electronic image transmission procedures, “A Parallel Image” uses a technologically transparent procedure, transmitting to the viewer a correspondence between the real world and its transmission.

Cloud
The hand-bent steel substructure of the sculpture is covered in a skin of incandescent light bulbs (new and burnt out), and rear-lit from within by 250 compact fluorescent bulbs, pulling a total power of approximately 20 amps (the equivalent of two household outlets  ).Each of these bulbs is attached to a pull-string, allowing viewers to control the illumination of the structure – like lightning in the CLOUD above them.

Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art
This building proposal challenges the traditional definition of a museum and the conventional relationship between building and site. The ground floor of the building is reduced to a nominal footprint, enclosing only enough space for basic services, structure and ticketing functions. The ground plane is primarily reserved for exterior public space, including an art park, Hall of Fame, and garden walk. The bulk of the program and building mass are split by the open ground floor. Half of the building is coupled with the earth while the other half hovers in the air. The purpose is twofold; to minimize the damaging effects of extreme local weather by harnessing environmental flows toward productive outcomes and to re-conceptualize the identity of a modern art museum. The manicured roof plane of the below ground program is pocketed with water absorbing vegetation and catchment systems, while the hovering museum above expands to form open atriums, allowing diffuse light to brighten the space and passive airflow to comfortably condition the building.The program of the museum is interconnected. The Contemporary Museum of Art, Children’s Museum of Art and Administration are located within the floating mass. The lecture hall, parking, art resource center, library and classrooms are located below ground. The programs below ground are easily accessible and directly connected through vertical circulation tubes, providing both structural support for the floating mass above and space for movement systems, such as escalators, stairs and elevators between levels. All of the below ground programs are flooded with diffuse light passing through skylights that penetrate the landscape.

努维尔
جان نوفيل
ז’אן נובל
ジャン·ヌーヴェル
Жан Нувель
장 누벨
Serpentine Pavilion

The design contrasted lightweight materials with dramatic metal cantilevered structures, rendered in a vivid red that, in a play of opposites, contrasts with the green of its park setting. In London, the colour reflects the iconic British images of traditional telephone boxes, postboxes and London buses. The building consists of bold geometric forms, large retractable awnings and a sloped freestanding wall that stands 12m above the lawn.
Striking glass, polycarbonate and fabric structures create a versatile system of interior and exterior spaces, while the flexible auditorium accommodates the changing summer weather and Park Nights, the Serpentine’s acclaimed programme of public talks and events, which attracts up to 250,000 visitors each summer.
Nouvel’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, the architect’s first completed building in the UK, operates as a publicly accessible structure within Kensington Gardens and as a café. The pavilion design highlights the idea of play with its incorporation of traditional French outdoor table-tennis tables.
This 2010 Pavilion is the tenth commission in the gallery’s annual series, the world’s first and most ambitious architectural programme of its kind, which has become an international site for architectural experimentation and follows a long tradition of pavilions by some of the world’s greatest architects. The immediacy of the commission – a maximum of six months from invitation to completion – provides a unique model worldwide.