FILE 2026

Registration is now open for participation in  FILE – Electronic Language International Festival 2026 , one of the most important events dedicated to art and technology. FILE invites Brazilian and international artists , as well as researchers, educators, and creators , to submit original artistic works and educational proposals — lectures, workshops, and training activities — focused on contemporary technological poetics.

Applications are open until February 19, 2026 .

With 26 years of experience , FILE is a non-profit cultural organization dedicated to promoting creation, research, and experimentation in Art and Technology , bringing together artists, scientists, programmers, and thinkers around exhibitions, events, and publications. The selected projects will be part of the FILE 2026 program, scheduled to take place at the FIESP Cultural Center in São Paulo, between August 18 and October 11, 2026,  with the possibility of parallel activities in other Brazilian states.

The call welcomes proposals in a wide variety of languages ​​and formats, intended for indoor or outdoor environments , in which the aesthetic experience emerges from the encounter between interfaces, data, space, and body . FILE 2026 seeks projects that propose new forms of perception, interaction, and critical and poetic reflection , expanding the debate on the aesthetic, cultural, social, and sensory impacts of contemporary technologies.

Access the registration form.

FILE 2026

Augmented and Virtual Reality Festival: brings together immersive practices in simulated three-dimensional environments and expands the perception of reality through the superimposition of digital layers onto physical space.  The works use mobile devices, glasses, and spatial interfaces to insert virtual objects, narratives, and data into the real world or transport the public to sensory and interactive digital universes. These languages ​​challenge the boundaries between the material and the informational, exploring subtle or monumental interventions, creating multidimensionality in the environment. Issues of presence, body, narrative, memory, surveillance, and technological mediation are central, configuring a fertile field of aesthetic and critical investigation into contemporary ways of inhabiting and perceiving space.

Applications are open until February 19, 2026. Access  the application form.

FILE 2026 | GENERAL REGULATIONS

Mark Napier has been creating artwork exclusively for the Web since 1995. He combines his training as a painter with his expertise as a software developer to create “art interfaces,” software that addresses issues of authority, ownership, and territory in the virtual world.
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“A symbol of the human desire to monumentalize ideas in physical form, the Empire State Building is a subject of Mark Napier’s artwork in the past four years. This icon of American hegemony is key to exploring shifting structures of power, specifically the transition from steel to software as the medium of power in our time.”Mark Napier

Metamembrana

A projeção representa uma paisagem em que num único panorama somam-se quatro projeções na horizontal em uma proporção de 16/3. Inspirado nos retábulos dos mestres flamengos Hyeronimus Bosch e Pieter Bruegel, a paisagem reproduz colinas, cidades, céus, mares e uma grande quantidade de situações protagonizadas por diferentes personagens. Não se trata de uma situação estática como daquelas pinturas, mas sim de uma colagem animada e variável vinculando o comportamento interativo das interfaces. A projeção dispõe de diferentes estados ou camadas, até sete, que resultam em uma grande diversidade interativa. As interfaces ou dispositivos sensíveis são ativados pelos espectadores que se convertem em usuários da instalação tanto no âmbito local como no resto das cidades. A interação também se produz por outros parâmetros, como o clima ou certos comportamentos sociais. Metamembrana tem uma clara vontade de estabelecer elementos de identificação com o espectador para fazê-lo participar da obra. Estão previstas três estratégias para consegui-lo: a primeira, previamente, mediante a produção de conteúdos in situ, em cada uma das cidades, com entidades e elementos próprios do lugar. A segunda, durante a exposição inserindo imagens dinâmicas como, por exemplo, câmeras conectadas a vários pontos da cidade ou capturas das faces de alguns espectadores. E a terceira, de maneira pontual, produzindo elementos ao vivo em cada uma das cidades que se retransmitem pela rede durante o período de exibição da peça.

SELF ABSORBED

Tim Murray-Browne

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

SELF ABSORBED – Scotland

SELF ABSORBED is an interactive installation exploring how AI interprets human identity. A custom model reads the visitor’s body, linking each pose to generative audiovisual output. Unlike human-designed interfaces built on reductive abstractions, this interaction emerges from unsupervised machine learning, forming a connection with a multidimensional, non-linear, and non-representational digital space.

BIO

Tim Murray-Browne is an interactive artist and creative coder. He creates installations and performances using the moving body to shape immersive experiences. His work questions what aspects of our humanity are lost as we entangle ourselves with the bureaucratic mechanics of AI and digital technologies.

Veillance

Louis-Philippe Rondeau

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

Veillance – Canada

Inspired by Steve Mann’s research, Veillance explores mutual surveillance between citizens and institutions. While observing digitized portraits of others, visitors also have their image captured and added to the archive. Yet through subtle gestures and changes in appearance, one can evade the scan, effectively hijacking the scanography process.

BIO

Louis-Philippe Rondeau designs playful, unconventional devices that explore self-representation and performance. His research-creation practice prioritizes user-friendly design, concealing complex code behind intuitive physical interfaces.

Les petits chercheurs de sons
Les Dirty Tangible Interfaces constituent une famille de contrôleurs basés sur l’interaction avec des matériaux tangibles. Elles permettent de contrôler par exemple une tablette de la même manière que l’écran tactile le permet… et elles s’en écartent en fournissant une interaction infiniment nuancée et expressive.

Swamp Radio
Swamp Radio gets beyond our anthropocenic reality, and maintains connections between the humans and other species. By artistic interventions and transmitting interfaces, the Swamp Radio is turned into a social media megaphone for invisible and inaudible actors of nature. The artists are installing microbial fuel cells, environmental monitoring sensors and transmitting devices to transform the swamps into dynamic power plants and the 21st century multi-voiced broadcast media.

朱利安·奥利弗
줄리안 올리버
ג’וליאן אוליבר
ジュリアン・オリバー
Джулиан Оливер
the transparency grenade
Julian Oliver é um artista nascido na Nova Zelândia, desenvolvedor de software livre, professor e escritor ocasional, sediado em Madri, Espanha. Ele apresentou trabalhos e obras de arte em muitos eventos e conferências internacionais sobre arte eletrônica. Julian deu diversos workshops e aulas sobre design de jogos, desenvolvimento artístico de jogos, arquitetura virtual, design de interfaces, realidade aumentada e práticas de desenvolvimento de código aberto em todo o mundo.

Miroir fuyant
My artistic approach takes place at the crossroads between object, sculpture and mediatics technologies: The materiality test the immateriality and vice-versa. All of that began with an important interest for the relationship which keepen by the spectator with outside relayed by screen and interfaces.

Cliff Hanger

Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher started their collaborative practice in 2002. Trained as a visual artist, Jeff Shore develops the visible sculptures and mechanisms, while Jon Fisher builds the electronics, writes the software, and creates the original soundtracks; for this he uses both digital and analog audio sources. The result of their collaboration is a series of kinetic devices and installations that generate live animated video and musical compositions. Similar to cinema storytelling, the movement in the pieces relate to the accompanying soundtrack or animation, and similar to a theater of automata, the pieces create precise and captivating sequential events. Bridging high and low-tech devices and instruments, the collaborative team creates mechanically activated moments of wonder, explores the relationship between automatism and chance, and comments on the impact of technology interfaces in our lives.

Homage to B. Franklin
File Festival
Homage to B. Franklin is an interactive sound installation. Like Franklin, we also got inspired by the glass harps, so popular in the eighteenth century and still enjoyed nowadays. With this reference in mind, we aim to realize a dialogue between the past and the approach to explore sonority from elements of everyday life -like simple crystal glasses filled with water- and the present, in which we use electronic synthesizers and tangible digital interfaces to generate music. In both cases, there is something magical about being able to generate music without necessarily being an instrumentalist, without making use of classical or conventional instruments. In both, the resulting sound is different from what these instruments can generate, but still music. Participation from the audience is essential for this work to make sense. This is not an artwork of mere contemplative character. We are interested in motivating the participation and the dialogue work-individual and between individuals, since this is a project in which one can interact in groups.

New Tangible Interfaces TTI

Interactive surfaces makes everyday objects multi-functional and fun. Reactive technologies have now enabled normal interfaces with new functions and new possibilities. The role of the surface is changing radically, according to how it’s designed and incorporated with objects. My proposal was to re-define the role of the surface in future lifestyle, exploring how surfaces can be an integrated as part of a product or environment.

TTI, (standing for Tangible Textural Interface) is a new sound system that embeds a tactile surface. TTI has flexibility that enables people to physically touch and feel the response through the controls and physical morph of the surface. TTI delivers new aesthetics through integrated flexible surfaces as interface material unlike adapting conventional materials for interfaces such as plastic or glass. Unlike existing 2D interfaces, TTI has a curved 3D surface opening up new possibilities in making flexible forms and shapes within the interface.

TTI consists of 3 main functions, backwards and forwards, volume control and equaliser, having a physical feedback and control interface within one surface. As you control the functions, the left surface physically responds to the controls. Tactile surface also responds to the beat of the music.