Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM

Edwin van der Heide

Interact with Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM via FILE ARCHIVE

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

Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM – Netherlands

Spiral of Time captures and stages the diverse soundscape of a specific location over the course of several years. By documenting the unique natural, cultural, spatial, and temporal dynamics of a place, the work honors the contributions of all its actors. Every hour, a one-minute recording is made, resulting in a vast sonic archive over time. It is accessible online through a spiral-shaped interface, allowing listeners to explore the cyclical patterns revealed by navigating the material across different time intervals. 

Since July 17th, 2024, the artist has been recording the sounds of the square in front of MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona). It is a very interesting, diverse, and vibrant urban space. The work is accessible online via https://www.macba.cat/en/spiral-of-time-placa-dels-angels/ and will also be presented physically in the museum starting July 10th, 2025.

Edwin is expanding the project to include other recording locations around the world—not only in urban contexts (dominated by humans) but also in areas governed by nature. The artist dedicated himself to a recording site in the Amazon region. Since February 11th, 2025 Spiral of Time has been installed at the Amazon Rainforest surrounding The UFAM (Federal University of Amazonas) in Manaus. It is home to one of the world’s largest urban forest fragments. Completely surrounded by the dense urban matrix of Manaus, this forest has been isolated since the late 1980s. The forest retains rich ecological features, including areas of mature terra-firme forest, late-stage secondary vegetation, and small patches of white-sand forests. This unique setting offers a rare opportunity to study tropical forest dynamics within a metropolitan environment. 

Spiral of Time-UFAM immerses the listeners in the acoustic life of one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. This contrast between the natural rhythms of the forest and the human-made patterns of the city enriches the broader narrative of the Spiral of Time, offering a deeper reflection on coexistence, change, and continuity across different environments.

BIO

Edwin van der Heide is an artist, composer, and researcher focused on sound, space, and interaction. His work pushes the boundaries of musical composition toward spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. He creates installations, performances, and immersive environments where the audience is placed at the center, encouraged to engage sensorially and investigatively.

Brain Entity

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Luigi Novellino (aka PintoCreation) – Brain Entity – Italy

In a laboratory, a brain-like organism grows rapidly, integrating with technology and evolving into a giant entity that manipulates objects with its mind. He hypnotizes the city, absorbing energy and creating patterns. Efforts to stop him fail, signaling a battle to understand existence. This symbolizes a new era of coexistence, urging us to embrace interconnectivity and navigate a more integrated world.

Bio

Fascinated by the limitless domain of AI, Luigi Novellino adopts the title syntographer, a term that resonates deeply within the community. The artist often asks himself: “am I an artist?” Art, in his view, defies rigid definitions or limits; it represents a fluid expression of creativity that transcends labels. The artist’s ultimate goal is to awaken something in the viewer, provoking thoughts and evoking emotions.

Credits

Music: Odyssey by John Tasoulas

Transparent Shell
Based on concepts, Transparent Shell gains inspiration from a rich variety of sequences in nature. By dissecting, extracting shell structure and restructuring, it reveals the tension of life evolution. Conch-shape helix is blended with vertical, balanced, stable and standard three-dimensional grid. Density and depth of different degrees are on one hand, in mutual erosion, harmony and coexistence and on the other hand, in antagonism, competition and conflict.

Oculus
Oculus is a large-scale, collaborative light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces. It both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. Oculus is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs produced in a transgenic lab while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. As each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, the apprehension of the self affects both individual and collective behavior in unexpected ways. This affective dynamic plays on the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them. The act of gazing at Oculus also puts into play the reciprocal condition of both seeing and being seen.

Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva sonification
via highlike submit
Project ‘Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva generator’ addresses the possibilities of coexistence of animals and machines. In contrast to robots, which are driven by digital artificial intelligence, the project uses a live organism to process the “aliveness” of a simple machine.

clear orb

“The sustainable architectural culture that aspires the coexistence of human, nature and the architecture itself” is a core value of Heerim Architects and Planners in South Korea, the team behind a sparkling orb designed for Santa Monica Pier. A finalist in the biennial site-specific 2016 Land Art Generator Initiative design competition, which promotes the uptake of energy-generating public art that informs, delights, and uplifts communities and visitors, The Clear Orb reveals a playful approach to holistic design. Using transparent luminescent solar concentrators, the installation is purportedly capable of producing up to half-a-million gallons of fresh water each year for California.

Crown Of Thorns

Elisabeth Wierzbicka painter and sculptor, was born in Cracow in 1964. She studied at the Cracow Academy of Fine Art from 1984-1989. In 1989 she continued her training at the Ecole Superiore of Fine Art in Paris and started her career as an international artist in several countries.She works with memory and identity, erasing and dividing time, nature and coexistence.
The ability of the artist is to transform and transcend reality apparently common and banal, in a powerful and evocative potential for stimulating the imagination.

하우스-루커-코
是由豪斯拉克科
“Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster”

In view of the advancing climate change, the exhibition “Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster” at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg poses the question: “How do we want to live in the future?” and draws attention to the socio-political consequences of coexistence under new climatic conditions. In view of the fact that the politicians are hesitant to enforce strict measures for climate protection and the citizens very sluggish about changing their habits, the change appears inevitable. The world community is accordingly confronted with the challenge of investigating various possible means of adapting to the climate change. This exhibition is the first to bring together historical and current climate-related models, concepts, strategies, experiments and utopias from the areas of design, art, architecture and urban development – pursuing not the aim of stopping the climate change, but envisioning means of surviving after disaster has struck. More than twenty-five mobile, temporary and urban capsules intended to make human life possible independently of the surrounding climatic conditions will be on view – from floating cities and body capsules to concepts for fertilizing sea water or injecting the stratosphere with sulphur. A symposium, film programme, readings, performances and workshops will revolve around the interplay between design processes and political factors such as migration, border politics and resource conflicts, and investigate the consequences for social and cultural partitioning and exclusion.

Coexistence