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FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Weidi Zhang & Rodger Luo

ReCollection

Weidi Zhang & Rodger Luo

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

 

ReCollection – China | United States

ReCollection is an interactive installation that uses artificial intelligence to construct synthetic collective visual memories from natural language input. The work blurs the line between memory and imagination through experimental visualizations and AI systems, prompting reflection on how narratives of memory are shaped by emerging technologies.

BIO

Weidi Zhang is a new media artist and designer based in Los Angeles and Phoenix. She is an Assistant Professor of Immersive Experience Design at Arizona State University. Her interdisciplinary research explores speculative assemblages at the intersection of immersive media, experimental data visualization, and interactive AI art. Dr. Jieliang (Rodger) Luo is the CEO and Head of Research at Minus AI, a research-driven startup focused on leveraging AI technology to empower the creative industry. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has previously served as a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Autodesk AI Lab.

Intermedia Chef

The Half
New media artist group, Intermedia Chef is trying to explore dynamic artwork generated by computer-controlled sound in the aspect of data visualization. The sound installation artwork transits sound wave into physical movement. Overmore, they are aiming that the sound wave energy turns out a kinetic type of visual art.

SARA SCHNADT

NETWORK
Sara Schnadt explores technology in her work both as subject and media. Her installations and performances use found objects, interactivity, projection, spatial illusions, and movement derived from common gestures. Much of her work involves representations or data that translate large quantities of socially resonant information into poetic forms, including data visualization. Schnadt often performs within accompanying sculptural environments, or sites works within functioning everyday spaces, attempting to articulate the personal within virtual and technological innovation.

JONATHAN WOOD

Suspension Dimension
Jonathan Wood’s wearable installation Suspension Dimension is an example how you can make an actual object that looks like 3D spacey data visualization… Suspension Dimension was awarded in 2008 at the awe-inspiring Montana World of WearableArt™ Awards Show in Wellington, New Zealand.

Richard Vijgen

The Architecture of Radio
In case you’ve ever wondered exactly what lies beyond the realm of the visible, Dutch designer Richard Vijgen has created a new app that is able to visually portray the network of radio waves that lies below the surface. The app was created as a part of Vijgen’s new ”The Architecture of Radio” exhibition at Germany’s ZKM, and combines technologies from GPS, OpenCellID, and NASA’s public satellite feeds to amalgamate a rendering of the data webs all around us. The app was intended to give a physical portrait of the very data waves that rule the modern day, according to Vijgen: “We cannot see the very thing that is defining our time, and that concerns me.” The designer went on to note “as technology is becoming more and more transparent, I think data visualization can help us to relate to things that are invisible, yet play an important role in our lives.”

FILE 2026 – Registration Open for the Digital Architecture and AI Festival – Art and Technology

FILE 2026

Digital Architecture and AI Festival :  investigates the use of computational technologies in the conception, visualization, and experience of space.  Works may involve virtual environments, simulations, digital facades, interactive architectural installations, and discrete systems. Algorithms and data become design tools. It is a practice that articulates art, architecture, and technology.

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

FILE 2026 | GENERAL REGULATIONS

EVAN ROTH

GRAFFITI ANALYSIS
SCULPTURES

 

Graffiti Analysis is an extensive ongoing study into the motion of graffiti. Custom software designed for graffiti writers creates visualizations of the often unseen motion involved in the creation of a tag. Motion data is recorded, analyzed and archived in a free and open database, 000000book.com, where writers can share analytical representations of their hand styles. Influential graffiti artist such as SEEN, TWIST, AMAZE, KETONE, JONONE, and KATSU have had their tags motion captured using the Graffiti Analysis software. All tags created in Graffiti Analysis are saved as Graffiti Markup Language (GML) files, a new digital standard used by other popular graffiti applications such as Laser Tag and EyeWriter. Graffiti Analysis 3.0 is an open source project that is available online for free in OSX, Windows and Linux. Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. What Martha Cooper did for archiving graffiti on film, and Chalfant/Silver did for archiving graffiti in video, Graffiti Analysis intends to do for archiving graffiti in code. The project aims to build the worlds largest archive of graffiti motion, and bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city.

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Andy Thomas

Visual Bird Sounds

Andy Thomas

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – INTERATOR

Electronic Language International Festival

Visual Bird Sounds – Australia

Visual Bird Sounds transforms bird songs and sounds into computer-generated 3D visualizations. The recordings are converted into animated figures that resemble living digital organisms—like virtual representations of the birds themselves. The work invites the audience to reflect on the beauty of nature and the urgency of preserving its habitats.

 

BIO

Thomas is an artist specializing in the creation of “sonic lifeforms” and creative sound visualization. He collects recordings and images of birds and other animals on expeditions to remote regions, transforming these data into videos and digital works. His work unites science and art by fusing elements of flora and fauna into abstract visual compositions.

Refik Anadol

Machine Hallucinations — Sphere

The artwork presents a series of AI Data Sculptures that incorporates vivid pigments, shapes, and patterns, aiming to create a collective, meditative, and multisensory experience. This immersive experience simulates the rhythms of various environments and invites the visitors to imagine alternative realities constructed by invisible data movements around them.
Machine Hallucination: The Sphere features dynamic visualizations of data that are based on vast archives containing visual imageries of space and nature while celebrating the unique architecture of The Sphere. For this project, Anadol and his team used these themed datasets as the building blocks for the three distinct chapters of the artwork and trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected image archives. After the training, when idle and unsupervised, the “machine mind” generates new aesthetic visuals and color combinations through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections.

QUBIT AI: Matthias Oostrik

The Forgettable Art Machine

FILE 2024 | Installations

International Electronic Language Festival

The Forgettable Art Machine is an artificial intelligence-driven video installation. When facing the panel, the public has their image captured, starting a cycle of analysis, creation and destruction. From this data, a composite emerges, slowly transforming the visitors’ image into a generative visualization. Once the cycle is complete, the composition is deleted, waiting for a new audience to be captured.

Bio

Matthias Oostrik works at the intersection of digital art, installation art, cinema and architecture. His works establish unpredictable relationships between people and their surroundings. Using digital technology, his installations allow visitors to reshape their environment and their relationships with each other. Oostrik collaborates with renowned professionals and, above all, with his audience, who often become an integral part of his work.

Credits

Co-production: Zester
IA Music: Than van Nispen

Refik Anadol

WDCH Dreams
The Los Angeles Philharmonic collaborated with media artist Refik Anadol to celebrate our history and explore our future. Using machine learning algorithms, Anadol and his team has developed a unique machine intelligence approach to the LA Phil digital archives – 45 terabytes of data. The results are stunning visualizations for WDCH Dreams, a project that was both a week-long public art installation projected onto the building’s exterior skin (Sept 28 – Oct 6, 2018) and a season-long immersive exhibition inside the building, in the Ira Gershwin Gallery.

Andrea Polli

Particle Falls

Particle Falls is a large-scale, real-time visualization of air-quality data.On a background of falling blue light, spots of bright, fiery color emerge and crackle, representing the presence of fine particulate matter, as detected by a nearby air monitor. Fewer bright spots over the falls mean fewer particles in the air.Particle Falls draws our attention to the invisible particles that surround us and that may affect our health. While the visible smog that plagued many U.S. urban centers decades ago has been mitigated by technology and regulatory measures, microscopic threats to our air continue to exist and often go unnoticed. Particle Falls is one way we can learn more about the quality of air around us.

Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat

Kissing Data Symphony
Intimacy Data Symphony is a poetic ritual for intimate experience of Kissing and Caressing each other faces, multi-sensory and socially shared in public space of merging realities. In live experiments with Multi-Brain BCI E.E.G. head-sets, visitors are invited as Kissers (or Caressers) and Spectators. Brain activity of people kissing and caressing is measured and visualized in streaming E.E.G. data, real-time circling around them in a floor projection. Simultaneously, the Spectators brain waves are measured, their neurons mirroring activity of intimate kissing and caressing movements, resonating in their imagination. The Spectators brain activity data are interwoven in the data-visualization. Brain activity of all participants, mirroring each others emotional expressions and movements, in interpersonal and aesthetic ways, co-create an immersive visual, Reflexive Datascape.

The OCR

Specimen Box

The OCR began work on Specimen Box in 2014 at the request of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center monitors communications coming from hundreds of millions of PCs around the world that have become infected by botnet malware. Employing data sonification together with advanced visualization techniques, Specimen Box provides a configurable multi-sensory presentation of botnet signal activity in real time. It also features a multitouch gesture-based interface for navigating, exploring, selecting, and examining the billions of signals that have previously been collected. Users can access the collected signals based on their activity levels, the geographic locations of their sources, or their daily activity patterns over time, using clustering to group sources with similar behavior.

Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield

Infranet
Infranet is a generative artwork realized through a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the city as their sustenance and canvas. Born curious, these agents form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions. In this city as organism, the data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system. Non-human beings flourish in this environment by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. The invitation is to witness, through immersive visualization and sonficiation of this complex adaptive system, how a new morphologic landscape emerges as a possible but speculative city.