DESERT ECH0000000

Zen Cohen

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – VIDEO ART SHORT
Electronic Language International Festival

Desert ECH0000000 – United States

Desert ECH0000000 is a site-specific video performance recorded during an artist residency at High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California. This work emerged from an immersive engagement with the landscape, where movements through the desert were captured and mediated using a camera and customized software. It invokes the concept of quantum branching—the idea that every event with multiple possible outcomes gives rise to parallel universes.

BIO

Zen Cohen’s exhibition credits include the deYoung Museum, SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Vanity Projects, Museo de Arte Moderno (CDMX), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (CDMX), and Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (Canary Islands). She is the founding director of Open Air Media Festival which received an NEA in 2024.

CONTRAPUNTOENTEÓGENO

Timothy Weaver & Xavier Barriga-Abril

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – MUSIC
Electronic Language International Festival

contrapuntoEnteógeno – Ecuador / United States

contrapuntoEnteógeno is an entheogenic plant biosonification composed in counterpoint from North & South American ecosystems. Brugmansia arborea (Andean cloud forest) and Datura innoxia (New Mexican desert) generate bioimpedances and scopolamine entheogens under celestial influences. In situ, Eurorack analog synthesis transmediates bioelectrical plant signals into ecogenerated electroacoustic sound, negotiating agencies between human and beyond-human/plant expression.

BIO

Timothy Weaver is a biomedia artist, microbiologist and bioenvironmental engineer focused on restoring ecological memory through speculative inquiry at the art-science interface. He is Professor Emeritus of Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver.
Xavier Barriga Abril is an Equatorian designer/artist/researcher exploring posthuman interactive systems through creative coding and electronic fabrication.

IN MEMORIAM

Tribute to Timothy Wayne Weaver: A Life Dedicated to Art, Science, and Knowledge

FILE—Electronic Language International Festival—honors the legacy of Timothy Wayne Weaver, artist, researcher, and professor whose career fostered a meaningful dialogue between art, science, and technology, inspiring artists, researchers, and audiences alike. 

Throughout his career, Timothy developed an interdisciplinary practice that brought together art, science, and environmental responsibility. His work explored the complex relationships between human beings, nature, and technology, guided by experimentation, rigorous research, and a deep commitment to the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

FILE is grateful for Timothy’s intellectual generosity, enduring curiosity, and dedication to building new dialogues across disciplines, contributions he also shared with our audiences and our community. His work and legacy will continue to resonate in the memory of the festival and in the lives of all those touched by his practice.

حرق رجل
燃烧的人
バーニングマン
горящий человек
starlight

“BURNING MAN starlight” refere-se à instalação de arte “Starlight”, criada por Erich Remash, Jeremy Berglund, Don Peterson e Chad Ingle para o Burning Man 2012. A instalação consiste em sete grandes estrelas de compensado que formam a constelação de Órion, projetadas para serem vistas tanto de perto quanto de longe, durante o dia e à noite, e para dar uma sensação de escala em contraste com a vastidão do Deserto de Black Rock.

XENO: UNDERTOW

Hsujing

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

XENO: UNDERTOW – China / England

XENO: UNDERTOW is an experimental short film that employs stream-of-consciousness narration and AI-generated surreal visual art to explore the identity struggles and inner turmoil of cross-cultural migrants in mainstream society. Through metaphor, the film depicts a whale forcibly displaced from the boundless azure sea, cast into a desert of shifting sands. This imagery symbolizes the challenges cultural migrants face in adapting to dominant cultures and the profound sense of identity loss.

BIO

Hsujing is a contemporary artist and digital artist & director. His primary research focuses on the integration of technology and art, as well as speculative creative outputs. He is skilled in combining diverse techniques for artistic creation. His works blend elements of classicism with science fiction, not only envisioning future landscapes but also revealing persistent realities.

Ritual
An undisclosed location. Dry land under a scorching sun. Something abominable has happened here in recent memory. Now a ritual is taking place. The remains of what was once human are flickering in darkness. Nature is reclaiming what is hers. She is savage and unforgiving. She is laughing at us. Her sinister laughter echoes in the emptiness. Ritual re-imagines the notion of site-specificity within the mediated landscape. The digital and physical work for this exhibition sit in a forgotten mining town somewhere in the California desert. The viewer is invited to interact with Triantafyllidis’ new live simulation, sculptures and custom electronics blurring the line between the real life and online experience

Cold Sleep
Right now, approximately 400 human bodies are frozen at -196 degrees Celsius in America and Russia. They are dead – legally speaking. The hope is to one day defrost and resuscitate them. The procedure is controversial. Nonetheless, cryopreservation, i.e. preserving people at extreme temperatures below zero, is an area marked by growth. The condition is sometimes referred to as ‘cold sleep’, which is also the title of Stine Deja’s first solo show in Denmark at Tranen. The exhibition is an installation of kinetic sculpture and animation. Cryopreserved bodies in thermal, yellow suits are suspended in big, circular aluminium structures revolving around their own axis on small islands in a desert landscape. In the sand lie craters where artificially inseminated cells divide. A barren desert landscape is usually seen as lifeless and abstract. In Deja’s version it becomes a place for being before or after human life, or, as the artist has it, “a population in another dimension.”

L’artista azuma makoto di Tokyo in collaborazione con john powell di JP aerospace ha completato un volo spaziale botanico, inviando un bonsai di pino bianco giapponese sospeso da un telaio in fibra di carbonio e una composizione di orchidee, ortensie, gigli e iris, tra le altre piante nella stratosfera. lanciata con un pallone appositamente attrezzato dal deserto di roccia nera in Nevada, la missione, intitolata “exbiotanica”, è stata concettualizzata per consentire a diverse piante di entrare nell’ignoto, lontano dalla terra.

The Lightning Field

His last large-scale work “The Lightning Field”, a Land Art project built on a semi-desert plain in New Mexico, in the United States, between 1971 and 1977, consists of four hundred meters high, placed in a geometric matrix strict. This area is often plagued by storms and these metal stakes serve to attract the rays, accentuating the dramatic spirit and the scale of the place.

Work in progress
The motionless figure of an androgynous giantess occupies almost the entire gallery space in her entangled posture. On its body and around it, small scaffolding grows upwards. But the construction site is deserted. Only the figure, which resembles an avatar, remains in a calm state. A state of “being in between”. Between day and night. Between dream and reality or even between life and death? It almost seems as if the figure is still being brought back to life. One is inclined to think of Mary Shelley, whose novel character Victor Frankenstein created an artificial human being 200 years ago – in a time of great upheaval and discovery. Today we find ourselves once again at a turning point in society and technology, which makes us question ourselves as well as platforms on which we construct our selfs… Is that what Evelyn Bencicova and Enes Güç are alluding to here?

Modern Desert Magic
Petecia Le Fawnhawk is a modern surrealist whose body of work is a meditation in form as monuments juxtaposed against minimal and ethereal desert landscapes. In placing elemental shapes in a vast dreamscape, Petecia strips away the unnecessary in an attempt to reveal truth in the mysterious and magisterial.

THE BED EXPERIMENT ONE

Witness as the covers are pulled back to reveal the rites and rituals of the untamable Homo Sapiens in its favorite nesting place — a giant bed! Like a bizarre nature documentary THE BED EXPERIMENT tracks four males and four females, who while confronting their deepest fears and desires, balance the witty and weird against the painfully true to life.

“As the piece proceeds, the focus shifts from mating rituals to the antics of lovemaking, from the battle of the sexes to baby worship, and from dreams of conquest to nightmares of disembowelment. The bed turns from the cradle of civilization into a hospital cot, from a sultry desert to a tundra of monsters. As the scenes evolve — the performance is a 60-minute continuum — the tone mysteriously oscillates between extremes of farcicality or pathos. How the performers effect these wondrous transformations is one of the Adaptors’ most singular professional secrets”. Alan M. Kriegsman

Architectural Constellation
To intensify the experience of visitors with the particular surrounding, X-Architects imagined “a constellation of architecture strategically placed on the vast terrain”. In fact, using the existing topography, the project puts in place dune shaped units, offering views of sabkhas. Moreover, other elements placed on the highest point of the site, grow vertically like the desert flower Cistanche Tubulosa and propose views towards the stars.

Journey
File Festival
Enter the world of Journey, the third game from acclaimed developers thatgamecompany and presented by SCEA Santa Monica Studio. Journey is an interactive parable, an anonymous online adventure to experience a person’s life passage and their intersections with other’s. You wake alone and surrounded by miles of burning, sprawling desert, and soon discover the looming mountaintop which is your goal. Faced with rolling sand dunes, age-old ruins, caves and howling winds, your passage will not be an easy one. The goal is to get to the mountaintop, but the experience is discovering who you are, what this place is, and what is your purpose.

توماس ساراسينو
托马斯·萨拉切诺
トマスサラセーノ
Aerocene
In the desert of New Mexico, artist Tomás Saraceno realized the very first human flight in a zero carbon solar-powered hot air balloon, propelled by Studio Tomás Saraceno and curated by Rob La Frenais. For three hours without touching the ground, the balloon rose into the air without the usual burner, its black fabric heated by the sun and the infrared rays reflected by the white dunes.
.

The Present Condition

The landscapes of ‘The Present Condition’ derive from a journey of more than 15,000 km by land by the artist between the two geographical extremes of South America. The video is suffused with a surreal atmosphere, where real and imaginary spaces intersect. Concepts such as human intimacy, desire, work, the savage capitalism that builds cathedrals in the desert, the perverse bureaucracy and the construction of the border wall are just some of the elements that are mixed in a striking and suggestive mosaic of images.

file sp 2019 videoart

Torus 9
After growing up in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, Phillip K. Smith III received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. From his Palm Desert, CA studio, he creates light-based work that draws upon ideas of space, form, color, light + shadow, environment, and change.

Paradise
“That must have been paradise in a hot desert. I think there was an idea that the real world is tough as hell. To contrast that, the idea of paradise must have been created,” says Maro.
video

The National Museum of Qatar
The idea behind the interiors designed by the australian studio intend to complement the exterior ‘desert rose’ concept envisioned by french architect Jean Nouvel. This collection of images showcases the ‘cave-like’ museum shop space that has been created taking direct inspiration from qatar’s natural ‘cave of light’ (dahl al misfir), which can be found in the heart of the country.

National Museum of Qatar
The building’s dramatic shape is inspired by the desert rose – a mineral formation created when minerals crystallise below the surface of a salt basin into an array of flat plates resembling rose petals.

Skydiver
On 30 July 2016, veteran American skydiver Luke Aikins made history by being the first person to jump 7600 m without a parachute. As he took his gigantic leap of faith, a crowd of anxious spectators craned their necks in the Californian desert in anticipation of his emergence from the clouds.

Sun Tunnel
Sun Tunnels consists of four massive concrete tunnels, each eighteen feet long and nine feet in diameter, laid out in the desert in an open X configuration. On the solstices, the tunnels frame the sun as it passes the horizon at sunrise and sunset. In the top of each tunnel, Holt drilled small holes to form the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. These holes, and the tunnels themselves, act as frames or lenses through which the visitor can view the surrounding sky and landscape of the Great Basin Desert.

ДУГ УИЛЕР
PSAD Synthetic Desert III

2017
حرق رجل
燃烧的人
バーニングマン
ГОРЯЩИЙ ЧЕЛОВЕК
Hyperlapse

Burning Man is much more than just a temporary community. It’s a city in the desert, dedicated to radical self reliance, radical self-expression and art. Innovative sculpture, installations, performance, theme camps, art cars and costumes all flower from the playa and spread to our communities and back again. In this section you will learn what you need to know about creating art for the playa, find out all about this year’s art installations, read essays about Burning Man and art from both staff and participants, and revisit some past off-playa art events and exhibitions.

Dan Pinchbeck, Robert Briscoe, Jessica Curry, Jacky Morgan, Nigel Carrington, Ben Andrews & Samuel Justice
Dear Esther

“A deserted island… a lost man… memories of a fatal crash… a book written by a dying explorer.”

“Dear Esther” is a ghost story, told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional game-play the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here. Fragments of story are randomly uncovered when exploring the various locations of the island, making each journey a unique experience.

file festival

Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery | Max Planck IP,Garching
Since the end of the 1970s Thomas Struth dedicates his work to the world of buildings and constructions as a visible, physical and sculptural symbol of our civilisation.
Struth’s earlier works mainly comprised architectural shots of deserted streets, squares and houses which he aimed to capture by the term unconscious places. His more recent work, however, reveals his interest in sites of high technology and places of exhibition and display. Both his work Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Interior 2 (2009) which was taken at the Max-Planck-Institute in Garching and his photography of a massive concrete construction at the Acropolis Museum, Athens (2009) bear evidence of this new focus.
This excellent selection of Struth’s works enables us to trace his development as a Photographer from small-sized prints from his time as a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher to large-sized photographic tableaus, and to experience Struth’s sculptural understanding of architecture. In addition to that the installation is supplemented by his largest work, a shot of visitors in front of the Aquarium, Atlanta, Georgia (2013) which follows the pattern of his Museum shots.

スティーヴ・ライヒ
סטיב רייך
스티브 라이히
СТИВ РАЙХ
The Desert Music
Steve Reich – The Desert Music (with Kristjan Järvi & MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra)
They can imitate you
But they can’t duplicate you
Cause you got something special
That makes me wanna taste you
I want it all day long
I’m addicted like it’s wrong
I want it all day long
I’m addicted like it’s wrong
They can imitate you
But they can’t duplicate you
Cause you got something special
That makes me wanna taste you
I want it all day long
I’m addicted like it’s wrong
I want it all day long
I’m addicted like it’s…

A.lter S.essio
“Loss”
via highlike submit
A.lter S.essio的组织Panem Et Circenses负责制作和行政管理，是Fabrice Planquette基于各种艺术合作发起的一个部分。
Fabrice Planquette偶尔邀请各个领域的人共享一个创意空间。 他给出了第一个动力和方向，每个人都有自己的语言，敏锐的感觉和前景。 2007年底，开始创作表演。 该系列已经由LOSS，LAYERS，ENDURANCE，EXTENSION（S）和ASCENSIO开始，并将继续进行SURFACE，DESERT（三重奏）和ENSEMBLE（7位舞者的作品）。 所有这些部分都是相互联系的：套件，互补，并行，对立。 他们遵循着对人类及其所处环境的探索的进步。 与环境，自己，对方面对

Desert Breath

I imagine two parallel realities in the way that we view the world. There is the world inside and the world outside of us. It is through the senses that we are able to connect the inside to the outside world. My whole life, including the choice to become an artist, has been an attempt to re-search, to understand, and to connect these two parallel realities. To bridge what is within to what is without…
Naturally my works are triggered or have a point of departure either in the external or in the internal world. Initially, an idea is generated in the form of an internal image, which in turn needs to be answered intellectually and put into context. This process seems to me to have its point of departure in the world of the subconscious, which then surfaces into the conscious realm. Following from there, the initial idea decodes itself as it evolves into realisation and ends up ‘translating itself’ in to an artwork. It is a bit like a journey, which slowly reveals itself as I journey towards it.

乔恩·凯斯勒
존 케슬 러
ジョン·ケスラー
Джон Кесслер
desert real

Desert III
File Festival – Machinima

كريستوفر دانيال
克里斯托弗·丹尼尔
כריסטופר דניאל
Кристофер Дэниел
California Roll House
a structure which self-adapts to its extreme environment, the prefabricated ‘california roll house’ by korean practice violent volumes uses the latest
in sustainable technologies and mechanized systems to maintain a comfortable atmosphere in the desert surrounding. a carbon fiber truss frame
system supports the irregular wrapping form, providing a lightweight and strong skeleton on which a solid exterior shell is attached to reflect the
intense sun. transparent glass panels change opacity automatically with the angle of the sun to absorb the nighttime coolth and reject the daytime
solar gain. the roof element then transforms into an entry courtyard, providing a flat artificial ground plane from which one can enter the hydraulically-
powered door, which is the only door in and out of the house and services all spaces. interior curtains subdivide the rooms for privacy, with skylights
for extra light.

ユナイテッド·ビジュアルアーティスト
美国视觉艺术家
fragment
Fragment is a site specific installation that investigates our (in)ability to correctly interpret the surrounding environment. The work continues the studio’s ongoing study into scientific models of nature and their experiments in utilising light as a formable material.
421 octahedron frames are assembled to form an inverted pyramid, suspended in a day-lit atrium, catching and reflecting light downwards into the space. Artificial white light is animated within the structure to create fragmented images; shapes that allude to real world illusions such as a desert mirage or fata morgana.

Indoor Desert

Hand of the Desert

ليدا عبدول
What We Saw Upon Awakening

In my work, I try to juxtapose the space of politics with the space of reverie, almost absurdity, the space of shelter with that of the desert; in all of this I try to perform the ‘blank spaces’ that are formed when everything is taken away from people. How do we come face to face with ‘nothing’ with ‘emptiness’ where there was something earlier? I was a refugee myself for a few years, moving from one country to another, knowing full well that at every juncture I was a guest who at any moment might to asked to leave. The refugee’s world is a portable one, allowing for easy movement between borders. It is one that can be taken away as easily as it was given: provisionally and with a little anxiety on the part of the host.

Sometimes people say, I am post-identity, post-nation, etc.. I don’t know what this means. For me the most difficult thing is precisely to go past the memory of an event; my works are the forms of my failed attempts to, what others call, transcend. But what? For me art is always a petition for another world , a momentary shattering of what is comfortable so that we become more sophisticated in reclaiming the present. The new wandering souls of the globe, the new global refuseniks —stubborn, weak, persecuted, strong—will continue to make art as long as people believe in easy solutions and closures of the most banal kinds.