FILE 2026

Registration is now closed 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 were 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 19 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.

فلوريان هيكر
フロリアン·ヘッカー
Sound Installation

Event, Stream, Object

In his installations, live performances and publications, Florian Hecker deals with specific compositional developments of post-war modernity, electroacoustic music as well as other, non-musical disciplines. He dramatizes space, time and self-perception in his sonic works by isolating specific auditory events in their singularity, thus stretching the boundaries of their materialization.
Their objectual autonomy is exposed while simultaneously evoking sensations, memories and associations in an immersive intensity. Some of his works incorporate psycho-acoustic phenomena, disorienting listeners’ spatial perceptions and expanding their conception about sound. Hecker’s most recent recording, Speculative Solution ( Editions Mego, 2011), brings together Hecker’s sonic practice and psychoacoustic experimentation with philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of ‘hyperchaos’ – the absolute contingency of the laws of nature.
During his residency at MIT, Florian Hecker will research a new sound piece that takes the concept of the “auditory chimera” as point of departure. Originally developed at MIT by Bertrand Delgutte, senior research scientist at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, the concept of the auditory chimera inspires an exploration of the relationship between pitch perception and sound localization. Hecker will create a text and sound piece that incorporates the recordings of material read by students. Using an anechoic chamber he will work with students to explore the experiential nature of psycho-acoustic practice.

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.

Hunter and Dog

Frederik De Wilde

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

Hunter and Dog – Belgium

Genetic and evolutionary algorithms reinterpret an existing artwork. De Wilde uses digital scans and custom genetic and evolutionary algorithms as a deconstruction technique to reinterpret and update the nineteenth-century work Hunter and Dog from sculptor John Gibson R. A. (1790–1866).

Frederik De Wilde’s Hunter and Dog interrogates the intersections of human evolution, genetic engineering, and the hybridization of technology and biology. De Wilde reinterprets the historical sculpture through the lens of post-evolutionary theory, engaging with contemporary debates on CRISPR, synthetic biology, and the implications of human-directed genetic modification. CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing technology, has introduced an unprecedented rupture in the trajectory of evolution. No longer constrained by the slow mechanisms of natural selection, humans now possess the ability to intervene directly in their own genetic blueprint, marking a shift toward a post-Darwinian paradigm. This technological power, however, is not neutral; it emerges from a historical lineage of scientific inquiry deeply entangled with colonialism. The history of genetic manipulation is inseparable from colonial bioprospecting, eugenics, and exploitative medical experimentation on marginalized populations. Colonial regimes treated bodies—both human and non-human—as sites of intervention, control, and optimization, a logic that persists in contemporary biotechnological frameworks. Post-colonial discourse reveals how genetic engineering risks perpetuating these legacies, reinforcing power asymmetries between those who wield biotechnological control and those subjected to its consequences. CRISPR, while offering the promise of eradicating disease and expanding human potential, also raises ethical concerns about genetic stratification, bio-capitalism, and the commodification of life itself. De Wilde’s work visualizes these tensions, making visible the processes of cell division and morphogenesis—the very biological mechanisms now subject to human intervention. Hunter and Dog does not merely depict the transformation of a neoclassical form but speculates on the future of the human body as a site of engineered evolution. From a decolonial perspective, the artwork questions who has the authority to edit life and to what ends. It challenges the techno-utopian narratives that frame genetic modification as an inevitable progress while obscuring its social, ethical, and ecological implications. By hybridizing art, science, and technology, Hunter and Dog compels us to confront the uncertainties of a CRISPR-driven future: Will genetic editing reinforce existing inequalities, or can it be decolonized and democratized? How do we navigate this post-natural frontier without losing the human—and more-than-human—dimensions of our existence? De Wilde’s work invites us into this speculative space, where the hunter, the dog, and the algorithm coalesce into a vision of a world where biology is no longer destiny, but a site of contested agency.

Where are we going from here? 

BIO

Frederik De Wilde fuses art, science, and tech. Known for his Blackest-Black works that inspired Kapoor’s Vantablack, he has shown at Venice Biennale, BOZAR, MAAT, Pompidou, and ZKM, winning awards like Ars Electronica.

Urban imprint
“If there is to be a “new urbanism… it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent … but for the creation of enabling fields….that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definitions, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space.”, Dutch architect + Harvard Professor, Koolhaas 959, writer of Delirious New York. URBAN IMPRINT is how we design a piece of this new urbanism, an augmented materiality , as we define it. An environment that is a ‘blank canvas’ to be reshaped by the future self.

Destructive observation field
The installation behaves like a living organism, it creates expanding and contracting forms that have a semi-organic appearance. During the course of the exhibition the deformations of the plate add up resulting in a more and more complex surface structure. The visible shapes will get more detailed and fragmented. The density of the stored information on the black plate increases. The characteristic visual appearance of the installation is the result of interference patterns, waves amplifying and canceling each other out in space, leaving complex traces of light and darkness.

recognition
RECOGNITION

Recognition, winner of IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, is an artificial intelligence program that compares up-to-the-minute photojournalism with British art from the Tate collection. Over three months from 2 September to 27 November, Recognition will create an ever-expanding virtual gallery: a time capsule of the world represented in diverse types of images, past and present.A display at Tate Britain accompanies the online project offering visitors the chance to interrupt the machine’s selection process. The results of this experiment – to see if an artificial intelligence can learn from the many personal responses humans have when looking at images – will be presented on this site at the end of the project.Recognition is a project by Fabrica for Tate; in partnership with Microsoft, content provider Reuters, artificial intelligence algorithm by Jolibrain.

The look elsewhere
The work, which in this video version is coupled with uncanny virtual landscapes, blurs the boundaries between the real and the simulated, while expanding the artwork into the virtual via the VR-headset wearing dancers. The artwork captures the entangled play between the participants, but also provides the viewer with a new perspective—opening a window onto the virtual dimension of the performance. The borders keep on fading, from the point where technology begins and physicality ends.

Electro-Magnetic Band
Barcodress/Barcodance
ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS! project has been reincarnating various retired consumer electronics as musical instruments such as Electric Fan Harp, CRT-TV Drums, Air Conditioner Harp etc. The band plays them by catching electromagnetic waves. The Barcodress project aims to create the new kind of dance performance. The clothes which recorded sounds as striped patterns, and dancers, and the performers who scan the clothes, together make electric sound waves in real time. By expanding the principles of sound recording and playback to the body, we explore new possibilities for music and dance expression.

Skin 2
His work often uses classical imagery that is transformed and energised using decidedly non-classical colours and forms. He uses collage and glitch techniques on his own and found images to create a quickly expanding body of work which has a recognisable and consistent style but has un unexpected energy making it feel fresh and dynamic.

ארווין וורם
アーウィンウーム
ЭРВИН ВУРМ
Erwin Wurm, one of Austria’s most important and internationally famous sculptors, has been preoccupied with expanding the concept of sculpture since the 1980s. Wurm is primarily a sculptor, and traditional sculptural concerns such as the relationship between object and pedestal, the function of gravity, the fixing of form, and the manipulation of volume, play through all his work.
Increasing, remodeling or removing volume, the habitual interests of many sculptors, are given a new twist in Wurm’s work. Volume and adding volume are treated as sociocrital issues. In 1993, Erwin Wurm wrote an instructional book on how to gain two clothing sizes in eight days. Eight years later, he made his first Fat Car by plumping up an existing car with styrofoam and fiberglass, which resulted in a pitiful, chubby version of the original sportsy model. By taking the question of obesity, Wurm probes the link between power, wealth and body weight. He also wants to offer a sharp criticism of our current value system, as the advertising world demands us to stay thin but to consume more and more.

A Cast of Things
A Cast of Things by the Los Angeles Design Group (The LADG), is a series of models and drawings that investigate the agglomerations of decorative stucco at an existing rococo church in Osterhofen, Germany. Through various models and drawings of the church’s adornments, the LADG attempts to reveal the architectural possibilities beneath the surface, expanding the surface decoration into proposals for occupiable space. more…

the expanding universe
The Expanding Universe is the classic 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The pieces comprising The Expanding Universe combine slowly evolving textures with the emotional richness of intricate counterpoint, harmony, and complex rhythms (John Fahey and J. S. Bach are both cited as major influences in the original cover’s notes), all built of electronic sounds. These works, often grouped with those of Terry Riley, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, differ in their much shorter, clear forms. Composed and realized between 1974 and 1977 on the GROOVE system developed by Max Mathews and F.R. Moore at Bell Laboratories, the pieces on this album were far ahead of their time both in musical content and in how they were made.

Globe of Science and Innovation
History of the universe
Did you know that the matter in your body is billions of years old?

According to most astrophysicists, all the matter found in the universe today — including the matter in people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies — was created at the very first moment of time, thought to be about 13 billion years ago.
The universe began, scientists believe, with every speck of its energy jammed into a very tiny point. This extremely dense point exploded with unimaginable force, creating matter and propelling it outward to make the billions of galaxies of our vast universe. Astrophysicists dubbed this titanic explosion the Big Bang.
The Big Bang was like no explosion you might witness on earth today. For instance, a hydrogen bomb explosion, whose center registers approximately 100 million degrees Celsius, moves through the air at about 300 meters per second. In contrast, cosmologists believe the Big Bang flung energy in all directions at the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second, a million times faster than the H-bomb) and estimate that the temperature of the entire universe was 1000 trillion degrees Celsius at just a tiny fraction of a second after the explosion. Even the cores of the hottest stars in today’s universe are much cooler than that.
There’s another important quality of the Big Bang that makes it unique. While an explosion of a man-made bomb expands through air, the Big Bang did not expand through anything. That’s because there was no space to expand through at the beginning of time. Rather, physicists believe the Big Bang created and stretched space itself, expanding the universe.

레이 놀드 레이놀즈
РЕЙНОЛЬД РЕЙНОЛЬДС
Secrets Trilogy
Secret Machine

Secret Machine is the second of the Secrets Trilogy; a cycle exploring the imperceptible conditions that frame life and is preceded by Secret Life (2008) and followed by Six Easy Pieces (2010)
In Secret Machine a woman is subjected to Muybridge’s motion studies. She is treated in the same fashion as in the original Muybridge photography: with Greek aesthetic in a Cartesian grid. A short time after Mybridge’s studies, Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) attempting to show time on a flat surface. He is expanding cubism and painting into another dimension: time. Time is about movement and change, like our experience of reality. Without change life does not exist. Photography does not capture this experience. In Secret Machine different filming techniques are compared to the motion of the body. The film camera becomes another measurement tool in a way a video camera cannot. The intention was to make an art piece from the point of view of a machine, specifically a camera.
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WORKS ON PAPER III: The Shape of Missing Violence
Each of the participants is required to hold a knife and stay still. They stand in front of a wall within a “frame” which is made of black adhesive tape in rectangle shape. When the performance starts, the artist adjusts their postures and, later, uses the same black adhesive tape to “fill” everything within the frame. Afterwards, the wall and the bodies of the participants are covered with black tapes, while their heads and the knives are still visible; then, their heads are covered with black tape and, finally, the knives are covered as well. Once participants realize that their body is completely covered, they can move slightly, expanding the tapes from “inside” (not destroying them) and come out from the tapes. They leave the knife, which is stuck on the wall, behind the tapes. In the end, the shapes of the leaving traces of their bodies are shown while the knives are invisible.

In Search of Vanished Blood

Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue. Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre.

الكسندر بونوماريف
АЛЕКСАНДР ПОНОМАРЕВ
A PARALLEL VERTICAL

Chapel Saint Louis, de la Salpetriere, Paris
Installation
Periscope installation with a cable suspension system. Metal, plastic, video optic system, acrylic spheres, sound wave generators.
The keystone artistic project of the Paris Fesitval d’Automne will be realized in September 2007, at the Salpetriere chapel in the center of Paris. A 36-meter periscope hanging from the dome forms a rigid vertical, equipped in the lower part with the head of the periscope with an ocular allows any viewer to look at the Parisian horizon, expanding vision in the spectacular spaces of the cathedral. The real-time video image is broadcast on closed-circuit television to chambers, offices and other buildings attached to the chapel of Salpetriere hospital. The patients, doctors and staff have the opportunity to take in the unexpected view point of the random viewer and peek past the horizon. This project has been organized by the French Ministry of Culture and the Energy of Art Foundation, Moscow

Expanding Room

אדוארדו סרור
Boat
Festival Serrinha

Eduardo Srur, from São Paulo, started painting, but stood out in urban interventions. His works use the public space to draw attention to environmental issues and daily life in the metropolises, always with the objective of expanding the presence of art in society and bringing it closer to people’s lives. The city is your research laboratory for the practice of artistic experiences; the public and governments are his target. Srur’s set of works serves as a guide for poorly managed spaces and urban errors. Above all, they are conceptual criticisms that awaken awareness and look at a new aesthetic and understanding of the visual arts.