BOB

Cheng’s work explores mutation, the history of human consciousness and our capacity as a species to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design, improvisation and cognitive science, Cheng develops live simulations – virtual ecosystems of infinite duration, populated with agents who are programmed with behavioural drives but left to self-evolve without authorial intent, following the unforgiving causality found in nature.

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

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The work magnifies the process of virtual and real fusion, which is the process of uploading human consciousness to digital space. When the visual perception has been lost, can people still recognize the body through the touch and sound of wind, sound and vibration everywhere? Experiencers use non-visual senses, experience media art, and cooperate with the Taiwanese Non-Visual Aesthetic Education Association to create a digital space where the computer can fully understand the location of the experiencer in the space, allowing the experiencer to listen, move, touch objects, feel the vibration and come to know the space.

Boundaries

Memo Akten & Katie Peyton Hofstadter

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

Boundaries – United States

Boundaries is a monumental work that explores the illusion of separation—between self and other, body and environment, matter and mind—and reflects on the interconnectedness of all things, from microorganisms to atoms forged in extinct stars. Created with custom code, AI, computer vision, digital painting, and dance, the work unites technology and bodily expression in an intimate and contemplative experience.

BIO

Memo Akten, a Turkish artist, musician, and researcher based in Los Angeles, creates speculative simulations about the relationship between humans and machines. With a PhD from Goldsmiths, he is a pioneer in the creative use of neural networks under human control. Katie Peyton Hofstadter is an artist, writer, and curator. Her work investigates the intersections between embodiment, technology, and consciousness, exploring how technologies shape cultural narratives and sensory experience.

Mutant Tales — Posterra

Fredo Agudelo

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

mutanttales — Posterra – Colombia

In the end, the organic will eat technological waste like fungi. What remains of humanity in this finale? What remains of Earth over human vanity? We are beings in an unconscious mix, sitting behind screens as if traveling in a spaceship in the void of the universe. The layers fall away, and our corporeal reality remains. Scan your consciousness and step out of your spaceship; in Posterna, there’s still a world to live in.

BIO

Colombian audiovisual artist based in São Paulo. He has experience with video mapping, working in Colombia on various projects and participating in several video mapping festivals in Brazil. He is currently working increasingly with sound to bring a live audiovisual exhibition to the audiovisual art scene, blending experimental sound with video projections.

Motherboard

Gabriel KÖI e Sabato Visconti

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Shorts Films AI
Electronic Language International Festival

Motherboard – Brazil

Motherboard is an experimental film that dives into the intersection between tech nology and consciousness, exploring the delicate boundary between the human and the digital. On this journey through the circuit, reality merges with the digital, challenging the understanding of existence. The contrast between the human and the artificial is revealed in the intertwining of both, echoing the voice of this emerging consciousness.

BIO

Sabato Visconti is a Brazilian digital artist. His works interrogate con temporary and historical practices of digital imagery, manipulating the inherent materialities of production and distribution. Gabriel Böing (KÖI) is an artist born and raised in São Paulo, who explores narrative and dreamlike stories materialized through mediums like 3D, AI, and video, heavily influenced by internet culture.

AI Museum

Valezart

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

AI Museum – Spain

AI Museum is an AI-generated short film that explores art, memory, and artificial consciousness. During a night shift, security guard James Foster encounters a mysterious force that brings museum masterpieces to life. As paintings step out of their frames, the line between art and reality dissolves in a post-apocalyptic world, culminating in a finale where humanity’s legacy merges with the digital.

BIO

Valezart is a multidisciplinary artist from Barcelona working across music, film, and game development. With award-winning soundtracks and a strong narrative focus, his work spans animated shorts, feature films, and immersive experiences. He currently explores filmmaking with AI, delving into the edges of artificial creativity.

Delusional Crime and Punishment

Who created life? I think this is the question everyone has been asking themselves since childhood? At least I have many doubts, the subjective feeling of the existence of consciousness allows us to face the world from that source. Why do humans eat like this for energy? Why not get energy in other ways? Why do you need energy to exercise? Why is this so joyful and so painful? What is the need for pain, pleasure, fear, excitement, etc.?Upon careful analysis, it appears that the source of many desires comes from the design of our physical structure. If God designed human beings, why was he designed that way and why was he designed as a biological mechanism for sin and hell? Why do human beings have desires because of such a physical structure and even they don’t understand self-control, they have sins, and they have to go to another hell of punishment system to atone for their sins? Who created this series of systems?

Fallen Water
Fallen Water explores questions about why humans are drawn to waterfalls and flowing water as a source for renewal. Waterfalls imbue subconscious associations with pristine and healthy drinking water, but what happens when the fountain can no longer renew itself? Is the water no longer pure? Cooley’s choice of subject matter strikes a deep chord with current social consciousness and anxieties about contemporary water usage and the drought crisis faced by the American West. Cooley references Blake’s famous quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as context for the diametric opposites of the current water conundrum: our deep sense of entitlement to and dire dependence on this precious commodity, coupled with a pervasive obliviousness concerning the sources which supply it. As a way to connect with his personal water use, Cooley hiked into the mountains to see firsthand the snowpack (or lack thereof), streams, and aquifers which feed the water sources supplying his Los Angeles home. This multi-channel installation is an amalgamation of videos made over numerous trips to remote locations in the San Gabriel Mountains, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and locales as far away as the San Juan Mountains in Southwestern Colorado. These disconnected video vignettes coalesce, constructing a large water landscape canvasing the gallery walls and floors – reflecting the disparate and widespread origin of Los Angeles’s drinking water. The colorspace within the videos is inverted, turning the water pink, orange and yellow—channeling an altered vision of water—in which something is definitely amiss: a stark reminder of the current water crisis in the state of California.
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Liminal Beings
Liminal Beings explores the concept of automaton and the different anthropomorphic forms and functions embedded within its ontology. Automata, since ancient times, have been standing on the verge of two states, developing machinic and human characteristics simultaneously – in reality, and in the collective consciousness. They are trained to execute and learn respective actions and procedures, thus creating an uncanny, awkward state, trapped in limbo between diverse conditions of existence.

Undercurrents

“Mostly the fact that I AM a human body. We can live our lives buried in complex abstraction, or in virtual reality, but you can’t separate your consciousness from the fragility of your physical form. Many of my own fears and anxieties revolve around that realization. I would probably say my pieces involving the human body are a kind of self prescribed therapy to deal with my neurosis”.Albert Omoss

Intagible #Form
In this artwork “intangible #form [2019]”, focusing on how do we see the intangible as tangible using 420 kinetic laser modules. I’ve tried to generate virtual consciousness, presence and behavior of life in this time. And then I’ve been exploring what are we getting the surfacing consciousness and presence from the thing is in front of us or are we giving these to them? I think that when paying attention to consciousness, it could be a trigger to sense that we are human ourself.

Self-Reflected

Dr. Greg Dunn (artist and neuroscientist) and Dr. Brian Edwards (artist and applied physicist) created Self Reflected to elucidate the nature of human consciousness, bridging the connection between the mysterious three pound macroscopic brain and the microscopic behavior of neurons. Self Reflected offers an unprecedented insight of the brain into itself, revealing through a technique called reflective microetching the enormous scope of beautiful and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this work of art. Self Reflected was created to remind us that the most marvelous machine in the known universe is at the core of our being and is the root of our shared humanity.

Death and the Powers

Science fiction and poignant family drama combine in one of the most stunning, cutting-edge operas of the 21st century, with a libretto by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, coming to the stage of the Winspear Opera House in a production directed by Diane Paulus, designed by Alex McDowell (Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) and conducted by Nicole Paiement (TDO’s The Lighthouse).This visually spectacular robot pageant by MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire, sung by Robert Orth, who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there. Without bodies, without the possibility of touch, sex, suffering, and death — are we still genuinely human?Explore these existential questions and much more in a piece Variety described as “playful, lyrical and…mesmerizing.” Also starring Joélle Harvey as Miranda, Patricia Risley as Evvy, and Hal Cazalet in his Dallas Opera debut as Nicholas.

The screw

Egle Rakauskaite is a leading Lithuanian artist, prominent on the world scene for her highly individual and memorable works. Born in 1967, she studied painting at Vilnius Academy of Arts and graduated in 1993. Described by critic Lolita Jablonskiene as “a unique artist, who does not follow any current trends of Lithuanian art”, Rakauskaite works in various media (video, performance, photography, making objects), free to associate and assemble them in different configurations as the project demands.In the early years of her career, she made objects out of unconventional and perishable materials such as chocolate, jasmine flowers, human hair, honey and fat. As she states, “these materials were used to protest against paint and canvas. Many critics attributed this interest in unconventional materials and also some of the images I constructed to my interest in feminist art. However, I think that at present the differences between male and female creation are not that visible any more. It is important that the art work opens itself to the consciousness and sub-consciousness of the viewer”.