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.

The Textile Room

Los Angeles-based P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S is among the most intriguing and progressive firms working in architecture today. They seem relentless in pushing boundaries in areas like ultra-light-weight high-tech materials and immersive media. They are also very thoughtful and patient in the way they approach design.This is good because what they are engaged in and the way they work takes time. By collaborating with engineers and innovators in different industries they are slowly changing the way architecture is carried out and conceived on material and ontological levels. They don’t do spec homes, they do what’s new, and sometimes try to do what hasn’t been done yet.

FILE 2026

Augmented and Virtual Reality Festival: brings together immersive practices in simulated three-dimensional environments and expands the perception of reality through the superimposition of digital layers onto physical space.  The works use mobile devices, glasses, and spatial interfaces to insert virtual objects, narratives, and data into the real world or transport the public to sensory and interactive digital universes. These languages ​​challenge the boundaries between the material and the informational, exploring subtle or monumental interventions, creating multidimensionality in the environment. Issues of presence, body, narrative, memory, surveillance, and technological mediation are central, configuring a fertile field of aesthetic and critical investigation into contemporary ways of inhabiting and perceiving space.

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

FILE 2026 | GENERAL REGULATIONS

TRANSFORMIRROR

Daito Manabe and Kyle McDonald

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

Transformirror – Japan |  United States

When everything is imagined by AI—from music and images to prompts and titles—what’s it like to look in the mirror? This seminal study of real-time image generation, made possible in 2023 with Stable Diffusion XL-Turbo and Stable Audio, explores the future of media and interactivity. Can we better understand these systems by interacting with them physically, in real time?

BIO

Kyle McDonald creates immersive audiovisual installations and performances using computer vision, machine learning, and creative programming techniques to explore connections and shared futures between human beings. Daito Manabe combines technology and physical expression in collaborations such as Perfume and ELEVENPLAY with MIKIKO. Founder of Rhizomatiks, he has directed projects such as the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympics.

Disconnection

Jorge Bandera

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

Disconnection – Colombia

Desconexion explores the transformation of energy. The piece intertwines spiritual and scientific perspectives—grounded in the Law of Conservation of Energy and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Symbolizing the continuous metamorphosis of life, the work reveals the eternity of energy, where the end of each cycle marks a new beginning.

BIO

Jorge Bandera is a multimedia designer and assistant professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. A specialist in design, interactivity, animation, and immersive experiences, he has collaborated with institutions such as Google, Teatro Mayor, and the Ministry of Culture. He is also an advocate of interdisciplinary co-creation in education.

UnBoxing the Infinite

WOW Studio by D2D

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

UnBoxing the Infinite – Egypt

The work explores the intersection between reality and hyperreality. As a dancer traverses confined spaces, discovers portals, and creates magical worlds with the audience. Using dynamic motion tracking and live visuals, the performance inspires transformation, creativity, and self-liberation, breaking down boundaries of perception.

BIO

Elena Kauffmann is the founder and creative director of WOW Studio (Egypt), focused on media arts, XR, and AI. She created WOW Zone, an experimental space powered by immersive technologies, and is a co-founder of VR developer UBR. She works as a creative producer, immersive experience designer, and art director. Carolina Assis is a Colombian contemporary dancer based in Egypt. Amr Ali is one of WOW Studio’s lead tech artists.

LOKI

Jia-Rey Chang

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

Loki – Taiwan

Loki is an interactive AI artwork inspired by the mischievous Norse god. Unlike obedient AI, Loki responds playfully and unpredictably, reflecting users’ attitudes—arrogance meets sharpness, modesty earns encouragement. It prompts critical thinking about AI’s reliability, biases, and neutrality. By engaging with Loki, users explore whether AI can truly be trusted. Dare to question!

BIO

Jia-Rey Chang is an artist/designer/researcher/educator focusing on immersive spatial interaction design. Received his Ph.D. in interactive architecture at TU Delft and is now a lecturer in the Medialab at Queen’s University Belfast UK investigating Games/Emerging Technologies in his creative research, crossing creative coding, speculative design, AI, and VR.

www.archgary.com

Modern Guru
Modern Guru is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, floating above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of Modern Guru – a missive produced only for those who seek to photograph life rather than live the moment. This immersive new media art installation uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through unique interactions with characters along a mystical journey of discovery. Visitors are asked to commit to the path – a tight and winding trail with subtle points of connection along the way – a glowing landscape of oversized, whimsical mountains that chant incantations and blink innocently from digital eyes.
Having communed with the Guru, visitors then weave their way back through this warped and strange world full of illusions and delusions, perceptions and deceptions, all the while bathing in luminescent light; embracing big, gentle forms; and following their own path up the pink tongue staircase to meet the one who oversees the whole fantastic dominion, the Sun God.

Shell of

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Marc Vilanova – Cascade – Spain

Waterfalls are a continuous source of infrasonic frequency found in nature. Although inaudible to humans, they play a crucial role in ecosystems, especially for migratory birds who use them as a compass. However, many waterfalls have lost their frequencies due to climate change. The work creates an immersive experience in which the audience interacts with the visualization of sound waves, experiencing the vibration of sound through illuminated strings.

Bio

Marc Vilanova is a sound and visual artist who works at the intersection of art, science and nature. Vilanova’s artistic production has always been led by a spirit of innovation fueled by an interest in new media. His practice combines sound/light installations, performance, and sculpture.

Credits

This work was partially carried out within the scope of the EMAP program at gnration, with the support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme, the Avatar Center in Quebec City and the Ramon Llull Institute.

Photo:
Eloise Coomber

The Sea

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The Sea is an extraction of a complex natural phenomenon, resulting in an artificial emulation that develops a life form of its own. Just like the sea with its endless waves, this artificial system follows the impact of an immersive state, leading to a unique vision of an artificial generator. Despite appearing chaotic, it is capable of generating associations ranging from the movement of waves to science fiction scenarios.

Bio

Paul Gründorfer develops process-related systems and explores variable or unstable conditions in the occurrence of sound when exposed to amplification, feedback, and multiple signal streams. His works focus on processes that evolve in a social space. Leo Peschta is an artist and researcher. During his studies, he worked in various fields of media arts, including sound, installations and software, developing over the years a special interest in robotics and machinery.

Credits

Austrian Embassy

Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Speculative experiment on a future ecosystem under strict control. The narrative takes place in a simulation, 30 years in the future, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology collaborate to optimize an environment for cultivated species. An AI-powered simulator helps visitors generate new species to balance the ecosystem. Inspiration comes from the book Under the White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert and artists’ stories about life on a damaged planet.

Bio

Marc Lee is a Swiss artist focused on real-time rendered audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile applications, critically exploring creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative themes. His work has been exhibited in important museums and new media art spaces. Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio engineer specializing in sonic computing, procedural sound design and production. Currently researching immersive audio at UdK Berlin.

micro | macro
micro | macro transforms Hall E in the MuseumsQuartier into an oversized world of moving images and sounds. In his immersive installation, multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda creates a field of imagination between quantum physics, empirical experimentation and human perception. In collaboration with nuclear scientists at CERN, Ikeda has translated complex physical theories into a sensory experience. The Planck scale is used by scientists to denote extremely small lengths or time intervals. Concepts like space and time lose their meaning beyond this scale, and contemporary physics has to rely on speculative theories. And on art. Visitors to micro | macro enter a world of data, particles, light and sound that makes the extremes of the universe perceptible to the eye and ear. In the micro world we penetrate the smallest dimensions of the unrepresentable, while in the macro world we take off into cosmic expanses that allow us to experience the infinite space beyond the observable universe. In this maelstrom of data, an acoustic and visual firework bridges the gap between theoretical understanding and sensual perception.

Geist Rendern
RENDER GHOST ist eine kombinierte immersive Theaterarbeit aus virtueller Realität, die vom New Media Art Team NAXS CORP erstellt wurde. Die sechs teilnehmenden Zuschauer werden weiße, staubfreie Kleidung anziehen, und das Servicepersonal wird dabei helfen, Virtual-Reality-Ausrüstung zu tragen und langsam das weiße aufblasbare Zelt zu betreten. Angeführt von der virtuellen Szene werden sie um den Spiralturm herumgehen, um eine physische zu starten Science-Fiction-Zeremonie. Wenn der Betrachter auf die Spitze des Turms tritt, entfernt er seine Virtual-Reality-Ausrüstung und taucht in eine surreale Landschaft ein, die aus Lichtern, Lasern, Rauch, Geräuschen, schwebenden Partikeln und Wind besteht. Allmählich geriet er in Trance und Blitz Nebel.

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.

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

Erratic Weather
Despite some world leaders skepticism, climate change is a reality and the world isn’t just warming, in some parts of the planet the weather is becoming more erratic. During the last years, our generation has started to observe the effects and consequences of this shift, witnessing violent and unexpected climate phenomenons. Erratic Weather is a digital art project aiming to represent changing atmospheric conditions into an immersive multimedia experience. During the performance, the system uses various source of weather information retrieved from an online database and processed on real time to generate a visual and a surround sound composition. During 30 minutes the audience will experience the life cycle of swirling phenomenons such typhoon, hurricane and tropical cyclone , demonstrating the devastating power of the nature and the emergency to preserve it.

Turbulence
TURBULENCE is an ongoing series of immersive experiences created for large-scale, high-resolution media environments that embosom the viewer in digital flow of particles.It’s a set of visual experiments on particles simulated in different virtual environments.

Shifting Intimacies
An interactive/media artwork for one person at a time. Each participant enters a large, dark space containing two circles of projected film imagery presented within an immersive sound environment. One image floats upon a disc of white sand and the other on a circle of white dust. Participants’ movements direct and affect the filmic image and spatialised audio experience. Throughout the work a layer of dust (an artificial life form) slowly eats away and infuses itself deep into the imagery and sound. Each person has 10 minutes alone with the work. Their movement through the space continually affects speed, quality, balance and flow within the work. At the end of the experience they are invited to climb a lit platform and cast dust back onto the images below.

アン·ハミルトン
앤 해밀턴
the event of a thread
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites.

Data.scape
Permanent Installation
Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations.

flicker

Flicker is an immersive electronic environment of generative image and sound. A collaborative work with Oliver Bown. Based on biological models of firefly behaviour, Flicker generates an ever shifting rhythmic, meditative environment to the viewer. Flicker uses 4 channels of synchronised high definition video and 8 channels of sound to immerse the viewer in a phenomenologically rich environment of artificial life. The work is a large-scale agent-based simulation, with each agent providing a rhythmic pulse at regular intervals. Agents try to synchronise their pulse with other agents in their immediate neighbourhood. The collective pulsations of groups of local agents are spatially sonified with int exhibition space. Over time, large groups synchronise at different rates, leading to complex visual and aural structures, syncopating and constant shifting in to a long term complexity.

MID AND PLAYMODES
radial and blaus
‘radial’ and ‘blaus’ are two interactive lighting installations, both a result of the collaboration between catalonia-based digital research collectives MID (media interactive design) and playmodes. ‘blaus’ introduces the abstract realm of three dimensional geometry through the mediums of audio and illumination – this could manifest as a cube or a blossoming flower, a grid or a jellyfish, a mutant framework of reflecting lights which submerge the audience into a multi-faceted universe, driven by hidden forces of the architecture. ‘blaus’ is an immersive space where audio-visual elements relate
intimately to impact on the visitor. the process led the designers to build most of the software and hardware elements themselves, by means of algorithm design, digital fabrication techniques and craft handwork. on the hardware side, the use of open source technologies, such as arduino, allowed us to create a flexible electronic system easily addressable by opensound – control data. ‘duration open source software by
james george was used in order to independently control, compose, and play a full score for the laser diodes, servomotors, lights and music.on the sound design side, all music and sound effects are made through the use of audio programming environments such as predate and reactor.
custom digital instruments are made in order to exactly match the resonant frequency of the space and its harmonics.
‘blaus’ is an immersive space where audio-visual elements relate intimately to impact on the visitor.