THE SPACE BETWEEN BECOMES US

Zack Nguyen

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

The Space Between Becomes Us – United States / Vietnam

The Space Between Becomes Us is a meditation on how the artist believes we come into being through one another—how the unseen space between us might carry memory, feeling, and healing. This work reflects a desire not for answers, but for mutual understanding. For the kind of peace that emerges when we let ourselves listen and become, together.

BIO

Zack Nguyen is a hybrid artist and independent curator based in Dallas and active in Berlin. Working across moving image, performance, sound, and new media installation, his practice explores nowness, identity, and the lived body as sites of healing and connection. His work balances minimal form with emotional intensity and has been exhibited internationally across Europe, Asia, and the U.S. 

Towards a New Nature

Pan

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

Towards a New Nature – China

Residents of the Metaverse might have hairstyles where the boundary between the person and the hair blurs, making the hair almost like an “organ.” These hairstyles could “grow” branches or flowers, have a dynamic motion similar to plants swaying in the wind, and feature geometric shapes, colors, and effects that surpass the physical world’s limitations.

BIO

Pan Qianqian is currently studying Digital Media and Mixed Reality at the China Academy of Art. She is good at 3D design and production, and new media art. She is involved in 3D imaging, interactive installations, virtual clothing and other fields. Her works have been exhibited at the First Digital Art Exhibition and Tianwen 2023: Mutual Learning among Civilizations.

Veillance

Louis-Philippe Rondeau

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

Veillance – Canada

Inspired by Steve Mann’s research, Veillance explores mutual surveillance between citizens and institutions. While observing digitized portraits of others, visitors also have their image captured and added to the archive. Yet through subtle gestures and changes in appearance, one can evade the scan, effectively hijacking the scanography process.

BIO

Louis-Philippe Rondeau designs playful, unconventional devices that explore self-representation and performance. His research-creation practice prioritizes user-friendly design, concealing complex code behind intuitive physical interfaces.

L’Alter-monde
Evocación de un jardín cibernético diseñado en múltiples escenarios, Realness contempla una potencial simbiosis entre el ser humano y un estado de naturaleza redescubierta. A través de la ecosofía y el mutualismo entre especies, este trabajo explora la posibilidad de identificarnos con una naturaleza mutante, un estado de devenir vegetal o la experiencia de vidas infrahumanas.

Transparent Shell
Based on concepts, Transparent Shell gains inspiration from a rich variety of sequences in nature. By dissecting, extracting shell structure and restructuring, it reveals the tension of life evolution. Conch-shape helix is blended with vertical, balanced, stable and standard three-dimensional grid. Density and depth of different degrees are on one hand, in mutual erosion, harmony and coexistence and on the other hand, in antagonism, competition and conflict.

Quantum memories
Quantum Memories is Refik Anadol Studio’s epic scale investigation of the intersection between Google AI Quantum Supremacy experiments, machine learning, and aesthetics of probability. Technological and digital advancements of the past century could as well be defined by the humanity’s eagerness to make machines go to places that humans could not go, including the spaces inside our minds and the non-spaces of our un- or sub-conscious acts. Quantum Memories utilizes the most cutting-edge, Google AI’s publicly available quantum computation research data and algorithms to explore the possibility of a parallel world by processing approximately 200 million nature and landscape images through artificial intelligence. These algorithms allow us to speculate alternative modalities inside the most sophisticated computer available, and create new quantum noise-generated datasets as building blocks of these modalities. The 3D visual piece is accompanied by an audio experience that is also based on quantum noise–generated data, offering an immersive experience that further challenges the notion of mutual exclusivity. The project is both inspired by and a speculation of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics – a theory that holds that there are many parallel worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own.

Wave wall
A wall of 122 wind-activated pendulums are each magnetically coupled with its neighbors so that the whole wall moves as a slowly undulating surface similar to a large piece of fabric rippling in the wind. In winds greater than 15 knots, the wall’s coherent wave-like movement becomes more chaotic as the pendulums break their mutual magnetic coupling. The pendulums can also be manually activated.

Liminal Scope
Liminal Scope is an immersive light and sound installation, in which three rings frame the transit of light through space. The audiovisual score enmeshes harmonic frequencies, rhythmic motion,
and gradients of color, orchestrating a narrative which navigates tension and release. Our form of reality is mutually constructed by our perceptions along with their limitations. The installation’s rings form an aperture that focuses and reveals a spatial quality of light, which usually remains unseen. Liminal Scope is a meditation on these perceptual limitations as they
relate to our shared and individual perspectives on reality.

Realistic and Interactive Robot Gaze
System for lifelike gaze in human-robot interactions using a humanoid Audio-Animatronics® bust. Previous work examining mutual gaze between robots and humans has focused on technical implementation. We present a general architecture that seeks not only to create gaze interactions from a technological standpoint, but also through the lens of character animation where the fidelity and believability of motion is paramount; that is, we seek to create an interaction which demonstrates the illusion of life. A complete system is described that perceives persons in the environment, identifies persons-of-interest based on salient actions, selects an appropriate gaze behavior, and executes high, fidelity motions to respond to the stimuli. We use mechanisms that mimic motor and attention behaviors analogous to those observed in biological systems including attention habituation, saccades, and differences in motion bandwidth for actuators.

Cube
Electronic images of black and white alternating structures and contrasts are projected on a cuboid object in space. Passing through different metamorphosis, the abstract image themes gather momentum in the three-dimensional. Structural unities of image, sound and movement deconstruct the shape of the cube – images and sounds are mutually dependent and explore relations between form and meaning beyond medial image fronts.

Psycho: 6 Symptoms
People’s mental activity often changes with the external environment, normal and abnormal is relative, mutual evolution, mutual migration, and there is no absolute normal and abnormal. Even if the people with healthy mentality mental activities may temporarily appear different levels, duration of varying lengths disorders in a certain situation or a specific period of time. I combined the computer generating and shot in creating this multi-screen audio-visual work. Mainly focusing on changes between six screens and possibility of flow, also designed to allow viewers to produce such “temporary exception” through the resonant stereo sense.

last breath
I understand passive instruments to be different multimedia objects that do not require management so much as co-existence with them based on relations born of a mutual “hybrid” symbiosis. The operating principle of the object is fairly simple – the exhaled air (its pressure and flow rate) activates the generative process, which depends on the exhalation parameters and is managed by the air movement in the organ. The object does not require any special game technique, although any change in the breathing (either premeditated or caused by physiological factors) is directly dependent on game dynamics and also on all the other parameters used to generate the sonic flow.

A Two Dogs Company
Duet

A man and woman are in a situation of absolute mutual dependence. As opposed to the situation in HEART man and woman are visible for each other. They execute their dance movements in a live loop. These movements will be deconstructed and mechanically manipulated. The machine pushes them to repeat perfectly; for which they inevitably have to trust each other. They are left to each other.
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Reed Esslinger’s work takes many forms, (sculpture, installation, video, writing, etc.) but almost always involves fibers and theatre. Having spent 3 years living on Réunion Island, an Outer Seas Department of France in the Indian Ocean, Reed’s interest in the island’s linguistic and cultural creolization have led to visual metaphors for the elusive process of relinquishing, adding, and transforming parts of one’s identity. She ultimately loves stories- whether absorbing, recording, or recounting them, and sees teaching as a natural occasion for mutual authorship and exploration.

Freudenthal/Verhagen are a Dutch photography duo based in Amsterdam. Carmen Freudenthal & Elle Verhagen met right after graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (university of applied sciences for Fine Arts and Design) were Carmen studied photography and Elle studied fashion design. There was a immediate recognition of a mutual taste in image making and what fashion imagery should look like.

100% Other Fibres
Through collisions of image, noise, objects, language and bodies, Heather Phillipson’s videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems – attending to how physical and affective ‘selves’ are constructed, manipulated and, above all, escape. Often rendered as walk-in conglomerations of readily accessible materials (digital images, paint, cardboard, words, audio loops and reproducible consumer detritus), her works stake out an ambiguous territory in which cultural references and emotional responses are mutually contingent and reactive. Collapsing distinctions between the forthright and the inarticulable, the banal and the ecstatic, and between metaphor and extreme literalisation, Phillipson’s work performs constant tonal shifts, disruptions and bleeds. In so doing, it oscillates between physical intimacies and conceptual distances – desire, sensuality, touching and being touched, shame, anxiety, (over-)exposure, resistant surfaces.

Mutual Wave Machine

Mutual Symphony