Pre(N)atura | Fonocene

CNDSD & Iván Abreu

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

Pre(N)atura | Fonocene – Mexico

Speculative audiovisual project inspired by postnatural studies, designed to explore the era of the Fonocene—a period where both human and non-human sounds define sensory experiences and interspecies interactions. In this narrative, Chthulucene beings, hybrid creatures, emerge to challenge traditional forms of communication, using listening as a tool to activate our awareness of interdependence. 

BIO

Iván Abreu is a Mexican-Cuban interdisciplinary artist who uses science, design and technology to create works that question human interaction and social systems. Malitzin Cortés, (CNDSD), is a Mexican artist who explores the intersection of sound, technology and speculative architecture. Her work combines live coding, audiovisuals and critical narratives. 

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.

Median
When examining any living substance at a microscopic level, there are almost no perceivable boundaries between human and non-human bodies. In this work, Hiroaki Umeda, a Japanese choreographer, dancer and visual artist, pursues his longstanding belief and fascination that a human body is an intrinsic part of nature, where there is simply no distinction with other living things. For Umeda, choreography is not only limited to human bodies but for anything that is capable of movement. In MEDIAN, he explores the choreography of cells, molecular forms and organic synthesis, bringing into human visibility another world of movement, light and sound.

Oculus
Oculus is a large-scale, collaborative light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces. It both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. Oculus is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs produced in a transgenic lab while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. As each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, the apprehension of the self affects both individual and collective behavior in unexpected ways. This affective dynamic plays on the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them. The act of gazing at Oculus also puts into play the reciprocal condition of both seeing and being seen.

Infranet
Infranet is a generative artwork realized through a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the city as their sustenance and canvas. Born curious, these agents form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions. In this city as organism, the data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system. Non-human beings flourish in this environment by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. The invitation is to witness, through immersive visualization and sonficiation of this complex adaptive system, how a new morphologic landscape emerges as a possible but speculative city.

In ‘We Need Sanctuary’ (2016) and ‘Symptom Machine’ (2017), Cooper offers the body up as a contested space for communication and representation. Using computer-generated imagery, situations and characters are brought together to think through politics of exploitative labour, and the somatic experience of image production and distribution. Both works present, scenes of a Computer-generated bodies; both female and non-human who loom at the very edges of the screen. Their hands touch; they move backwards on a conveyor belt; and blood drips from the girl’s mouth while the non-human sweeps the floor behind her.

Star Ceiling
Expressing the vibrant dynamism of nature—from billowing cosmic clouds and swarming masses to radial bursts, spiraling vortices, and turbulent waves—Star Ceiling​ explores the tension between the rational and the transcendent, between the human and the non-human worlds. Villareal’s artwork gives life to inanimate matter through the invisible medium of code and induces a deep connectedness and rare experiential awareness.

Neotenous dark dwellers
Lygophilia
Lygophilia weaves together mythologies and sciences, history and future, fears and desires, continents, cultures, humans and non-humans. Lygophilia folds and unfolds the stories carried by those fascinating creatures that are the Mexican Axolotl and the Slovene Proteus.
From immortality to regenerative medicine — both animals are, as adults, in a state of “eternal youth” (neoteny) showing extraordinary longevity and regenerative abilities that put them at the centre of ancient myths as well as current cutting-edge scientific researches.

H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g in-human garden
H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g is a large scale, high-resolution 3D printed bio-sculpture receptive to both human and non-human life. The project is conceived by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto (ecoLogicStudio) and developed in collaboration with the Synthetic Landscape Lab at the University of Innsbruck.

MIST
The Prayer
MIST envisions a world in which mass extinction has accelerated to a point of no return; where non-human beings have become spiritual, capable of self-transcendence and mystical experience, because they have no other choice. It is as if promethean punishment (the trauma of reason) were visited on them for humanity’s crimes in the pursuit of planetary mastery.”

Shapeshifter Heartbreaker

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker, is an installation on two levels composed of sculptural work and 3D computer animations that are both abstract and figurative. On the first level Pakui Hardware has designed an office desk using the typical components of a trading floor. However, this is not a work station for individuals; it is for computer aided trading, non-human activities which are approximated in the three channel videos atop desks noticeably lacking keyboards and mice. These activities often occur at an exceedingly fast pace, in the blink of an eye, an expression that lends its name to a video installed on the second floor. There, the blinks of a humanoid form have been accelerated to illustrate how fast the body would have to consciously react if it were operating at the speed of decision making that resulted in the stock market’s ‘flash crash’ of 2010.

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker, is an installation on two levels composed of sculptural work and 3D computer animations that are both abstract and figurative. On the first level Pakui Hardware has designed an office desk using the typical components of a trading floor. However, this is not a work station for individuals; it is for computer aided trading, non-human activities which are approximated in the three channel videos atop desks noticeably lacking keyboards and mice. These activities often occur at an exceedingly fast pace, in the blink of an eye, an expression that lends its name to a video installed on the second floor. There, the blinks of a humanoid form have been accelerated to illustrate how fast the body would have to consciously react if it were operating at the speed of decision making that resulted in the stock market’s ‘flash crash’ of 2010.
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