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MARKUS KAYSER

Fritté Solaire
Dans cette expérience, la lumière du soleil et le sable sont utilisés comme énergie brute et matériau pour produire des objets en verre à l’aide d’un processus d’impression 3D, qui combine l’énergie naturelle et le matériau avec une technologie de production de haute technologie. Le frittage solaire vise à soulever des questions sur l’avenir de la fabrication et déclenche des rêves de pleine utilisation du potentiel de production de la ressource énergétique la plus efficace au monde – le soleil. Sans apporter de réponses définitives, cette expérience vise à fournir un point de départ pour une nouvelle réflexion.

Markus Kayser

Solar Sinter
In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology. Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and triggers dreams of the full utilization of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource – the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers, this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking.

ROBERT STADLER

light installation at St. Paul

The first image in this post is from a work – the most interesting – by Nuit Blanche. Robert Stadler’s installation in the Saint-Paul Saint-Louis Church. Upon entering the church, through a side door, the public sees only large luminous spheres, which appear to be randomly arranged. When going to the center of the church, however, the spheres form a big question mark on the altar.

DAVID DAWSON

timelapse/(Mnemosyne)

 

With his newest creation David Dawson marked his return to the Dutch National Ballet. Here, Dawson reflects upon the legends from Greek Mythology and the ideas of Memory. Each passing scene weaves a magical journey back in time, exploring the ideas that lay within these stories and questions their continued value and meaning to our modern day psyche. With an original new score specially commissioned from Scanner, set design and projection by artist Eno Henze, and also with long term collaborators, light designer Bert Dalhuysen and costume designer Yumiko Takeshima.

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Frederik De Wilde

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.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK

versuch unter kreisen

This is the artistic result of a residency spent at CERN, where particles circulate on rings at great speed. The four lamps that are suspended from the ceiling also describe circles, but at varying speeds. Starting from there, every imaginable choreography is possible as well as every interpretation. The lamps describe figures that imperceptible transitions trigger one to the other. According to the artist, it’s only a question of mathematics here, though one asks oneself which one of the four incandescent lamps directs the others. And just as quick as they come into alignment as though linked by invisible ties, there is one that seems to accelerate while another can’t manage to keep up with the group. You can watch them for hours on end, hypnotised by the aesthetic beauty of physical laws. The artist, Julius von Bismarck, when receiving his prize admitted to having learned a lot at the CERN. It is likely that the scientists were also marked by his presence.
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lera auerbach

ICARUS
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
conducted by Mark Wigglesworth
“What makes this myth so touching is Icarus’s impatience of the heart, his wish to reach the unreachable, the intensity of the ecstatic brevity of his flight and inevitability of his fall. If Icarus were to fly safely – there would be no myth. His tragic death is beautiful. It also poses the question – from Deadalus‘ point of view – how can one distinguish success from failure? Deadalus‘ greatest invention, the wings which allowed a man to fly, was his greatest failure as they caused the death of his son. Deadalus was brilliant, his wings were perfect, but he was also a blind father who did not truly understand his child.” LERA AUERBACH

Stefan Wewerka

Class room chair

Polyfunctionality and deconstruction of everyday objects, irony and humour as weapons and moments of profound insight: these are some of the ideas behind the works by the architect, designer, sculptor and film-maker, Stefan Wewerka (born in 1928, in Magdeburg).
In his works, Wewerka pushes against conventional concepts relating to art and aesthetics, rationalism and functionalism. As a result for instance, the Last Supper is turned into a weird affair, the kitchen space turned into a kitchen tree. Wewerka’s unmistakable trademark is the manipulation of chairs. Sawn, hacked and bent out of shape, these chairs subversively thwart previously unquestioned concepts relating to furniture. In stark contrast to this, however, are his sculptural furniture designs, adapted to suit the requirements of the human body and its habits.

BABAK GOLKAR

Grounds for standing and understanding
Babak Golkar is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice, at its fundamental roots, takes aim to deconstruct, recontextualize and rearrange our perceptions of the world around us. Marked by an intellectual iconoclasm and an unbridled philosophical spirit of inquiry, many of Golkarʼs works mischievously reveal that the fixity of meaning is merely an illusion, which he systematically disassembles and exposes. Like Zen koans, Golkarʼs work seems to arrive at new understandings by setting up impossible questions; ultimately focusing on the nature of truth; a truth unobstructed by the oppositions or differentiations of language, or perspective.

ALLORA & CALZADILLA

АЛЛОРА И КАЛЬСАДИЛЬЯ
Never Mind That Noise You Heard

Through sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video, Allora and Calzadilla’s works have been informed by questions of mark making, traces, and survival in a way that is simultaneously conceptual, metaphorical and spatial. Their understanding of material and metaphor as a couple is crucial; for them a material is never simply self-evident in its meaning, it is always marked with histories, cultures, and politics that are at once irreducible to and indivisible from the material in question. Another recurrent trope in their work is that of animality, and its unstable relationship to the realm of the human. Most recently, they have created a series of works that explore the interplay between militarism and sound in the context of today’s global state of war.

ALLORA & CALZADILLA

АЛЛОРА И КАЛЬСАДИЛЬЯ
performative ellipses

Through sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video, Allora and Calzadilla’s works have been informed by questions of mark making, traces, and survival in a way that is simultaneously conceptual, metaphorical and spatial. Their understanding of material and metaphor as a couple is crucial; for them a material is never simply self-evident in its meaning, it is always marked with histories, cultures, and politics that are at once irreducible to and indivisible from the material in question.

pierre delavie

architectural abduction

french artist pierre delavie has transformed the grand palais in paris into an ‘urban lie’, distorting the architecture of the famed building with ‘neo – rapt architectural’. questioning reality and manipulating city landscapes, delavie changes the face of building facades, integrating fake structural elements and projected light into the existing space. by manipulating the exterior skin of the renowned european museum, he forms a new archetype he calls, ‘architectural abduction‘, where the falsification of the traditional image is changed and reinterpreted as a new space. additions and subtractions render the structure imperfect, changing the manner in which passers-by perceive the historically significant landmark.