FILE 2026

Registration is now closed for participation in  FILE – Electronic Language International Festival 2026 , one of the most important events dedicated to art and technology. FILE invites Brazilian and international artists , as well as researchers, educators, and creators , to submit original artistic works and educational proposals — lectures, workshops, and training activities — focused on contemporary technological poetics.

Applications were open until February 19, 2026 .

With 26 years of experience , FILE is a non-profit cultural organization dedicated to promoting creation, research, and experimentation in Art and Technology , bringing together artists, scientists, programmers, and thinkers around exhibitions, events, and publications. The selected projects will be part of the FILE 2026 program, scheduled to take place at the FIESP Cultural Center in São Paulo, between August 19 and October 11, 2026,  with the possibility of parallel activities in other Brazilian states.

The call welcomes proposals in a wide variety of languages ​​and formats, intended for indoor or outdoor environments , in which the aesthetic experience emerges from the encounter between interfaces, data, space, and body . FILE 2026 seeks projects that propose new forms of perception, interaction, and critical and poetic reflection , expanding the debate on the aesthetic, cultural, social, and sensory impacts of contemporary technologies.

Access the registration form.

FILE 2026

Art and Technology Festival | Installations: artistic systems, indoor  or  outdoor , in which the aesthetic experience emerges from the dynamic relationship between interface, data, environment, and body.  Digital technologies, technologies with artificial intelligence, metamaterial technologies, random technologies, sensors, algorithms, and responsive systems are employed by the artist as structural elements of the work, which is completed in the encounter between the work and the participant.

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

FILE 2026 | GENERAL REGULATIONS

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

FILE 2026

Robotics and AI Art Festival: Mechanical, autonomous, and intelligent systems as aesthetic agents. The works explore movement, behavior, and interaction between humans and machines.  Sensors, actuators, and artificial intelligence structure the experience. These creations raise questions about autonomy, artificial life, and technological ethics. The machine becomes a palpable presence in the artistic space.

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

FILE 2026 | GENERAL REGULATIONS

FILE 2026

Electronic Music and AI Festival: brings together interconnected fields of contemporary sound art, in which sound and technology operate as structuring elements of the aesthetic experience.  These approaches explore sound as spatial, sensory, and conceptual matter, articulating active listening, bodily presence, and synesthetic relationships between audio and video, through digital systems, generative intelligence processes, algorithms, field recordings, and audiovisual performances.

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

FILE 2026 | GENERAL REGULATIONS

FILE 2026

LED SHOW Festival: a program dedicated to exhibiting digital works specifically designed for the Digital Art Gallery, an LED panel located on the facade of the FIESP building, Avenida Paulista, 1313.  The festival investigates the relationship between moving image, light, architecture, and the city, exploring the expressive potential of luminous devices as an artistic medium. The works dialogue with the three-dimensionality of the facades, the urban scale, and the flows of public space, transforming the building into a narrative and sensory support. By integrating technology, art, and urban context, the LED SHOW proposes immersive visual experiences that reconfigure the perception of collective space and expand the field of contemporary audiovisual art. Download the technical specifications of the LED Show file.

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

FILE 2026 | GENERAL REGULATIONS

Begins with Chaos

Kenji Kojima

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

Begins with Chaos — Lascaux – United States

The environment is filled with chaotic information. Sensory organs build the world by extracting only certain elements from this chaos—such as visual and auditory data—acting like filters. It is as if the world is constructed using the “key” of a specific sense, decoding a hidden code. All information is recorded in binary form. The artist transforms this binary data into new formats, turning it into artworks. To do so, a one-time-use key was used to encrypt and decrypt the colors within the image data.

BIO

Kenji Kojima was born in Japan and moved to New York in 1980, during the rapid rise of personal computers. He began creating digital art, exploring the connections between perception, cognition, technology, music, and visual art. His works have been exhibited in New York City and at media art festivals around the world.

Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM

Edwin van der Heide

Interact with Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM via FILE ARCHIVE

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

Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM – Netherlands

Spiral of Time captures and stages the diverse soundscape of a specific location over the course of several years. By documenting the unique natural, cultural, spatial, and temporal dynamics of a place, the work honors the contributions of all its actors. Every hour, a one-minute recording is made, resulting in a vast sonic archive over time. It is accessible online through a spiral-shaped interface, allowing listeners to explore the cyclical patterns revealed by navigating the material across different time intervals. 

Since July 17th, 2024, the artist has been recording the sounds of the square in front of MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona). It is a very interesting, diverse, and vibrant urban space. The work is accessible online via https://www.macba.cat/en/spiral-of-time-placa-dels-angels/ and will also be presented physically in the museum starting July 10th, 2025.

Edwin is expanding the project to include other recording locations around the world—not only in urban contexts (dominated by humans) but also in areas governed by nature. The artist dedicated himself to a recording site in the Amazon region. Since February 11th, 2025 Spiral of Time has been installed at the Amazon Rainforest surrounding The UFAM (Federal University of Amazonas) in Manaus. It is home to one of the world’s largest urban forest fragments. Completely surrounded by the dense urban matrix of Manaus, this forest has been isolated since the late 1980s. The forest retains rich ecological features, including areas of mature terra-firme forest, late-stage secondary vegetation, and small patches of white-sand forests. This unique setting offers a rare opportunity to study tropical forest dynamics within a metropolitan environment. 

Spiral of Time-UFAM immerses the listeners in the acoustic life of one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. This contrast between the natural rhythms of the forest and the human-made patterns of the city enriches the broader narrative of the Spiral of Time, offering a deeper reflection on coexistence, change, and continuity across different environments.

BIO

Edwin van der Heide is an artist, composer, and researcher focused on sound, space, and interaction. His work pushes the boundaries of musical composition toward spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. He creates installations, performances, and immersive environments where the audience is placed at the center, encouraged to engage sensorially and investigatively.

light dress

Erina Kashihara is a light artist. She has been creating light dresses and accessories since 1985. She gives a name for these art works “LIGHT MODE ART”. This is the first challenge to use wireless sensor system. If a model moves the blue sphere which she has in the hand, the light of a dress will change.

オラファー·エリアソン
اولافور الياسون
奥拉维尔·埃利亚松
אולאפור אליאסון
Олафур Элиассон
Polyphonic House
Olafur Eliasson (1967 Copenhagen) ganador del premio Joan Miró instalaciones a gran escala esculturas, fotografías y fotograbados que retan a la percepción del espectador y a las leyes de la física , experiencias poéticas y sensoriales.

Arr. pour une scène
La force sonore de la scène de meurtre la plus célèbre du cinéma est étudiée. Deux artistes foley recréent la séquence de douche d’Hitchcock, déconstruisant les associations de signifiants auditifs et le pouvoir synesthésique du son. Jonna Kina contextualise ce phénomène étrange – la qualité trans-sensorielle du son – à la fois dans l’œuvre de Kina, ainsi que dans d’autres œuvres historiques et contemporaines à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur du domaine de l’art. Dans Arr. for a Scene (2017), Kina explore les structures et les formes du son cinématographique – en transformant une image emblématique – la scène de douche horrible dans Psycho d’Alfred Hitchcock (1960) – en fréquences sonores d’objets domestiques originaux et apparemment innocents.

Arr. for a Scene

“The sonic force of cinema’s most famous murder scene is investigated.Two foley artists recreate Hitchcock’s shower sequence, deconstructing the associations of aural signifiers, and the synesthetic power of sound. Jonna Kina contextualize this uncanny phenomenon — the “trans-sensory” quality of sound – within both Kina’s oeuvre, as well as other historical and contemporary works inside and outside the realm of art. In Arr. for a Scene (2017), Kina explores the structures and forms of cinematic sound – transforming an iconic image — the horrific shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) – into the sonic frequencies of quirky, seemingly innocent, domestic objects.” Melissa Ragona

States of Mind
Brussels-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens’ practice is concerned primarily with light, colour, and perception. Janssens makes very few art objects. Instead, her work attempts to escape the ‘tyranny of objects’ and what she describes as their ‘overbearing materiality’. Since the late 1990s, Janssens has filled spaces with washes of coloured light or ‘haze sculptures’: dense, illuminated clouds of vapour that render surroundings unfamiliar and sensory perception altered.

COLLAGENE
People’ faces are scanned throught a sensor and acquired in a digital environment. The software application written by the designers generates customized masks for each person. The masks are produced as unique pieces through 3d printing and WINDFORM materials.

The Slow Motion Band
Villanueva began his training and initiation in1984 from 1986-1995 he worked as an artist and teacher with Abraham Dubckovsky the Argentine sculptor and architect planner. His work: causes, produces and creates visual and physical impressions and sensory pleasures, space and forms that are capable of enclosing and hiding something and demarcating soluble volumes. The pieces are of respectful sizes, clean lines and defined but at the same time fragile, silky smooth but yet again clear due to the materials used. As he describes it, art linked to the intimate experiences of the body and time, in search of an interior portrait joined with beauty resulting in essential interlocutor.

Dissonant Equilibrium
Isabelle Andriessen is a visual artist born in the Netherlands (1986). She studied at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (NL), where she received her BFA in 2013. Currently she is an MFA candidate at Malmö Art Academy (SE). She lives and works in Amsterdam and Malmö. She is a recipient of the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Fellowship. Her work consists sculpture, installation and performance and has been presented in places like Optical Pavilion, Moscow, Unfair, Amsterdam and Mediamatic Amsterdam. Her work has been presented in online art magazines like Metropolis M and Mister Motley. In July 2014 her work has been mentioned in VOGUE Russia. Recently she has been collaborating with the Dutch National Ballet. Her recent work concern the sensory experience examined through light installations and performances.

Рафаэль Лозано-Хеммер
拉斐尔·洛萨诺 – 亨默
ラファエル·ロサノ=ヘメル
라파엘 로자노
רפאל לוזאנו, המר
Pulse Spiral
“Pulse Spiral” é um parabolóide espiral tridimensional composto de 400 lâmpadas dispostas de acordo com as equações de Fermat, – uma distribuição espacial eficiente ao longo de uma superfície que é encontrada na filotaxia da planta (arranjo de folhas e células nas raízes, por exemplo). A peça registra e responde à frequência cardíaca dos participantes que seguram um sensor por baixo. Encomendada para a inauguração do Centro de Cultura Contemporânea de Moscou na construtivista Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, a peça é inspirada no engenheiro Vladimir Shukov que trabalhou com Melnikov neste edifício emblemático de 1926-28.

لانغ باومان
郎鲍曼
랭 바우만

Com sua arte urbana exposta nas ruas das principais cidades europeias e ocupando espaços enormes e inusitados, Lang/Baumann produzem uma dinâmica de interação impactante com a arte.
Sabina Lang e Daniel Baumann são dois artistas suecos que se consolidaram através de intervenções urbanas interferindo na paisagem da cidades e produzindo uma nova interação dos habitantes com a arte e com a própria cidade. Suas obras vultosas podem ser apreciadas por um vasto público que circula pelas ruas onde, em fachadas de prédios, em ruas movimentadas, ou, ainda, em passarelas, elas são montadas/criadas. Mas os artistas não abrem mão, também, das instalações em ambientes internos, a fim de produzir uma variedade enorme de estímulos sensoriais no apreciador de arte contemporânea.
As obras dos dois artistas foram unificados em um único projeto em 1990 com a intenção de criar peças visualmente impactantes sob um único nome, Lang/Baumann. Entre suas obras de arte estão: uma grande escala de cores em asfalto urbano e em pontes conhecidas, luminárias fluorescentes, escadas inacessíveis, parasitas infláveis que invadem prédios, entre outras. Através do trabalho com geometria e a distribuição de elementos arquitetônicos as obras produzem um efeito visual deslumbrante.

振り子の合唱団
CYCLOID-E

This piece, which comprises a series of tubular pieces arranged horizontally and activated by a motor, generates a particular sound through its movement, which is unexpectedly harmonic. The artists have taken their interest in the mechanisms that generate wave motions as a starting point to create this sculpture: five metal tubes joined together feature sound sources and sensors that allow them to emit different sounds based on their rotations.
The sculpture runs through a series of rhythmic movements, like a dance, creating, in the words of the artists themselves, “a unique kinetic and polyphonic work, in the likeness of the “Cosmic Ballet” to which the physicist Johannes Kepler refers to in his “Music of the Spheres” in 1619.” This work is part of the reflection on the possible interactions between sound and movement developed by the artists since 1999, using electronic devices and inspired by the aesthetics of industrial machinery.

Crystal Aqua Trees
Installed in Sony Square in Tokyo and on display until January 14, the ‘Crystal Aqua Trees’ is a crystal work of art inspired by the concept of a fountain that can be seen as a spray of water as well as a Christmas tree. Designed by Torafu Architects, the project was inspired by the Trevi fountain in Rome, the “Ai no Izumi” (Fountain of Love) charity drive, which has been held by Sony every year since 1968. For this edition, the architects proposed a new embodiment as an interactive installation. More images and architects’ description after the break.In response to changes in the landscape of the street and the actions of people, the illumination will play beautiful music in harmony with a gorgeous light display. The movement of people is picked up by a sensor camera, which prompts the pillars of light illuminated by LEDs to change colors to create a glimmering structure.Whenever coins are deposited in the crystal donation box placed in front of the square, the installation responds by switching to a special performance, as if acknowledging the contributions made. Like water in a fountain, the polished black floor surface of the stage reflects the illumination, creating a wonderful scene in the middle of the streets of Ginza.