Aquarela de Íons

Arthur Boeira e Gustavo Milward

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Arte e Tecnologia
Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica

Aquarela de Íons – Brazil

Aquarela de Íons is an artwork-device that translates solar flares and magnetic activity cycles into forces within the exhibition space. Inspired by satellites, the sculpture captures real-time data of solar activity, creating a data-driven artwork that reacts to the presence of viewers in an immersive and generative environment. The system translates spatial information into sound, light, and image, establishing an interface between the cosmos and human territory. The piece invites reflection on the impact of space weather—an aurora borealis brought to life, transforming astronomical data into an aesthetic experience.

BIO

Arthur Boeira has been conducting transdisciplinary research since 2015, exploring the philosophy of science and technology as applied to artistic practices. Gustavo Milward (Drawlim) specializes in interactive art and algorithmic narratives, investigating the relationship between body, space, and code.

Empire State
Empire State is a kinetic A.I. artwork visualizing the current time-of-day and weather at the Empire State Building in New York. The imagery was created from running a sketch through an Artificial Intelligence model to generate two variations on the image, each printed on each side of the discs. The piece visualizes the current time-of-day and weather by animating clouds, rain, light/shadow, by rotating sections of discs to the reverse side. When one walks up to the piece, they will see their image reflected back at them, further embedding them to the connection between where they are and the current state in NYC.

Satellite Daylight
Satellite Daylight is an interactive light installation formed by a trapeze of 24 high-voltage neon tubes tapering upwards, created by fabric | ch – a studio for architecture, interaction and research dedicated to investigating contemporary space based in Lausanne. The installation is connected to data collected in real time from online weather stations and meteorological satellite maps, which therefore translate actual global light conditions picked up by satellites orbiting the earth at the latitude of Basel into an endless loop of perceivable electrical intensity.

Cloud Pergola
Inspired by the cloud formations and weather events, this mathematized cloud plays with visitor’s perception. Movement through the structure generates a series of dynamic interference views in its deep fabric, drifts and ruptures in visibility. A sea of redirecting vectors is pulling the visitor like an invisible gravity force through the fabric.

Vertical Studies
Vertical Studies: Acoustic Shadows and Boundary Reflections; Water Tower Sint Jansklooster In their new collaborative work, Vertical Studies: Acoustic Shadows and Boundary Reflections, Signe Lidén and Espen Sommer invite participants on a journey to a 46-metre-high abandoned water tower in Sint Jansklooster. The tower has been re-imagined as a vertical field-lab where Lidén and Sommer discuss their ongoing research into connections between sound, history, wind and weather. To this end they have constructed a range of special instruments to record and playback sounds in the vertical dimension. The participants on this journey will experience live outdoor vertical studies and a vertical soundscape shaped by Eide and Lidén that ascends the tower’s spiral staircase.

The Weather War
Bigert & Bergström is an artist duo living and working in Stockholm, Sweden. They met while at the art academy in Stockholm in 1986 and have collaborated ever since. Through their career B&B have produced and created art ranging from large-scale installations to public works, sculptures and film projects. Often with a conceptual edge, the core of their work is placed right in the junction between humanity, nature and technology. With energetic curiosity their art investigate scientific and social topics discussed in contemporary society.

The Blur Building (an architecture of atmosphere)
The Blur Building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.From piles in the water, a tensegrity system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevers out over the lake. Ramps and walkways weave through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The form is based on the work of Buckminster Fuller.The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed.The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing water nozzles. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat). The coat is used as protection from the wet environment and storage of the personality data for communication with the cloud’s computer network. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position can be identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.In the Glass Box, a space surrounded by glass on six sides, visitors experience a “sense of physical suspension only heightened by an occasional opening in the fog.” As visitors pass one another, their coats compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush – red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.Visitors can climb another level to the Angel Bar at the summit. The final ascent resembles the sensation of flight as one pierces through the cloud layer to the open sky. Here, visitors relax, take in the view, and choose from a large selection of commercial waters, municipal waters from world capitals, and glacial waters. At night, the fog will function as a dynamic and thick video screen.