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.

Eternity Be Kind
LaTurbo Avedon performs Myriam Bleau’s music in a multiplatform audiovisual performance. Eternity Be Kind exposes the codified spaces of performance and hints at a different future for personal and musical representation. Navigating between hyper-pop, mythical symbolism and baroque hints, the artists propose a multilayered experience of collective mise en abyme.
video

Vision II
David Spriggs’ Vision artwork series have a distinct focus on the senses. Accentuated by an affinity between its subject matter and the fragmentary nature of the medium, there is a tension created between form and emptiness. Appearing both as an implosion and as an explosion depending on the one’s perception, the viewer has the sense that he/she is observing a form in becoming, yet at the same time breaking down. The immersive experience created by Vision provides the audience with the impression that they are in the midst of witnessing an event, something of monumental proportions akin to the Big Bang. In changing viewpoints by navigating around the work, Vision is continually altered, breaking down at the sides so that the viewer can only see the edge planes of multiple sheets, begging the question: Is there in fact a form, or just individual images?

Specimen Box

The OCR began work on Specimen Box in 2014 at the request of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center monitors communications coming from hundreds of millions of PCs around the world that have become infected by botnet malware. Employing data sonification together with advanced visualization techniques, Specimen Box provides a configurable multi-sensory presentation of botnet signal activity in real time. It also features a multitouch gesture-based interface for navigating, exploring, selecting, and examining the billions of signals that have previously been collected. Users can access the collected signals based on their activity levels, the geographic locations of their sources, or their daily activity patterns over time, using clustering to group sources with similar behavior.

Ocean = Amazing
by Tobias Stretch
Bagman Actors:
Richard Lehmann
Braden Lawrence
Frank Galaviz
via highlike submit

Well, it’s been a year now, and Stretch has kept busy with projects big and small. Today, The Creators Project premieres “Ocean = Amazing,” Stretch’s new music video for Brooklyn-based band, Dirt Bikes. In three minutes, we follow a plastic bag man (played by Richard Lehmann, Braden Lawrence, and Frank Galaviz) as he traverses the beach in a visible ennui, navigating graffiti-covered barracks, kneeling down to a tidal pool to take a drink, and consuming (or being consumed by, depending on the way you look at it) more bags like the hundreds that compose his fluffy, matted body.