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.

Delusional Crime and Punishment

Who created life? I think this is the question everyone has been asking themselves since childhood? At least I have many doubts, the subjective feeling of the existence of consciousness allows us to face the world from that source. Why do humans eat like this for energy? Why not get energy in other ways? Why do you need energy to exercise? Why is this so joyful and so painful? What is the need for pain, pleasure, fear, excitement, etc.?Upon careful analysis, it appears that the source of many desires comes from the design of our physical structure. If God designed human beings, why was he designed that way and why was he designed as a biological mechanism for sin and hell? Why do human beings have desires because of such a physical structure and even they don’t understand self-control, they have sins, and they have to go to another hell of punishment system to atone for their sins? Who created this series of systems?

Great Chain of Being
FILE FESTIVAL
The great chain of being, an ancient philosophical concept, attempted to explain the structures and relationships of the world as a form of hierarchy or set of strata. This philosophical idea is here expressed in the form of the entities that constitute the contemporary world. The philosophers of the past believed that the structure of the world had at its top a god, and that beneath there were angels, animals, plants, and elements. But this conception of the world, as a result of the changes in civilization and culture, resulted in the elements that constitute the world undergoing a transition and sustaining an unforeseen hierarchy. The works of art depict the contemporary structure in the form of robots, machines, people, animals, and virtual or digital entities. Within virtual systems, these entities undergo a process of creation, arrangement, use, disposal and recycling, through which they emerge and disappear. The work depicts the stories emerging from these processes, against the background of a systemically designed landscape akin to a factory.
video

Terraforming
The video work “terraforming” focusses on the transformation of a natural environment through energy input. The underpinning idea is that of three phase system change. This begins with the stage of equilibrium where a system is in a certain balance and not changing at all. In the next stage an evolving system enters a state of motion and change where it moves away from equilibrium. The third and final stage is the phase of transformation in which the original system becomes something else. The key element in this transformation process is the sun. This process is called terraforming, whereby a hostile environment, i.e. a planet that is too cold, too hot, or has an unbreathable atmosphere, can be altered to make it suitable for human life. Such a process is not merely a futuristic scenario but represents exactly what is happening on Earth at this moment as the process of atmospheric change brought about by increasing CO2 emissions heats up our planet and speeds up the process of climate change.
video

SONNTAG aus LICHT

Sonntag aus Licht takes as its subject our solar system and the relationships of all the planets that orbit the sun. In this opera, the earth and life on it is represented as the result of the union of light and water. These two elements are presented in the first scene, and the rest of the opera celebrates the evolution of life, of plants, animals, humans, and above all this the planets, moons, and heavenly constellations. The opera has a pronounced ritualistic and meditative character, with very little that can be described as dramatic action.

Everything
FILE GAMES 2017
Everything is an interactive experience where everything you see is a thing you can be, from animals to planets to galaxies and beyond. Travel between outer and inner space, and explore a vast, interconnected universe of things without enforced goals, scores, or tasks to complete. Everything is a procedural, AI-driven simulation of the systems of nature, seen from the points of view of everything in the Universe.

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
HYPERGRADIENT
“Hypergradient” analyzes the different interpretations of an impartial consistent statement. The installation repeatedly changes between two states: the “statement” state and the “interpretation” state. The statement state displays a sequence of characters of a distinct semiotic system, which can be described as a deputy for all known semiotic systems. These single characters are grouped to strings and then form string orders into an abstract proposition.

Death and the Powers

Science fiction and poignant family drama combine in one of the most stunning, cutting-edge operas of the 21st century, with a libretto by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, coming to the stage of the Winspear Opera House in a production directed by Diane Paulus, designed by Alex McDowell (Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) and conducted by Nicole Paiement (TDO’s The Lighthouse).This visually spectacular robot pageant by MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire, sung by Robert Orth, who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there. Without bodies, without the possibility of touch, sex, suffering, and death — are we still genuinely human?Explore these existential questions and much more in a piece Variety described as “playful, lyrical and…mesmerizing.” Also starring Joélle Harvey as Miranda, Patricia Risley as Evvy, and Hal Cazalet in his Dallas Opera debut as Nicholas.

CINCO VARIACIONES DE CIRCUNSTANCIAS FONICAS Y UNA PAUSA
Órgano [Organ] is a large-scale and site-specific interactive installation of a talking machine resembling a musical church organ. Originally installed at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (LAA)–a former 17th-century church in downtown Mexico City–the device features two inputs: a musical keyboard and a typewriter. Each time users move to another line by striking the carriage-return lever on the typewriter, the words that have been typed are played back by means of a voice synthesizer. The musical keyboard, on the other hand, features a more complex system in which each key, music interval, and chord has been programmed to sound a specific syllable, comprising more than 2,000 syllables that make up the Spanish language. The latter programming has been translated into English, and more recently into Russian, for international exhibitions.

Algorithm Cinema
Daemon

FILE FESTIVAL

Machines and artificial intelligence have permeated virtually every aspect of our lives and consistently are about to conquer the last bastions of human autonomy. Do machines represent the more contemporary, ultimately perhaps even better humanoids and mankind gradually gets absorbed by this perfect system?
The audio-visual installation “Daemon” analyzes the never-sleeping and permanent alertness of an artificial intelligence.
FILE LED SHOW

دوجلاس إنجلبرت
道格拉斯·恩格尔巴特
דאגלס אנגלברט
ダグラス·エンゲルバート
더글라스 엥겔바트
Дуглас Энгельбарт
The first mouse

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.