RÍOS TRILOGY // CHAPTER N.2: HYBRID CARTOGRAPHIES

The second chapter of the Ríos Trilogy presents twenty-one clay 3D-printed sculptures shaped through digital hybridisation using Amazon-related data. Each piece corresponds to one of the main tributary territories of the Amazon Basin. These speculative cartographic artefacts draw on topographic and social media data to reflect the socio-environmental tensions tensions pressing on the region.

2 - 8 May 2025
CEFE - Centro Felicidad Chapinero, Bogotá, Colombia

RÍOS TRILOGY // CHAPTER N.3: HYBRID R€¥€R$€

Getting closer to the Amazon is like zooming into an immensely complex and abundant system. Diving deeper is confronting, as it leads to the experience that, in fact, one knows nothing. 

R€¥€R$€ is a 30' Virtual Reality piece that deepens into the complex situation of Amazonia. More than half of the Amazon region, 66 per cent of it, is subject to permanent pressure due to human extractive practices such as oil and mineral exploitation, road infrastructure development, ranching, agricultural activity and hydroelectric plants. Deforestation, burning, and loss of carbon stocks are proof of the large-scale transformations taking place in Amazonia.

The ancestral Indigenous Peoples' and the biome of the Rainforest are endangered by the rapid deforestation and exploitation of natural resources. The extractivist practices operating in the region have caused irreparable damage to these vital ecosystems, threatening the survival of countless species of plants and animals. The loss of these valuable resources impacts the local communities who rely on them for their livelihoods and has far-reaching global consequences. It is imperative that we take action to protect and preserve the Rainforest and its inhabitants before it's too late.

R€¥€R$€ underlines the tensions present in the territory, where human, cultural and environmental aspects rub with power, economics and multinational interests in a context of climate stress in which importance of preserving this unique ecosystem is vital for the survival of the current life on Earth.

5 - 9 May 2025

Centro Fundadores, Manizales, Colombia

Laura Colmenares Guerra
Festival Internacional de la Imagen

Wolf is Alex Verhaest’s feminist rewriting of Little Red Riding Hood, merging augmented reality with hand-painted animation in the tradition of Kiki Smith and Paula Rego. 

After years of painting pixels, Verhaest now turns to acrylics and a custom build AR app to blur the line between folklore and flesh.

Alex Verhaest - Wolf

Sewing Machine Orchestra - Singer sewing machines, objects charged with collective memory and family histories, evoke a transfigured past brought back to the present and decontextualized. In Sewing Machine Orchestra, twelve domestic machines, collected and diverted from their utilitarian function, become the protagonists of a choreography orchestrated by computer and amplified by contact microphones.

Directly inspired by the performance of the same name, this installation reveals the sound and light potential of this familiar object. Unsettling in the agitation it generates, the work evolves in a crescendo of sound: like a polycephalic mechanical monster, the machines come to life with increasing intensity, filling the space with a low tone.

The omnipresent light accentuates the spectral effect of the installation. It transcends the overall choreography and casts the shadows of these ghostly objects, symbolically reanimating an industrial and domestic past. This hybrid work invites us to take part in an unsettling experiment on our links to collective memory and its materiality.

Martin Messier
Centre Bang

SHRINK 01995 - Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.

At 16. Internationalen Tanztage there will be 3 Shrinks and the bodies of 3 performers.

Lawrence Malstaf

Organism destabilises the socio-historical tonality of a century-old pipe organ to liberate and sound its turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic restraint. During concerts, shifting metastable states allow for Organism’s energetic thresholds to rapidly fall into and out of compatibility with one another. With no digital sounds, Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.

Performance: solo acoustic concert for robotically prepared historic organ, 2024

Navid Navab
Organism: In Turbulence
Kontejner

The Desert of the Real - A multi-sensory live performance by Studio Radiaal

Technology increasingly reshapes our perceptions, blurring the boundaries between the tangible and the virtual. Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, The Desert of the Real explores how we experience, perceive, and remember reality within a shifting ecological and technological landscape.

Through a staged journey across four scenes, the performance opens with virtual reality as a portal. This individual immersion in a simulated environment gradually shifts toward the exploration of the installations and shifting landscapes on stage. Objects appear fossilized, remnants of a fading world, while original compositions for cello, piano, and live electronics draw audiences into an active role within a fluid reality. Digital seeds and strange organisms start to grow, as glitches and sonic distortions increasingly disturb the fragile balance between the organic and the artificial. Between fading echoes and fractured images, the desert of the real unravels.

STUDIO RADIAAL is an Audiovisual Collective / Pushing the Boundaries of Traditional Art Forms / Creating Multi-Sensory Performances & Stand-alone Installations / Blending Original Compositions for Cello, Piano & Electronics with Visual Art, Video Art, and Scenography.

Portfolio Studio Radiaal
Concertgebouw Brugge

Humming the Ubique is a new installation by Aernoudt Jacobs and part of the Hear Here exhibition.

A mosaic of luminescent foils with artificial voices responds to the imperceptible radiation of the city.

The universe is permeated with radiation that cannot be perceived by our human senses. What is visible and audible to humans is only a very limited part of the electromagnetic and sound spectrum. Think of infrasound, ultraviolet light, or cosmic radiation. In this new work, I create a mosaic of wafer-thin foils that transform such radiation into luminous fields of color and voices. The vocal sounds are generated by artificial intelligence, while the color of the foils intensifies with voltage. The input to the work comes from sensors placed along the Hear Here Walk, directly translating the city's present but imperceptible radiations into this audiovisual artwork.

Aernoudt Jacobs
Hear Here
STUK Leuven

Oceanic oscillation, in the same vein as 1 drop 1000 years, this piece explores thermohaline currents - the deep ocean flows that regulate our planet’s climate. Through moving drawings of the thermohaline loop, brought to life by motors, lights, and sound, the project makes visible the invisible forces that shape our world.

On an oceanic scale, surface waters and deep waters intertwine in a vast circulation network - the thermohaline loop - which orchestrates the balance of living organisms. Under the impact of human activity, this dynamic is being disrupted, weakening the interactions and stability of ecosystems. How can we, as individuals, understand these invisible forces that shape our planet?

In this installation, 21 sheets of paper carry the memory of ocean currents. Their graphic lines reveal the variations of ocean currents, while a set of motors instills subtle, organic movement. Through glass filters, the public explores these oscillations, whose perception changes according to the light reflections and their own movements in front of the work. Ambient music with evolving textures, punctuated by glitches that alter sonic harmony, accompanies this fragile breathing.

With Oceanic Oscillation, Martin Messier invites us to consider ecological issues through a prism that is both philosophical and sensory: to perceive the world's pulsations, to experience the latent tension between stability and chaos, and to detect our own vulnerability in the face of ongoing imbalances.

Martin Messier
PHOS

In search for the hidden mysteries of matter from the borders of table-top astrophysics and natural fiction, three microcosms orchestrate states of sensory access to the phenomenological emergence of order out of chaos. 
tangibleFlux φ plenumorphic ∴ chaosmosis is an installation that invites participants to intimately encounter the ontogenesis of vital patterns through the spontaneous formation of temporal textures that emerge from material-energy fields. 

Physically investigated through collaboration with forces of complex harmonic motion, patterns-of-interaction between magnetism, gravity, and light spiral out of theories of complexity and into an improvisatory dance of hallucinatory forms. Eventually, the kinetic event unveils messy realness chaosing into balance: things doing…  stuff seeking a minimum-energy-state under magnetic flux. Sensually binding, spatially confusing, and temporally unsettling, tangibleFlux pulls everything into immediate vibrational relation with its vertiginous ritual.

N°3 plenumophileia holds a sensuous swamp of voids, curves, and viscous waves, where gestures prevail shapes: where pixel is lube, architecture is pollen, and objects are but excited clumps in a puddle of time.

Navid Navab
PHOS

tele-present wind consists of a series of 42 x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in a gallery and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer installed outdoors. When the wind blows, it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects this movement transmitting the motion to the grouping of devices in the gallery. Therefore, the stalks in the gallery space move in real-time and in unison based on the movement of the wind outside.

For this version of tele-present wind at esc medien kunst labor, Graz the sensor will be installed in an outdoor location adjacent to the Visualization and Digital Imaging Lab at the University of Minnesota, USA. Thus, the individual components of the installation in Austria will move in unison as they mimic the direction and intensity of the wind halfway around the world. As it monitors and collects real-time data from this remote and distant location, the system will relay a physical representation of the dynamic and fluid environmental conditions.

David Bowen
esc medien kunst labor

Manufacture poétique d’icebergs artificiels - Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff
A frozen safe, Antarctica constitutes the largest reserve of fresh water on the planet, accounting for approximately 90%. Its ground is rich, and about 20% of the world's reserves of oil, gas, and minerals are believed to be buried there.
Officially, a neutral and demilitarised territory, reserved for scientific study, Antarctica is a terra nullius, belonging to no one. The Antarctic Treaty rules out any possibility of exploiting natural resources until 2048. Unofficially, some scientific bases serve as flags for states to claim a part of the continent.
In 2012, under the guise of scientific research, the Russians drilled up to 3,768 meters to test hydrocarbon extraction technologies in polar environments. The Chinese mapped the continent's resources.
The installation Manufacture Poétique d’Icebergs Artificiels represents the map of the Antarctic continent, divided into 350 iceberg units. Audiences are invited to rearrange these units into a new, artificial topography of the territory. This staging becomes the play-support to explore future challenges related to the white continent, blending geopolitical fiction and geostrategic projection.

Les Unités Icebergs – Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff en collaboration avec Vanessa Bell
The iceberg unit is a fictional unit that fits in a child's hand and measures the cryosphere and its disappearance. These units - which could be described as pixels or satellite tiles - evoke the division of resources into geo-strategic parcels. And they raise questions about geo-political borders and fractures.
By ironically reusing the codes of projections used in industrial drawings, these prints weave several narrative threads that echo our immediate present and future.

Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff 
Biennale En Commun(s) - HABITER

1 drop 1000 years - In this hypnotic performance, Martin Messier explores the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years unfolds as a poetic, immersive ballet, revealing the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.

Scientists agree that a drop of water travels the globe in less than 1,000 years. This drop shapes our world: it transports nutrients, heat and living organisms, while regulating our planet's climate and ecosystems. It contributes to the fundamental process of life's equilibrium.

Drawing on data from the Global Conveyor Belt, the vast ocean current that orchestrates the mixing of water from the five oceans and redistributes heat on a global scale, Martin Messier underlines the fundamental role of water as a vital substance. Yet, over the past two centuries, human action has been shaking this fragile balance: the gradual slowing of this ocean current could trigger a major climatic upheaval, threatening the entire chain of life.

In this hypnotic performance, the artist explores the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium, and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years reveals itself as a masterful, poetic ballet, conveying the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.

Martin Messier
Kontejner
Gibanja

R€¥€R$€ is a 30' Virtual Reality piece that deepens into the complex situation of Amazonia. More than half of the Amazon region, 66 per cent of it, is subject to permanent pressure due to human extractive practices such as oil and mineral exploitation, road infrastructure development, ranching, agricultural activity and hydroelectric plants. Deforestation, burning, and loss of carbon stocks are proof of the large-scale transformations taking place in Amazonia.

The ancestral Indigenous Peoples' and the biome of the Rainforest are endangered by the rapid deforestation and exploitation of natural resources. The extractivist practices operating in the region have caused irreparable damage to these vital ecosystems, threatening the survival of countless species of plants and animals. The loss of these valuable resources impacts the local communities who rely on them for their livelihoods and has far-reaching global consequences. It is imperative that we take action to protect and preserve the Rainforest and its inhabitants before it's too late.

R€¥€R$€ underlines the tensions present in the territory, where human, cultural and environmental aspects rub with power, economics and multinational interests in a context of climate stress in which importance of preserving this unique ecosystem is vital for the survival of the current life on Earth.

Laura Colmenares Guerra will be present in Osaka to give a talk about her practice and show R€¥€R$€.

1 drop 1000 years - In this hypnotic performance, Martin Messier explores the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years unfolds as a poetic, immersive ballet, revealing the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.

Scientists agree that a drop of water travels the globe in less than 1,000 years. This drop shapes our world: it transports nutrients, heat and living organisms, while regulating our planet's climate and ecosystems. It contributes to the fundamental process of life's equilibrium.

Drawing on data from the Global Conveyor Belt, the vast ocean current that orchestrates the mixing of water from the five oceans and redistributes heat on a global scale, Martin Messier underlines the fundamental role of water as a vital substance. Yet, over the past two centuries, human action has been shaking this fragile balance: the gradual slowing of this ocean current could trigger a major climatic upheaval, threatening the entire chain of life.

In this hypnotic performance, the artist explores the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium, and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years reveals itself as a masterful, poetic ballet, conveying the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.

Martin Messier
ISEA 2025 

What happens when you unleash wild and chaotic processes on a traditional organ? Leave this question to Montreal-based Navid Navab, who takes it completely apart and creates a new instrument and sound constellations from it. In this acoustic solo performance, Navab improvises with Organism: a 1910 Casavant pipe organ, exploring ways in which its turbulent thresholds manifest unstable timbres and intricate sonic self-organisation. 

The experimental instrument destabilises the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate and sound its hidden turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic restraint. During the concert, Organism’s slowly-shifting metastable states allow for the pipes’ energetic thresholds to transductively fall into and out of compatibility with one another, turning each pipe into a vortex-shedding, edge-tone jumping, theatre of spectra and tone. 

With no digital sounds, Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.

Performance: solo acoustic concert for robotically prepared historic organ, 2024

Navid Navab
Organism: In Turbulence
FIBER Festival

Aquaphoneia (2016) by Navid Navab

This alchemical installation features a floating horn that echoes the ghost of Edison’s machine. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. 

Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released. The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound. 

Navid Navab
798 CUBE

Phantom Vision uses the latest advances in science and technology to provide insights into brainwave patterns, dreams visualized by artificial intelligence, nature's hidden communication networks, and layers of our reality that go beyond the limits of everyday perception through the works, interactive installations and ever-changing projections of more than 35 international and Hungarian artists.

"If we can capture the rippling of a lake, can we also capture howling wind and billowing fog using digital art? David Bowen’s sculptures capture a fleeting moment in the ever-changing pulse of water waves, freezing it in space and time. Using a CNC router, the artist transforms the dynamic, fluid movement of water into a static, three-dimensional form, paradoxically capturing the constant flux of nature. The works encourage the viewer to reflect on the futility of artistic efforts to capture the essence of ephemeral natural phenomena and transform them into an artistic experience by digitally capturing a single moment of infinite wave motion. The intricate, minute details and undulating surface of the sculpture serve as a tangible imprint of the power of water and the complexity of wave motion, juxtaposing the ephemeral with the permanent. The precise geographical coordinates in the title refer to Lake Superior in North America and associate these frozen waves with a specific location, further emphasizing the tension between the universal nature of water movement and the singularity of a single moment in time and space. The sculptures exemplify the artist’s broader artistic practice, which offers unique perspectives on the relationship between nature, technology and human perception." Barnabás Bencsik

46°41'58.365" lat. -91°59'49.0128" long. @ 30m refers to the source location where the water surface data was collected for this series. An autonomous aerial vehicle hovering 30 meters above Lake Superior captured still images of the water’s surface. 
For this series of five, the vehicle was deployed to the same location on different days and in different weather conditions. The collected images were converted into three-dimensional models using open source software.
The models were then carved with a CNC router into a series of clear acrylic cylinders. This process captured the dynamic movements of the waves and ripples from a specific time and location and suspended this ever-changing water pattern into a static transparent form. 

David Bowen
Light Art Museum Budapest