Ríos Trilogy
02.10.2025 - 05.10.2025 Fotosíntesis - Festival internacional de arte, ciencia y tecnologías | Eco existencias
Medellín (CO)
RÍOS TRILOGY
SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE AMAZON BASIN
The Ríos Trilogy is a three-chapter installation exploring the Amazon Basin from local and international perspectives. Through this hydrology-based body of work, the trilogy explores the relationship between language and the construction and definitions of territory.
This project examines the pressing socio-environmental challenges faced by the Amazon. Working with language, through the analysis of social networks, and in parallel analysing GIS data to analyse the threats derived from deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources, this body of work seeks to identify the meanings we attribute to the territory of the Macro-Amazon, a territory politically shaped by nine Latin American countries.
The Ríos Trilogy is composed of three chapters:
CHAPTER N.1 - RIVERS // AMAZONIA GEO-LINGUISTICS ONLINE APPLICATION
CHAPTER N.2 - HYBRID CARTOGRAPHIES
CHAPTER N.3 - R€¥€R$€ - VR
Laura Colmenares Guerra
Fotosíntesis - Festival internacional de arte, ciencia y tecnologías
eco existencias
FIELD at MA/IN Festival
28.09.2025 Teatro Paisiello
Lecce (IT)
Field is based on the idea that sounds can emerge from the electromagnetic fields that are omnipresent in our environment. This performance reveals these invisible forces, essential and imperceptible to the eye and ear, which orchestrate our gestures and movements.
Residual electrical signals are picked up by electromagnetic transducer microphones. Recorded beforehand, they then become Martin Messier's raw materials. On stage, the artist interacts with two aluminum panels, linked by a network of cables that he continually connects and disconnects, generating a choreography of sound and light. From these repeated gestures, a hypnotic composition emerges. Evolving in an infinite loop, each iteration, though familiar, is different. The visual power of the work, evoked by electrical conduction and lightning-like flashes of light, plunges viewers into a state of fascination. This revelation of electromagnetic forces brings us closer to their mystery, making the inaccessible tangible.
With surgical synchronization of light and sound, and shadow effects that animate a constantly changing landscape, Field is a landmark project in Martin Messier's artistic research.
the two (premiere) in machinekind
25.09.2025 - 13.12.2025 PRAx
Stirek Gallery, Oregon State University, Corvallis (US)
The exhibition machinekind aims to explore the liminal space between machine-generated efficiency and the poignant and sometimes valuable inefficiencies that accompany human behavior. What vision of a future built on machine-collaboration do we hope for? When and how do we want artificial intelligence making decisions with us, or altogether for us? As those invested in the technological innovation behind machine-kind market dreams of a world made easier, what elements of human social interaction might be lost or reinterpreted in the process?
machinekind invites the viewer to explore the notion of artifice as it relates to the tangible, cultural, and ethical consequences of AI. The invited artists engage with questions of outsourcing care and connection, the often-biased logics embedded in data models, the humor in glitches, and the moments humankind and “machinekind” recognize one another in unexpected contexts.
is it possible for robots to fall in love?
This installation consists of two identical robotic arms with cameras connected to two identical computers. Each computer is running a custom deep neural network that is trained to recognize the other robot. Using their cameras, the robots attempt to find and track each other as they move independently. Playfully dancing, the robots at times are attracted to each other. While at other times they seem repelled by their mate. Tension increases as they almost touch only to quickly pull away. If one of the robots does not see the other it will go to a resting position briefly before it begins to look for its counterpart again. When a robot positively identifies it’s mate a given number of times, the network is re-trained based on the new data. Through this continual training and re-training, the robots conceivably increasing their proficiency at recognizing and finding one another. In this way, as they lock onto each other’s loving gaze the robots become more and more familiar with their mates.
tele-present wind in Silence & The Presence of Everything
21.09.2025 - 03.05.2026 Monopole
Schiedam (NL)
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam breathes new life into the former dance hall and cinema Monopole with art. Silence & The Presence of Everything opens to the public on Sunday, September 21, 2025: an exhibition full of intriguing art installations exploring natural phenomena. Immerse yourself in magical natural phenomena and experience captured sunbeams, weather systems of dust and light, swaying reeds from Schiedam bending with the Minnesota wind, boundless horizons, and dancing droplets flowing toward the center of the earth
The art installations of artists Sabine Marcelis, Guido van der Werve, Tina Farifteh, Lachlan Turczan, David Bowen, Gordon Hempton, Lily Clark, Carel Balth, and Boris Acket are spread throughout the Monopole. The artist Boris Acket, is also the guest curator of the exhibition, alongside co-curator Sanneke Huisman.
Silence is the Presence of Everything The inspiration for this exhibition comes from the acoustic ecologist and philosopher Gordon Hempton. He once placed a microphone on the world and put on headphones. According to him, this gave him an unforgettable experience. Boris Acket and Sanneke Huisman: “We’ve taken that feeling as the starting point for this exhibition. You enter a world where everything seems new, seen through the eyes and ears of the artists. The title of the exhibition is therefore derived from a statement by Hempton, which encapsulates everything: ‘Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.'”
This installation by David Bowen consists of a series of 126 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.
Elusive Matter
18.09.2025 - 19.09.2025 Transart Festival
BASIS Vinschgau Venosta, Silandro, Bolzano (IT)
18 September 2025 from 21:45 until midnight
19 September 2025 from 9:00 until 15:00
With Elusive Matter, a minimalist sound and light performance, Martin Messier transforms simple wisps of smoke into a veritable projection screen. In a room plunged into darkness, armed only with a projector as a source of light, the artist creates tableaux in an intangible mist: a myriad of ghostly spaces, architectural forms and dreamlike images take shape in the mist, suspended just a few centimetres above the viewer's head. This proximity of matter creates the illusion of a moving space, blurring spatial reference points.
Exploring the boundary between the tangible and the intangible, Elusive Matter brings light and sound into tension to generate atmospheres that are both ethereal and soothing. Guided by the search for an immaterial device, Martin Messier creates a sensory universe where matter fades away to make way for an experience oscillating between presence and absence, intangible beauty and dream.
Innervision
11.09.2025 Transart Festival
NOI Tech Park, Bolzano (IT)
Opening performance Transart Festival on 11 September 2025
at 20:30 & 21:30
A living sculpture takes shape with 62 dancers, each facing an amplified light table, and guided live by Martin Messier. At the heart of this human wave that passes through and encompasses the audience, each performer follows the artist's instructions, as if carried by an inner voice, oscillating between obedience and free will. Dressed in black, the performers merge into a pulsating collective body, swelling, shrinking, advancing or collapsing, embodying the power and malleability of the social body.
In this vast choreographic device, the dancers hold a stone, symbolizing raw material and original nature. Their simple, repetitive gestures - rubbing, throwing, catching - evoke both a return to our roots and a harbinger of humanity's future struggles. In a space saturated with technology, this visceral, prophetic performance returns us to the timeless power of nature and the weight of our collective heritage.
tele-present wind (Mars wind version) at Ars Electronica
03.09.2025 - 07.09.2025 Ars Electronica
Postcity (Groundfloor), Linz (AT)
Futures Entangled: Material Intelligence, Memory & Movement
Istanbul Digital Art Festival (IDAF)
The exhibition Futures Entangled: Material Intelligence, Memory & Movement, presented within the framework of the Ars Electronica festival’s PANIC – yes/no theme, offers a narrative that weaves together the urgencies of migration and ecological crisis. Through installation and data artworks, it explores the emotional, material, and technological dimensions of displacement, adaptation, and survival.
This work invites audiences into an environment where speculative ecologies, nonhuman data, and alternative systems of exchange come to life—proposing new sensibilities for how we sense, share, and sustain in a rapidly transforming world. By engaging with both planetary and personal scales of crisis, the work asks: How do we navigate panic—not just as fear, but as a potential for transformation?
tele-present wind (Mars wind version)
This installation by David Bowen is a collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The piece consists of a series of 84 x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to tall dried grass stalks, installed like a field in the gallery. The mechanisms will tilt, move and sway based on data collected from the wind sensor on the Perseverance Mars rover.
Dr. José A Rodríguez-Manfredi, lead scientist on the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer on Perseverance, assisted in collecting the wind data for the project. That data is mapped to the movement of the mechanisms. Thus, the individual components of the installation here on earth will move in unison as they mimic the direction and intensity of the wind from another planet.
Organism: In Turbulence: Golden Nica at Ars Electronica
03.09.2025 - 07.09.2025 Ars Electronica
Mariendom, Linz AT)
Navid Navab (IR/CA) explores an experimental approach to organ sounds with his performance Organism: In Turbulence, that won the Golden Nica at the 2025 Prix Ars Electronica. Based in Montreal, they challenge conventional ideas of classical church music. The installation will be on display at St. Mary’s Cathedral throughout the festival, with additional performative interventions to look forward to.
Organism: In Turbulence
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent patterning
Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate its turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression. In concerts, Organism’s shifting metastable states allow for its energetic thresholds to fall into and out of compatibility with one another. Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.
Mariendom, Linz (AT)
Openingconcert Wednesday 3 September 2025 - 19:30
Saturday 6 September - 12:30 - 13:30
Saturday 6 September - 20:00 - 21:00
Organism + Excitable Chaos: Golden Nica at Ars Electronica
03.09.2025 - 07.09.2025 Prix Ars Electronica Exhibition
Mariendom, Linz (AT)
Organism + Excitable Chaos
Navid Navab (IR/CA), with Garnet Willis (CA)
This year’s Golden Nica in the category “Digital Musics & Sound Art” goes to media artist Navid Navab and Garnet Willis for their project “Organism.”
Anyone who was in the POSTCITY bunker during last year’s Ars Electronica Festival may remember that moment. The humming in your chest, the rattling of the technology, the archaic sound creeping through the concrete. “Organism” by Navid Navab and Garnet Willis was no ordinary piece of music. It was an experience, raw, expansive, almost eerie. And above all: difficult to forget. No wonder, then, that the work has now been awarded the Golden Nica in the “Digital Musics & Sound Art” category.
This category is one of the most traditional at the Prix Ars Electronica. Ars Electronica introduced the category for computer music back in 1987—a bold move long before electronic sounds were commonplace in the art world. Since then, the field has developed rapidly: from algorithmically generated music and hybrid compositions to immersive soundscapes that challenge and expand our listening habits.
But what makes “Organism” so special? And what role does chaos play in a work that seems so precisely programmed? In conversation with Navid Navab, we dive into a world where machines breathe, organ pipes whisper, and order is just an illusion.
Read interview
Organism is a new instrument reconstructed from a century-old Casavant pipe organ using robotics technology. By combining it with a robot-controlled triple pendulum system called Excitable Chaos, it unleashes the organ’s turbulent materiality and releases tones that have been suppressed for centuries. The pipes chosen for the work are those that exhibit the highest degree of instability, “edge-tone jumping” to sound intermittently even the subtlest fluctuations. Designed to produce unpredictable compositional futures, Excitable Chaos is animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms. The generative movement of Excitable Chaos conducts Organism’s aerodynamic thresholds, drawing kinetic chaos into dialogue with sonic turbulence. The resulting sonifications of chaos serve as meditations on the sense of more-than-oneness that spontaneously emerges in life and nature, and how this wild yet steerable relationality can help us express worlds yet unknown.
Mariendom, Linz (AT)
Thursday 4 September 2025
10:00 – 17:30
Friday 5 September 2025
10:00 – 17:30
Sunday 7 September 2025
12:30 – 18:00
Prix Ars Electronica 2025
Golden Nica – Digital Musics & Sound Art
New Project: Astronomical Water
14.08.2025 - 28.08.2025 Village Numérique - MUTEK Montréal
Society for Arts and Technology [SAT], Montréal (CA/QC)
Omnipresent on our planet, water also exists in different states in the universe, notably in the form of drops in microgravity. Astronomical Water invites us to rediscover the sublime nature of water, questioning our relationship with this element, the magic it conceals and its life-giving power.
Echoing his performance 1 drop 1000 years, Martin Messier imagines an installation made up of a hundred drippers arranged on three large panels. The public is invited to move inside and outside the structure, sometimes watching the panorama, sometimes immersed in the heart of the device. Playing on the rhythms of the drops and the stroboscopic lights, the artist manipulates persistence of vision to reverse or freeze the movement of the water. The paintings follow one another: first emphasizing the gravitational effect, then giving the illusion of levitating water. Sound is reduced to its essentials: the sound of valves opening and closing. An organic rhythm that accompanies the falling drops and finally reveals their materiality.
Astronomical Water offers an immersion without a digital screen, where time seems to stretch, a contemplative and singular work that allows us to invest the world once the experience is over.
The Montréal-based artist Martin Messier (CA/QC) creates works blending sound art, light, robotics, and video. His performances and installations emphasize the body. Collaborating with various artists, his creations have been presented in 50 countries and have won numerous international awards. He has directed the company 14 lieux since 2010.