Mesh is a biennial festival for art and technology in Basel. The program includes exhibitions, performances, screenings, and workshops, complemented by a conference of talks and panel discussions. This year's edition, Infrastructures of Care, asks after good social relationships, fair technologies, and a mindful engagement with the environment. Mesh creates spaces for connection, exchange, and solidarity, understanding care as something shared that can be shaped together. At its center stands one question: how is technology changing the way we live together?

Martin Messier and Nelly-Ève Rajotte are co-presented by MUTEK, with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Mesh - Festival for Art and Technology

Water is everywhere on Earth, and it also exists in space — as floating drops in weightlessness. Martin Messier his Astronomical Water asks how we relate to this element.

Visitors move around the installation and step inside it, switching between an overview and full immersion. Inside, water falls in a steady rhythm under strobe light. The light plays with how the eye works: the drops seem to freeze in mid-air, or even to move upward.

The only sound is the opening and closing of the valves. There is no screen. Time appears to slow down.

Martin Messier
Astronomical Water
Mesh

A drop of water travels around the Earth in less than 1,000 years. On its way it carries nutrients, heat and living organisms, and it helps regulate the climate.

In this performance 1 drop 1000 years, fifteen suspended machines move water in real time. Together they show the movement of the oceans on a small scale.

Martin Messier connects two kinds of current: the global flows that keep the planet in balance, and the flows inside our own bodies. The result is a slow, hypnotic piece about how fragile these systems are.

Martin Messier
1 drop 1000 years
Mesh

Giulia Bini in conversation with Juliette Bibasse, Martin Messier and Tatjana Vall.

A key figure on the Quebec and international art scenes, Martin Messier orchestrates a dialogue between sound, light and movement. His art of staging and his ability to combine technologies with natural elements (water, smoke, waves, electricity...) have led him to develop a body of work on our perception of physical phenomena. He explores their manifestations - from the most imperceptible to the most monumental - through extraordinary devices. His performances and installations oscillate between order and chaos, creating a contemplative tension that invites the audience into a synesthetic experience, sometimes close to the spiritual.

Mesh

Nelly-Ève Rajotte is a visual and media artist, she develops a practice rooted in immersive installation and performance that interrogates contemporary conditions of perceptual experience. Working with moving image and sound, her projects explore non-human regimes of vision and machinic forms of landscape imaging, drawing on technologies such as LiDAR, biosensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics. She is professor at the School of Design at UQAM, where she leads the Moving Image and Sound Design research axis.

Trees communicate with each other at 220 hertz A/V (2026) is an immersive audiovisual performance combining moving image, generative sound, and biosensitive devices. The work is projected and coupled with a modular synthesizer connected by electrodes to a living tree, whose bioelectrical signals feed the sonic flux in real time.

Rooted in the boreal forest, the performance invokes the memory of the sublime landscape to draw the spectator into a sensitive space where the perspective adopted is that of the living — the spectator no longer contemplates the landscape, they become part of it. The frequency of 220 Hz, through which trees communicate with one another, runs through the work as a sonic and symbolic thread, carried by textures that simulate the organic sounds of the forest.

Faced with environmental stakes, the artist adopts an empathetic and contemplative stance. Through LiDAR, she digitally archives the boreal forest, building a three-dimensional memory that questions new forms of non-human perception of the living world.

Between spectrality and preservation, Trees communicate with each other at 220 hertz A/V opens a sensitive space where the boundary between spectator and living world dissolves — a shared presence beneath the canopy.

Volumetric Cinematography / VFX Artist / Software Developer : Codrin-Mihail Tablan Negrei

Nelly-Ève Rajotte
Mesh

News October 2026 - part I
Tallieu Art Office Projects