Trees communicate with each other at 220 hertz A/V at Silbersalz Festival
30.10.2026 Planetarium Halle
Halle (Saale) (D)
Friday 30 October 2026 - 19:00
Performance + Panel discussion with guests
Friday 30 October 2026 - 20:30
Performance
What if we could not only see the forest, but also hear it?
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 presented in a projection 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.
The visual and media artist, Nelly-Eve Rajotte (CA/QC) develops a practice rooted in immersive installation and performance that interrogates contemporary conditions of perceptual experience. She is also professor at the School of Design at UQAM, where she leads the Moving Image and Sound Design research axis.
This performance is 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.
VFX Artist / Software Developer: Codrin-Mihail Tablan Negrei
Matter - In the depths of flesh, the delicacy of invasive machines at Silbersalz Festival
29.10.2026 - 01.11.2026 Schaufenster @nt
Halle (Saale) (D)
Known for her immersive video installations, Nelly-Ève Rajotte presents Matter. In the depths of flesh, the delicacy of invasive machines, her most personal work to date. Based on her own experience with robot-assisted abdominal surgery, Rajotte’s piece involves an operation conducted by the medical robot Da Vinci, and invites us on a fanciful voyage to the heart of an imaginary patient’s body.
Via a large-format projection that combines real images shot by a camera, ones generated by artificial intelligence, and others modelled in 3D, Nelly-Eve Rajotte explores the growing integration of robotics and intelligent systems in the field of medicine. She also questions the complex relationship between medicine, the body, and women’s health.
This installation is supported by The Québec Government Office in Berlin, and 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.
Nelly-Eve Rajotte
Matter. In the depths of flesh, the delicacy of invasive machines
Silbersalz Festival
SHRINK 01995 at SILBERSALZ Science & Media Festival
28.10.2026 - 30.10.2026 Konzerthalle Ulrichskirche
Halle (Saale) (D)
How does it feel when the human body suddenly becomes an exhibit?
Enclosed between two large transparent membranes, a person floats seemingly weightlessly in the room. The air is slowly drawn out from between the membranes until they cling tightly to the body and restrict every movement. What sounds oppressive at first transforms in SHRINK 01995 into an extraordinary experience that straddles the line between control and loss of control, protection and vulnerability.
Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf makes the human body itself part of his installation. Visitors can experience a completely new perspective on the human body. Fascinating images emerge: the enclosed bodies resemble three-dimensional sculptures or oversized specimens. A work that is as unsettling as it is aesthetic, exploring bodily perception and vulnerability.
Lawrence Malstaf
SHRINK 01995
SILBERSALZ Science & Media Festival
1 drop 1000 years at Transdisciplina
24.10.2026 Teatro Echegaray
Málaga (ES)
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.
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.
This performance is 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.
1 drop 1000 years at KIKK Festival
23.10.2026 Delta
Namur (B)
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.
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.
This performance is 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.
Martin Messier
1 drop 1000 years
KIKK Festival - After Party & Performance
tele-present wind (Mars wind version) at Festival d'Autres Formes 2026
23.10.2026 - 01.11.2026 Festival d'Autres Formes 2026
Citadelle, Besançon (F)
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.
tele-present wind (Mars wind version)
David Bowen
D'Autres Formes
Astronomical Water at KIKK Festival
22.10.2026 - 25.10.2026 Delta
Namur (B)
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.
Organism + Excitable Chaos at KIKK Festival
22.10.2026 - 25.10.2026 Delta
Namur (B)
A robotically prepared historic pipe organ driven by a robotically-steered chaotic pendulum
“Organism dismantles the socio‑historical tonality of the organ – civilization’s triumph over the turbulence of nature – to liberate its hidden turbulent materiality. A 1910 Casavant pipe organ, rescued from impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montréal, has had its pneumatic architecture modified to remove stabilizations that historically aimed to eliminate turbulent flow and its uncontrollable sound world, unleashing long-repressed timbres to be heard anew after centuries of sonic repression. The pipes chosen for the work exhibit the highest degree of instability, ‘edge-tone jumping’ to sound intermittently even the subtlest fluctuations, bringing the energetic interdependencies of the system to the sensory realm.
Designed to produce unpredictable compositional futures, Excitable Chaos is a nonlinear movement system animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms. Sliding pivotal-joints shift the system’s larger gravitational dynamics, while subtle adjustments to damper-weights refine its kinetic resonances, phases, and grooves. These mass-orbital modulations allow Excitable Chaos to continuously enact chaotic movement systems, each a stochastic universe unto itself, while highlighting how, in nature, even at the smallest scales of magnitude, events are key contributors to cohesive but emergent behaviors, whose next states are unknowable.
Excitable Chaos’s transductive dance with gravity (its energetic tensions, correlations, and upheavals continuously shaping and unshaping excitable worlds) is wirelessly sensed and data‑sculpted to reveal its inner liveliness. By channelling this stream of ‘lively’ data, the generative movement of Excitable Chaos can conduct Organism’s aerodynamic thresholds, drawing kinetic chaos into conversation with sonic turbulence. Each undulation opens an indeterminate cycle of cascading oscillations, while over time chaotic attractors establish self‑similar grooves. The resulting turbulent 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.” – Navid Navab
SHRINK 01995 at Electron Festival
17.10.2026 Comédie de Genève
Geneva (CH)
Lawrence Malstaf, a leading figure in the fields of immersive and performing arts, presents SHRINK 01995, a work that embodies his artistic approach.
This performance installation consists of two large suspended plastic sheets that enclose a body vacuum-packed using an air-extraction mechanism. A transparent tube inserted between the two layers allows the participant to regulate the flow of air. The increasing pressure gradually causes the surface of the body to set into multiple micro-folds. As the performance unfolds, the ‘wrapped’ person changes position, evoking in turn images of an embryo or a crucified body.
At the intersection of the visual arts and theatre, Lawrence Malstaf develops installations and performances based on movement, coincidence, order and chaos, as well as a series of sensory pieces. He also creates monumental mobile environments that explore the notions of space and orientation and can involve the audience as co-performers.
Lawrence Malstaf received several awards in the field of arts and technology, he is also internationally recognised for his set designs in the worlds of dance and theatre.
At Electron there will be four shrinks and the bodies of 4 performers.
Lawrence Malstaf
SHRINK 01995
Electron - Festival des cultures numériques de Genève
Indigenous and multibeing answers to extractivism: organising life before profit
17.10.2026 Shifting Worlds - FTI Festival at Wiels
Brussels (B)
Anthropologist and legal scholar Barbara Truffin and artist Laura Colmenares Guerra will discuss the social and political conflicts linked to the extraction of natural resources in the macro territory of the Amazon Basin.
R€¥€R$€, a VR work that received an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica 2026, reflects on the dismantling of the Amazon Basin under the pressure of anthropogenic climate change, and on the importance of Indigenous governance over these territories.
Together, we will move from understanding the geopolitical conflicts of the region to exploring models of Indigenous governance across the macro territory. We will look at how Indigenous peoples design planes de vida (life projects) for their own communities, and how these frameworks can offer clues to other ways of organising and relating to nature.