Winner [Award of Distinction] Prix Ars Electronica 2026 Digital Humanity: R€¥€R$€ by Laura Colmenares Guerra
09.09.2026 - 12.09.2026 Ars Electronica
Linz (AT)
With 4,329 submissions from 106 countries, the Prix Ars Electronica 2026 once again affirms its role as a central hub in the global network of media art. The four categories received 1,144 submissions in New Animation Art, 1,757 in Interactive Art+, 754 in Digital Humanity, and 674 in u19–create your world.
In the category Prix Ars Electronica 2026 Digital Humanity,
Laura Colmenares Guerra is honoured with an Award of Distinction for her project R€¥€R$€.
Congratulations!
"With R€¥€R$€, Laura Colmenares Guerra has created an aesthetically compelling immersive work that introduces viewers to the complexity of one of the world’s most fascinating yet endangered ecosystems: the Amazon region. Through virtual reality and interactive cartographies, the project exposes the entanglement of ecological fragility with political and economic forces, pointing out the devastating impact of extractivism and deforestation.
R€¥€R$€ highlights the fatal connection between colonialism and capitalism, which is a central theme of the artwork. By using symbols such as gold, raw materials, or algorithmic processes, the artist draws attention to the historical exploitation of the Amazon region. It immediately becomes clear that this exploitation continues to follow the logic of resource extraction. Virtual reality makes this critique particularly effective by making the power structures palpable.
The fact that the challenges facing the Amazon region do not stop at political borders was subtly conveyed through a curatorial decision regarding the division of the areas to be explored: rather than following the logic of national borders, the exhibition is divided into twenty-one sections, corresponding to the headwaters of the Amazon’s major tributaries—across nine countries and more than 847 million hectares." - Jury Statement
Laura Colmenares Guerra (CO/BE) is a Colombian artist based in Brussels. Her practice encompasses installation, sculpture, and digital 3D narratives, including animation, XR, and ceramics 3D printing. Working from a research-based approach, she explores the relationships between contemporary Western societies and living ecosystems, questioning constructions of nature, territory, and technology as mediations of reality. Her work often transforms environmental data and topographic information into immersive, sensor-based experiences that connect audiences to distant ecological realities. Recent projects address themes of environmental fragility, interspecies transformation, and the entanglement between extractivist systems and vulnerable territories.
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Organism + Exitable Chaos at Aarhus Festival
28.08.2026 - 01.09.2026 UngK
Norre Alle 23K, Aarhus (DK)
“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
Aarhus Festival was founded in 1965 and one of Northern Europe's oldest cultural festivals. Up to one million visitors over a 10-day period and more than 1,000 unique events.
Navid Navab - The Three-Body No-Problem
26.08.2026 MUTEK Forum 2026
Montréal (QC)
MUTEK Forum 2026
12th Edition — Symbiotic Frequencies
From 26 to 28 August 26, 2026, MUTEK Forum returns to Montréal for three days of talks, performances, workshops, screenings, masterclasses, and professional gatherings dedicated to the future of digital creation.
Storytelling: Expanding Realities
Day 1 of MUTEK Forum is dedicated to immersive storytelling, Indigenous media practices, expanded narratives, and the relationships between embodiment, technology, and communities.
Featuring Loretta Sarah Todd, Navid Navab, Zach Blas, Caroline Monnet, New Models, Lou Fauroux, and Tracy Rector.
Navid Navab is a media alchemist, antidisciplinary composer, and tabletop cosmologist whose practice draws from contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology. Their recent performance-installation Organism earned the 2025 Golden Nica from Ars Electronica — the highest international honor in digital musics and sound arts — as well as the prestigious Lumen Prize.
Through an investigative ArtScience practice, Navab creates art-machines that infuse matter with a sense of liveness, probing its excitable dynamics and making the imperceptible palpable at the pre-metabolic border between breathing and not breathing. As a gestural-sound composer and machine-improviser, Navab centers the poly-temporal and material dimensions of the sonic event, performing alongside artists such as George Lewis, Lori Freedman, and Sandeep Bhagwati.
Their works consist of kinetic sound sculptures, theatrical interactive installations, and site-specific interventions that circulate internationally at venues including Ars Electronica, MaerzMusik Berlin, the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, and Japan Society NY. As a researcher active since 2008, Navab also directs the Topological Media Lab (TML) in Montréal, fusing phenomenological studies with artistic research-creation practices.
Organism + Excitable Chaos at Eufònic Festival
10.07.2026 - 26.07.2026 Lo Patti Art Center
Amposta (ES)
A robotically prepared historic pipe organ driven by a robotically-steered chaotic pendulum
Organism + Excitable Chaos begins with an act of dismantling: taking a century-old organ and making it sound from a state of imbalance. The piece brings together Organism —a 1910 Casavant organ prepared robotically— and Excitable Chaos, a robotically guided triple pendulum that activates its aerodynamic thresholds. The result is a kinetic and sonic installation that displaces the instrument from its historical stability and releases a turbulent materiality made up of minimal variations, unstable timbres and unpredictable responses.
There is no closed composition here simply being performed, but rather a living system of movement, air and vibration that constantly reorganises itself. With each oscillation, Excitable Chaos drives the sonic behaviour of the organ, bringing kinetic chaos and acoustic turbulence into dialogue. The piece thus proposes an attentive listening to what deviates, trembles and emerges, opening up a space where sound is not fully controlled, but instead allowed to appear.
Eufònic - Festival around the sound, visual and digital-performative arts that is held in Terres de l’Ebre.
Martin Messier with Sewing Machine Orchestra at Baltoscandal
01.07.2026 - 05.07.2026 Baltoscandal
Rakvere (EE)
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.
Navid Navab with Organism: In Turbulence at Blaues Rauschen 2026
07.06.2026 Anneliese Brost Musikforum Ruhr
Bochum (D)
Organism: In Turbulence
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent formations.
The organ is considered the epitome of musical order: an instrument of harmony, controlled breath, and “pure” tone. In Navid Navab’s work “Organism: In Turbulence,” this idea is radically expanded. The starting point is a century-old organ by Montreal instrument maker Casavant, which Navab saved from destruction and transformed into an experimental sound system. The pipes and pneumatic mechanics were modified and expanded with robotic actuators and ecological sensors. The organ now reacts to its surroundings and becomes part of a cybernetic cycle of air, material, and information. Navab thus continues a tradition in which machines are no longer just instruments, but become systems that can hear and react. Artists such as Nicolas Schöffer and Gordon Pask were already experimenting with such feedback loops between environment, technology, and sound in the 1960s.
Navab develops this idea into a living organism. The organ no longer sounds disciplined and monumental, but turbulent, rushing, and full of unstable overtones. The instrument leaves the sacred space of its history and becomes an open sound laboratory. Navid Navab was born in Tehran and lives in Montreal. As a musician, composer, and researcher, Navab moves between art, science, and experimental instrument making. For “Organism,” Navab and Garnet Willis received the 2025 Prix Ars Electronica award in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category.
Navid Navab’s performance is supported by the Québec Government Office to Germany.
Navid Navab
Organism: In Turbulence
Blaues Rauschen
Free ticket
tele-present wind (Mars wind version) in EMERGENCE[Y]
06.06.2026 - 06.12.2026 Science Gallery
University of Melbourne (AU)
Urgent times. Emergent futures.
EMERGENCE[Y] brings together artists, scientists, technologists, and collaborators to explore how we adapt to a world in flux. In an age marked by ecological collapse, technological acceleration, and social upheaval, adaptation becomes not only a biological imperative but a creative and ethical act. This Science Gallery Melbourne exhibition asks: how might we not only survive through change but emerge in a critically reimaged future?
tele-present wind, created by artist David Bowen in collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory that uses data collected from the wind sensor on the Perseverance Mars rover.
The exhibition has been curated by Science Gallery Head Curator Tilly Boleyn, with input from a team of academic experts and young people.
CD Release: Tuning Time - Orchestral Works by Annelies Van Parys
05.06.2026 Antartica Records
Mechelen (B)
This first portrait album devoted to Annelies Van Parys reveals a distinctive voice in contemporary European music. Drawing on spectralism, she builds luminous orchestral textures that unite timbral exploration with clear musical architecture and strong dramaturgy. Conductor Marit Strindlund notes: "I find Van Parys to be one of the most interesting contemporary European composers… a uniquely individual artistic voice is always shining through her music."
"There is something brilliantly strident about the music of Belgian composer Annelies Van Parys. A spectral composer - her musical structures are grounded in the acoustic properties of sound itself - Van Parys creates music that exudes a terrific power, both intellectually and emotionally. [...] A challenging but enormously rewarding disc." - Kate Wakeling - BBC Music Magazine
Tuning Time - Orchestral Works
Tracklist
1. Eco… del vuoto for orchestra
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Kristiina Poska
2.-4. Concerto for piano and orchestra
Jan Michiels, Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins
5. EUTOPIA for orchestra
Brussels Philharmonic, Kazushi Ono
6. Fantasie for soloists, choir and orchestra
Flanders Symphony Orchestra, Revue Blanche, Kristiina Poska, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
RESIDENCY KIKK X CCN - SHOWCASE: ARTS, SCIENCES & TECH
20.05.2026 CCN - Centre culturel de Namur
Namur (B)
Artists Laura Colmenares Guerra and Julien Clauss, both recipients of the “Arts, Sciences & Tech” grant awarded by KIKK, TRAKK, Le Pavillon and the Cultural Center of Namur, open the doors to their residencies and invite you to discover the results of their research. A moment of discovery and exchange in a friendly atmosphere!
The aim of this residency is to foster interdisciplinary research, experimentation, and artistic creation through digital and technological media, by offering a framework conducive to exploration, prototyping, and dialogue between disciplines.
Laura Colmenares Guerra is a Colombian artist based in Brussels. Her artistic practice moves between technology, environmental awareness, and installation art. She explores the complex relationships between contemporary Western societies and nature, with particular attention to ecosystems and environmental justice through interactive installations, sculptures, and the use of 3D.
The Persistent Elsewhere explores Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, things that surpass us and remain unseen, yet are present and interact with us through corporeality. Morton questions what we feel in the presence of these entities when they are not merely described but inhabited: like a pressure, an immersion, a loss of distinction between one’s body and its surroundings.
The Persistent Elsewhere is an immersive real-time 3D visual essay created using the Unreal Engine 3D generator. The viewer is guided through an ever-evolving inner landscape that originates within the body, expands through aquatic, industrial, and geological spaces, while remaining, at all scales, within. The body contains the hyperobject just as the hyperobject contains the body.
Discover the innovative research and the installations, while immersing yourself in the creative processes. A unique opportunity to explore their stimulating work around art, sound, and science. Don’t miss this chance to meet the artists and be part of the KIKK adventure!
Organism: In Turbulence at Münchner Biennale für Neues Musiktheater
15.05.2026 - 16.04.2026 Ampere / Muffatwerk
München (D)
Organism: In Turbulence
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent formations.
“Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of a century-old 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.” – Navid Navab
Concert: Navid Navab – Organism: In Turbulence - Set 1
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent patterning.
15.05.2026 at 22:00
Concert: Navid Navab - Organism: In Turbulence - Set 2
16.05.2026 at 21:30
Curated by Dietmar Lupfer – a collaboration between the Munich Biennale 2026 and Muffatwerk Munich
The Münchener Biennale – Festival for New Music Theatre – celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2026!
Numerous international composers are confronting the complexities of our present-day in a bold and experimental manner, alert to the contradictions of our time. Together with their artistic teams they create music-theatre worlds that sharpen our gaze, fuel resistance, and give us hope; they connect us and solicit conversation about unforeseen ways of watching and listening.