Trees communicate with each other at 220 hertz A/V at Mesh Festival
16.10.2026 TransBona-Halle
Basel (CH)
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.
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.
Volumetric Cinematography / VFX Artist / Software Developer : Codrin-Mihail Tablan Negrei
Circular Systems Conference with Juliette Bibasse, Giulia Bini, Martin Messier, Tatjana Vall
16.10.2026 HGK - D 1.04 Aula
Basel (CH)
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.
1 drop 1000 years at Mesh Festival
14.10.2026 TransBona Halle
Basel (CH)
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.
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
Mesh Festival
See also: Astronomical Water, Conference
Astronomical Water at Mesh Festival
14.10.2026 - 18.10.2026 Exhibition Circular Systems - Project Room Kabinett Herzog & de Meuron
Basel (CH)
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.
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
Astronomical Water
Mesh Festival
See also: 1 drop 1000 years, Conference participation
Shrink 01995 at Schemerlicht Festival
09.10.2026 - 19.10.2026 Schemerlicht Festival
Goffertpark, Nijmegen (NL)
In SHRINK 01995, Lawrence Malstaf depicts a human body being slowly vacuum-packed and vertically suspended between two transparent plastic layers. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds.
The confrontation with this vulnerable, moving body makes us acutely aware of our own bodies and our presence. We almost empathise with the person in the installation and, as a result, become aware of our own breathing, boundaries and physicality. SHRINK 01995 brings us so close to a direct, physical experience of consciousness: the realisation that we are not merely observing, but are ourselves a body that feels and perceives.
Sewing Machine Orchestra
08.10.2026 - 08.11.2026 Himmel unter Berlin
Berlin (D)
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
Sewing Machine Orchestra
Himmel under Berlin - Tickets
tele-present wind (Mars wind version) at PRISMA Festival
08.10.2026 - 10.10.2026 Edifício da Antiga Capitania de Aveiro
Aveiro (PT)
tele-present wind (Mars wind version) by David Bowen is a collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The piece consists of a series of 126 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.
David Bowen
tele-present wind (Mars wind version)
PRISMA Festival
Newsletter Annelies Van Parys
19.09.2026 - 19.10.2026 Various Locations
Europe
Canzon at Klangspuren Festival - Medea at September Me Festival - Come fiume incessante at Festival 20·21 - Judith at Concertgebouw Brugge - Ekstase by SRW Vokalenensemble - Six Interludes at Festival 20·21 - Threnody by Ensemble Modern
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.