Sabrina Ratté: Cyberdelia

Sabrina Ratté: Cyberdelia
Canada (Québec), 2024
Courtesy of the Artist
Kindly supported by Québec Government Office in Germany

Drawing on science fiction and philosophy, Canadian artist Sabrina Ratté’s interactive installation explores play as a form of communication with artificial intelligence. Cyberdelia invites audiences to consult the AI-powered oracle by posing a question and selecting one of twenty-two cards, inspired by the Major Arcana of the tarot. Placing a card on the reader triggers the projection of a prescient video, accompanied by a soundscape by composer Roger Tellier-Craig, co-created with AI. The encounter offers a new perspective on the question posed, blending chance, prediction and interpretation in a dialogue with AI.

Canadian artist Sabrina Ratté explores the convergence of technology and biology through video, installation, 3D animation, analogue synthesizers, and virtual reality. Her interactive installations imagine post-human worlds shaped by speculative evolution. Influenced by science fiction and philosophy, she examines the shifting boundaries between material and virtual realms. Ratté’s work is part of the MAC Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection and has been exhibited internationally, including at Fotografiska Shanghai, CN (2024); HEK, Basel, CH (2022); and Centre Pompidou Málaga, SP (2021-2022).

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Yaloo: Shininho

Yaloo: Shininho
Korea, 2024
Duration: 10 min
Language: English
Courtesy of the Artist

South Korean artist Yaloo’s holographic installation Shininho is a speculative marine adventure that captures the journey of 86-year-old K-pop idol and pirate, ‘Shin In-ho’. The legacy of Zheng Yi Sao (1775–1844), a woman of Chinese descent and the most successful pirate in history, inspired Yaloo’s fictional protagonist. In this work, Shin In-ho captains a pirate ship navigating the Pacific Rim, retracing the historic trade routes that once connected Korea and the United States, where Yaloo is currently based. Reimagining Piracy—with its centuries-old pursuit of profit through exploration—in contemporary terms, Yaloo positions the K-pop idol as a modern counterpart to the profit-driven pirate. Shin In-ho and her crew embark on a mission to steal memories for a data centre, prompting reflection on whether, in our digital age, data has become the world’s most sought-after treasure.

The flickering holographic projection evokes both the glow of advertising screens and the spectral presence of a person who has never existed or is deceased. Shin In-ho’s physical appearance is modelled on motion-capture scans of the artist’s grandmother, animated through MetaHuman 3D technology. This act of digital archiving adds to the narrative, incorporating the process of transforming a family member into data. Through her dynamic digital collages, Yaloo reflects on the construction of legacy, identity and history in Asian and American capitalistic societies.

Yaloo is a South Korean artist based in Los Angeles who works across digital media, moving image and installation. Through her practice, she explores contemporary consumer culture, folklore and symbolism within the context of her Asian cultural heritage. Utilising new technologies and techniques of worldbuilding, she constructs multi-faceted narratives that make unexpected links within capitalism visible, inviting viewers to reflect upon their experiences of everyday life. She graduated in video art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches at the Department of Experimental Animation, School of Film/Video, California Institute of the Arts. Yaloo was awarded the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Scholarship by Video Data Bank, the Gold Prize in visual arts from the AHL Foundation in New York, and the Gyeonggi MoMA & IBK Young Artists Award. Her work has recently been exhibited at The Photographers Gallery, London, UK (2024-2025); SongEun Art Center, Seoul, KR (2024); Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (GMoMA), KR (2024); and FACT Liverpool, UK (2022).

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Random International: Human Algorithm / Imagine All Of Us (Polyptych)

Random International: Human Algorithm / Imagine All Of Us (Polyptych)
and Human Algorithm, performance film, Jeddah
United Kingdom, 2024
Courtesy of the Artist
The artist would like to thank ATHR Gallery, Jeddah and Riyadh, for their support in developing and producing this body of work.

In their series titled Human Algorithm, art group Random International reverses the role of human and machine and turns people into code. The starting point of this multi-layered work was marked by a performance in Jeddah in 2024 where a group of local participants moved together as a flock in algorithmic movement patterns. In preparation for the performance, Random International used artificial intelligence to research how their flocking code might translate into human form, prompting Human Algorithm into a synthetic visual existence.

Imagine All Of Us (Polyptych) is part of Random International’s Human Algorithm series and takes the form of a series of prints of what seems like a photorealistic image. However, closer observation of the prints reveals any incipient human-likeness blurring into distortion. The more one looks, the less one sees. For this work the artists selected four stills from their deep learning image-to-text models simulation of a crowd to showcase how AI imagines human beings performing an algorithm. Imagine All Of Us (Polyptych) plays with the human instinct to recognise something human in other forms of life.

 

Random International is an art group exploring the impact of technological advancement on the human condition. Best known for their large-scale interactive installations, the group works across an array of media including sculpture, video, and print. Established in 2005 and led by founders Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, the group’s work invites co-creation between artwork and audience, human and machine. Random International’s works have been exhibited internationally including presentations at Nxt Museum, Amsterdam, NL (2023); Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2018); and MOMA, New York, US (2013).

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Almagul Menlibayeva: The Map of Nomadizing Reimagining #3

Almagul Menlibayeva: The Map of Nomadizing Reimagining #3
Kazakhstan/Germany, 2025
4 min
Language: English
Courtesy of the Artist

Posthuman Matter: The Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings #3 by Kazakhstani artist Almagul Menlibayeva comprises several video screens and a postdigital textile piece, and merges feminist craft traditions from Central Asia with post-Soviet histories and AI-induced speculative futures.

The large-scale textile work, hand-woven in Kazakhstan, forms part of a wider series of ‘cyber textiles’ that combine manual labour with neural computation, continuing the tradition of embedding hidden messages within tapestries. The AI-generated image functions as a map, tracing notable sites referenced throughout Menlibayeva’s artistic practice. Each of the videos corresponds to a specific location on the map, ranging from salt lakes to remote steppe villages and former Soviet nuclear test sites. Interweaving documentary video footage captured by the artist with feminist rituals of restoration, nomadic mythology, and fragments from vanishing languages, the AI-generated videos possess a dreamlike quality, evoking lost worlds through technological advancement.

This stream of consciousness is as much a reflection on ecological collapse and geopolitical fracture following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as it is a radical archive of survival, embodied memory and feminist resistance.

Almagul Menlibayeva, based between Germany and Kazakhstan, works across video, photography, installation, textiles and performance. Her practice engages with environmental degradation, socialist modernism, and socio-political shifts in Central Asia, exploring identity and nation-building through feminist and post-colonial lenses. She employs Eurasian nomadic and indigenous mythologies and AI technologies to create living archives as forms of resistance. Her works have recently been exhibited at HKW, Berlin, DE (2023-2024); Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai, TH (2023); LACMA, Los Angeles, US (2023); Sharjah Biennial 15, UAE (2023), and GrandPalais, Paris (2016-2017); among others. A major retrospective of her works inaugurates the AMA Almaty Museum of Arts, KAZ in 2025.

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Olivia Mc Gilchrist: Virtual ISLANDs

Olivia Mc Gilchrist: Virtual ISLANDs
Canada, 2022
Duration: 7 min
Courtesy the Artist
Kindly supported by Québec Government Office in Germany

Virtual ISLANDs explores the interplay between virtual immersion and physical submersion, offering viewers evocative audio-visual interpretations of the ebb and flow of water. Drawing from the artist’s Caribbean and European heritage, the work reflects on the insular geography of the Caribbean and its profound influence on Caribbean identity.

Within this virtual reality experience, visitors are transported into an aquatic realm where they follow the movements of Canadian aerial performer Keely Whitelaw, rendered as a particle effect. To create the volumetric video Whitelaw was submerged in the underwater VR world while performing on a floor-based aerial structure, her gestural response being captured by a ten-sensor depth camera system. The performance-based VR experience is complemented by a soundscape by British composer Jack Hyde, drawing visitors deeper into the underwater landscape.

 

Olivia Mc Gilchrist is a white French-Jamaican artist-researcher based in Canada whose practice encompasses video, installation, and virtual reality. Her work explores the relationship between the experience of immersion in VR and the physicality of submersion. Gilchrist’s work engages with questions around identity, feminist performance, and colonial legacies. She has participated in exhibitions at MUTEK Festival, Montréal, CA (2021); Ars Electronica Festival, AT (2018); and Screen City Biennial, Stavanger, NO (2017); among others.

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Gabriel Massan: How Do We Get There?

Gabriel Massan: How Do We Get There?
Germany/Brazil, 2024
Duration: 13 min
Language: English
Courtesy of the Artist

Berlin-based artist Gabriel Massan’s video installation How Do We Get There? is an open-ended question: how do you organise your travel to a desired location if you don’t have the required cultural, financial or physical means? The work is part of the artist’s latest animation series HOW, which creates a digital universe that addresses the cultural practice of train hopping in Brazil.

Marking Massan’s first time using motion capture, How Do We Get There? is filmed in the computer game engine Unreal Engine and follows three characters as they travel through a hostile environment, attempting to find a way out of their restrictive social reality. Depending on one’s point of departure, reaching or even just choosing a destination is not always easy. How Do We Get There? is both an open world and a journey filled with unforeseen challenges, comforting encounters, and major life choices.

Gabriel Massan is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist. Combining storytelling and worldbuilding, Massan creates worlds that simulate and narrate situations of inequality within the Latin American experience. Framed through ‘fictional archaeology’, and working across 3D animation, digital sculpture, games, sound, and interactive installations, the artist uses machinima techniques to challenge warped conceptions of the Global South while investigating possibilities for ‘subversive otherness’. Their work has recently been showcased at BOZAR, Brussels, BE (2025); MAM Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, BR (2024); Centre Pompidou-Metz, FR (2023); and Serpentine, UK (2023), amongst others.

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Guy Maddin: Haunted Hotel

Guy Maddin, Magnus Fiennes, Headraft Studio: Haunted Hotel
United Kingdom, 2022
Conceived and produced by BFI London Film Festival

Guy Maddin’s first venture into the world of augmented reality, Haunted Hotel sees the Canadian avant-garde filmmaker and artist explore the hidden layers of human nature. Drawing from Maddin’s personal archive of newspaper clippings, surreal paper worlds invite audiences to look through virtual peepholes into rooms filled with longing, seduction and betrayal.

Maddin approaches augmented reality from a filmmaking perspective, drawing inspiration from Silent-era films, and constructs eight three-dimensional collages of a multi-layered world that aspires to draw the observer ever inward. Each scene set to an intricate soundscape by acclaimed composer Magnus Fiennes, Haunted Hotel hosts familiar pop culture figures alongside ecstatic nudists from the 1960s or frightened film noir actors.

Guy Maddin is a renowned Canadian screenwriter, director, author, cinematographer, and installation artist, internationally acclaimed for films like My Winnipeg (2007) with Darcy Fehr, The Saddest Music in the World (2007) with Isabella Rossellini or Rumours (2024) with Cate Blanchett. Maddin’s video installations are strongly influenced by the aesthetics of lost Silent-era films. He won an Emmy Award for Dracula in 2002 and was appointed to the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honour, in 2012.

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William Darrell: The Machinery of Enchantment II, 2025

William Darrell: The Machinery of Enchantment II
United Kingdom, 2025
Courtesy of the Artist

British artist William Darrell’s kinetic 3D-printed sculptures capture the essence of botanical beauty. His mesmerising mechanical replications of floral structures tap into the preconditioned pull of humans and other living beings towards flowers, reproducing their seductive nature through kaleidoscopic movements of spinning petals and stamen. Delving into themes of perception, evolution, and wellbeing, Darrell’s dynamic sculptures highlight the interconnectedness of all forms and how technological innovation is often inspired by natural phenomena.

London-based artist William Darrell’s kinetic 3D-printed sculptures take inspiration from biological organisms. He received his MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2015 and his BA from Edinburgh College of Art in 2012. In 2021, the artist produced a year-long installation for Yorkshire Sculpture Parks’ initiative The Art Block at Selfridges in London, UK. In the following year, he collaborated with Louis Vuitton on a series of marine creatures displayed in LV stores globally. William Darrell recently took part in Saatchi Gallery’s exhibition FLOWERS – FLORA IN CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE and completed a three month artist residency at Gapado AiR in South Korea.

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Serafima Bresler: My Trees

Serafima Bresler: My Trees
Germany, 2024
Courtesy of the Artist

My Trees is a video installation by Serafima Bresler, composed of a network of circular micro-displays resembling round electronic watch faces. These small screens form tree branches and serve as vessels for looping video content—emphasising the cyclical nature of time, memory, and observation.

The project centers on the themes of invisibility, recurrence, and the disappearance of archival material. It juxtaposes two contrasting video archives: personal, intimate footage of daily life and public documentation of disasters. Through this contrast, My Trees investigates how catastrophes become normalised and how memory—both individual and collective—fades or becomes distorted over time.

The network of smart watch screens carries associations of family trees and passing on trauma over generations as well as the common practice of silent witnessing of a disaster from a safe distance, looking through a peep-hole-like screen.

Serafima Bresler is an artist and researcher based in Hamburg. Her work engages with the study of catastrophes and their interconnectedness with domestic spaces. She holds a BA in Illustration from the British Higher School of Art & Design (BHSAD), Moscow, and graduated in Time-based Media at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK). In 2024, she received the DAAD Prize and in 2023 she was awarded the Achievement Grant Award for International Students from the Hamburg Ministry of Sciences. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, DE (2024); De Balie, Amsterdam, NL (2024); and Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, DE (2024) Bresler co-founded Artworkshop HH, a project organising free art workshops for refugees in Hamburg.

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Sougwen Chung: BODY MACHINE (MERIDIANS)

Sougwen Chung: Body Machine (Meridians)
United Kingdom, 2024-2025
Courtesy of the Artist and Studio SCILICET

Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung’s Body Machine (Meridians) is a series of biomimetic explorations. In this digital work, forms are sculpted in air, reflecting the artist’s vision of machines as extensions of living systems. The concept of Meridians is woven throughout as both a planetary measurement and a pathway within the body. Through this dual meaning, Chung encourages us to contemplate on how bodies in motion, machinic forms and the earth’s biomes might intertwine.

Drawing inspiration from philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who viewed machines as metaphors shaped by imagination, fabrication and illusion, Body Machine (Meridians) expands the boundaries of how we imagine machines. In doing so, Chung challenges today’s AI systems and proposes a more symbiotic relationship between human and machine.

Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher, widely considered a pioneer in human-machine collaboration, exploring the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics between humans and systems. Sougwen’s work MEMORY (2017) is part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is the first AI model to be collected by a major art institution. Recently, Chung was recognised as a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, as one of four recipients of the TIME100 Impact Award, and named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. Chung has exhibited internationally at the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, FL (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich, DE (2020); ArtScience Museum Singapore, SG (2018); and New Museum, New York, US (2016); among others.

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