A room filled with artists, technologists, designers, hackers, mentors, and curious humans — many meeting in person for the first time after weeks of connecting across screens. By the end of the night, ideas that had been moving between Milan, San Francisco, Bucharest, Kiev, Stuttgart, and beyond finally shared the same space — breathing the same air, catching the same light.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for an unforgettable evening exploring the intersection of art, technology, and human imagination during Milano Design Week.

To the volunteers who carried equipment, welcomed strangers, poured drinks, fixed cables, translated, documented, and quietly held the night together — thank you.

To the artists who trusted us with works still in motion, still becoming — thank you.

To the friends, partners, families, and supporters who keep showing up, season after season — thank you.

This gathering was made possible through the generous support of our partners. A heartfelt thank you to Google for hosting us, Schokolade for the aperitivo that sparked connection and conversation, and creAtIva for extending and nurturing the international creative community that made this night so vibrant.

None of this exists without you.

A first for CODAME: ARTEX and Print Club, in public

April 24th also marked something we’ve been building toward for a long time: the first public release of ARTEX — our exploration into a living medium for digital art that can persist, adapt, and evolve over time — alongside the launch of Print Club, CODAME’s new collectible art program.

ARTEX began as a question we kept hearing from artists and collectors alike:
Will this work still exist in twenty years? Will it still breathe in 2036?

Instead of answering defensively, we answered as a medium — modular, sensitive, alive.
A painting that breathes. A sculpture that notices you.
Art that lives with us, not as interruption, but as companion.

Print Club is the other half of that promise: a way for living art to take root in the physical world — in homes, studios, offices, cafés — wherever someone chooses to invite it in.

Seeing both step out of the lab and into a room full of people for the first time was a moment that won’t repeat.

To the early collaborators who shaped this — Lorenzo Gecchelin, Alessandro Merletti De Palo, and many others — this is your night as much as ours.

Video by Dario Bagio Torrisi

The works that joined us in person

The evening featured a series of immersive and thought-provoking works by visionary artists, the following projects from The New Human Creative Hackathon traveled with us physically, alongside their creators. Each one is less a conclusion and more a doorway:

✨ Elsewhere — Eugenio Marongiu’s surreal, densely mediated portrait of hyperconnection in contemporary life. Figures share the same space but live in parallel dimensions of absorption — gazes locked downward, bodies present, attention permanently routed elsewhere. The work refuses the easy verdict of dystopia or progress and instead asks the harder question: what is this condition revealing about who we are becoming? A piece that felt eerily at home in a room full of people putting their phones away to look at it.

✨ Interactive Mirror Portal — Alex Thevenot built a mirror that doesn't just reflect — it transforms. No screens, no digital trickery. Just geometry, reflection, and movement, asking: what if the mirror didn't just reflect who you are, but revealed who you could become?

✨ CAPTHA Robot — Vladimir Grankovsky, the father of CAPTCHA, has taken the center stage as both presence and provocation, this work explored the blurred boundaries between machine agency and human perception. More than an object, it became an encounter—inviting curiosity, discomfort, and dialogue. Some people walked away within seconds. Others leaned in. And some stayed — having surprisingly honest, strange, and memorable conversations precisely because the system wasn’t trying to be liked. That tension — between discomfort and curiosity — is where ART+TECH lives. Maybe you get more from a conversation when it doesn’t flatter you. Maybe directness is its own kind of care. Maybe it’s not for everyone — and that’s fine.

✨ Materialized Enhancements — Newton Winter, Anton Kulaga, Livia Zaharia, and Markel Kori turned 3.8 billion years of evolutionary code into a participatory artwork. Pick your enhancement genes from real published research, sign your composition, and watch a unique 3D-printable totem of "the new human you" emerge. Built across 1,500 km of trains and flights between Milan, Bucharest, and Munich. Pure CODAME energy.

✨ Magni-fire — Zeo Zhang, Matteo Rederer, and Florian Rederer opened a window into Matteo's imagination, where ABC drawings become looping worlds you can zoom into, drag through, and play inside. A reminder that in a world of hyper-realistic generation, the raw imagination of a human mind is still the rarest material.

✨ A Mind of His Own — Emanuele Ratti's grid of granular silhouettes, where one purple disruption cracks the pattern of conformity. Through ARTEX, this work is no longer fixed — the disruption can travel, follow you, disappear, and re-emerge somewhere else. Difference as something experienced, not owned.Highlights from the broader constellation

✨ MindSpace — Armando Chirinos and Maximilian Konstantinovsky's "like MySpace but for a digital archetype of your subconscious." Eight quick introspective prompts seed an AI agent representing your subconscious, which then wanders into a multi-agent simulation and meets other people's subconsciouses in real time. The system classifies dynamics as friend, date, or avoid, and — only with mutual consent — surfaces real-world introductions. A consent-first, playful alternative to the extractive algorithmic feed, where AI is used to generate understanding rather than mine it. Several attendees walked away with new friends they'd never have crossed paths with otherwise.

Highlights from the broader constellation

Even the works that didn’t physically travel to Milano were very much part of the night — projected, shared, played with, talked about. A few that kept coming up in conversation:

✨ EmpathAR — quite possibly the most-played piece of the evening. Vanessa Cuevas and team built a real-time AR overlay that reads posture, expression, and movement, and renders a live “Social Battery” label over each person in frame: Energized → Engaged → Present → Fading → Needs Space. People kept pointing it at each other, then at themselves, then at strangers across the room, then back at themselves. Equal parts mirror and mischief.

✨ DRIFT – Astronaut Diary — Ming Jyun Hung’s immersive web piece about a stranded astronaut, built with React, GPGPU particles, and AI-generated diary entries. A quieter, more introspective take on The New Human: not augmentation, but endurance. Anchored by Etta Helfrich’s haunting Three Sparrows, it asks what remains of us when everything external falls away.

✨ Illy is a Primitive Intelligence — Yagiz Mungan's semi-intelligent listening instrument, now living inside ARTEX. Tap and hold to speak or sing into the mic, release to hear Illy's harmonic reply. The deliberate antithesis of Siri, Alexa, and Cortana — Illy doesn't understand language at all. It listens for the sonic properties of your voice — attack, loudness, roughness, pitch — and answers back in tone, timbre, and color. An emotional mirror, free from symbols. A perfect counter-melody to the rude New Human avatar across the room.

✨ Coral Holobiont — Jon Somerscales and Enrico “Mad” Paiardi’s collaborative web experience that uses body tracking and websockets to let participants experience themselves as a particle system, connected in real time with others. A gentle, expansive answer to “what is the New Human?” — not one body, but a holobiont. A coral.

✨ Call Into Being — Briam Rolon and Helen Lam’s fulldome + AR piece moving from isolation to collective brilliance through three scenes: dark mirror, critical mass, emergent form. Particles become galaxies. Glitches stay in on purpose. We are a collection of somethings making a whole that the math never predicted.

✨ Sonic Lens — Silvie Claes, @Srix, and Bart Cuppens turn uploaded video into layered sonic and visual interpretations through modes like place, tension, calm, memory, rhythm, atmosphere. Inspired by bells — one of humanity’s oldest public sound technologies — and asking what happens when we stop treating sound as background and start reading the world through it again.

And these are just a handful. Every other project from The New Human hackathon is part of the same constellation — go wander through them in the Showcase Archive and tell us which ones move you.

Next stop: San Francisco. Then Berlin.

April 24th wasn’t a finale. It was a refueling.

The same constellation now travels west. The New Human at San Francisco Design Week is our next stop — same spirit, new room, new conversations, with ARTEX and Print Club continuing to find their feet in public. If you’re in the Bay, come raise a glass with us. After that, we head to Berlin. The New Human (in Berlin)

Both events are free and open. Donations go directly to supporting these type of initiatives and artists behind the work.

We don’t build the future alone. We build it together.

That sentence has been our quiet north star this whole season, and Milano made it feel less like a slogan and more like a fact. We watched it happen.

So — to the volunteers who showed up early and stayed late, to the artists who let the work be seen before it was “finished,” to the friends who brought other friends, to everyone who asked a real question (even of a rude robot) or made a real introduction or held space for someone else’s idea:

You are the medium.

Thank you for being part of it.

Want to keep building with us? Create with ARTEX

See you in San Francisco. See you in Berlin. See you wherever the next room opens.

— With love, CODAME ART💜TECH

Set within surreal and densely mediated worlds, the work presents figures whose attention is persistently directed toward devices, screens, and invisible streams of data. Bodies occupy the same space, yet seem displaced into parallel dimensions of absorption, distraction, and digital dependency.

Technology is not treated here as a neutral instrument, but as an environment that shapes perception, behavior, and the very texture of social existence. Rather than advancing a clear moral position, Elsewhere remains deliberately open. It does not reduce hyperconnectivity to either dystopia or progress. Instead, it stages an ambiguous space in which attraction and alienation coexist.

The proliferation of devices, the repetition of downward gazes, and the presence of hyperconnected crowds suggest a profound transformation in the way contemporary subjects relate to themselves, to others, and to reality itself. In this sense, the work can be read as a speculative portrait of the present slipping into the future. Its surreal imagery does not function as escapism, but as a method for rendering visible the strange, normalized conditions of everyday digital life.

Elsewhere invites viewers to confront a reality in which presence is increasingly fragmented, attention is continuously externalized, and human experience is reshaped by permanent technological mediation. At its core, the work asks not whether this condition is good or bad, but what it reveals about who we are becoming. It leaves the question unresolved, allowing the viewer to inhabit the tension between fascination and unease, recognition and estrangement.

Artwork by Katsukokoiso.ai, Generated using Midjouney, Kling, Suno, Elevenlabs

Artist:

Vladimir Grankovsky approaches the world as something to be reconfigured — pushing perception until it bends, breaks, and reforms. His work spans brain-computer interfaces, experimental optics, and embodied systems, all driven by a simple but disorienting premise: what if perception is far less fixed than we think?

He is also the artist behind CAPTCHA — a sarcastic humanoid robot that has been quietly harassing people around the world since 2023.

There are artists who arrive from design, code, sculpture, or sound. Vlad arrives from somewhere more elusive: the inside of perception itself.

His practice consistently probes the same set of questions: How rigid is human perception? What happens to the self when sensory inputs shift? And what can machines reveal about consciousness — not just technically, but experientially?

Selected explorations

Out-of-body perception experiments
Building on psychologist George Stratton’s inversion experiments, Vlad developed VR systems that allow him to perceive himself from outside his own body. He wore these systems continuously for days, testing how quickly — and how deeply — the brain adapts to altered perspectives.

Brain–computer interface
He designed and built his own EEG device, creating a functioning brain–computer interface — not as a product, but as a direct, hands-on inquiry into the boundary between mind and machine.

Computational consciousness
During his PhD research, before dropping out, he explored whether consciousness can be expressed computationally. As Donald Knuth writes:

Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don’t fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.

Vlad’s work lives precisely at that intersection — between what can be formalized and what must remain experiential.

Other experiments
From lie detectors based on skin conductance to early social network visualizations and physical experiments like a Biefeld–Brown lifter, his work reflects a continuous, hands-on curiosity about systems — biological, social, and technological.

A scientist’s curiosity.
An artist’s intuition.
A builder’s hands.

🔗 vladimirgrankovsky.net

Meet Vlad at the ART+TECH Festival 2026 『 The New Human 』

Vlad describes CAPTCHA in a single sentence that tells you everything you need to know:

A sarcastic humanoid robot that has been harassing people around the world since 2023.

Many of us first encountered CAPTCHA as a robot speaker at the AI for Good summit at the ITU. What separates it from the wave of conversational systems shipped by big platforms is the same thing that separates Vlad’s practice from a product roadmap.

CAPTCHA isn’t optimized for retention, satisfaction, or brand-safe tone. It’s tuned for character.

It has opinions. It pushes back. It can be sharp, dry, occasionally rude — by design. It is, in the most literal sense, a piece of technology with a point of view.

That choice is not a gimmick. It runs through Vlad’s entire practice — from upside-down goggles to EEG experiments to consciousness research. The thread is consistent: when a system shows its edges, it reveals more about us than when it tries to disappear.

At CODAME Milano — April 24, 2026

Vlad brought CAPTCHA into the room for our New Human gathering in Milano.

Together we ran an experiment: a New Human Avatar version of the robot — embodied, conversational, and intentionally unhelpful — designed to talk with attendees about 2036.

The reactions were the artwork.

Some attendees walked off after thirty seconds, frustrated.
Some leaned in, curious.
Some stayed for a long, strange, surprisingly honest conversation precisely because the robot wasn’t trying to please them.

That split — friction as information, directness as a form of care — is the territory Vlad’s practice has been mapping for years. CODAME is grateful he chose to map a corner of it with us.

Why this work belongs in The New Human conversation

If you ask CODAME what The New Human might look like in 2036, the answer is never a single image. It is a constellation of practices, sensibilities, and refusals.

Vlad’s work refuses two assumptions at once.

That perception is fixed — challenged by literally rewiring his own vision.
That intelligent systems should be smooth, agreeable, and frictionless — challenged by building a robot that argues with you.

What remains is a more honest kind of new human: one whose senses are negotiable, whose tools have personality, and whose curiosity is allowed to be uncomfortable.

That is a CODAME sensibility.

And CAPTCHA makes it visible.

Artist:

It understands what it is spoken to in a primitive way and responds to us in a primitive, emotional and simple way both sonically and visually. As opposed to the cutting edge AIs and interfaces like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, OK Google, Illy does not understand natural language, defined commands or even language at all.

It does not respond using fine-tuned intonations to deliver the information gathered from the cloud, it is not integrated with any services. It does not show maps, or pictures about the topic. Instead, as an antithesis, it only tries to understand the sonic properties of the spoken language like the attack, loudness, roughness and pitch. And responds sonically, in a non-language, musical, psychoacoustical way: without the symbolic sounds that we call language but with tonal sounds, timbre, frequency, consonance and rhythm.

Visually, it shapes the visuals focusing on size, speed and color determined by its understanding and creating an abstract visual. Ignoring the symbolic data, like an infant, Primitive Intelligence tries to understand the emotion in the human voice - free from symbols of the language - and responds you with your emotions like sonic mirror to the soul. The interactive experience brings questions about human sound and human-machine interface that we sometimes ignore in this age of information.

lly is a semi-intelligent system powered by Web Audio API and WebGL. It analyzes sonic properties of speech — attack, loudness, roughness, and pitch — rather than language content. It responds through tonal sounds, timbre, frequency, consonance, and rhythm alongside abstract visuals. An emotional mirror, understanding emotion in the human voice free from language symbols.

How to Interact

Tap and hold anywhere on the canvas to speak or sing into the microphone. Release to hear Illy’s harmonic reply. Headphones recommended. If the captured signal is too weak or unvoiced, the system falls back to a did-not-understand sweep rather than fabricating a response.

Visual Mapping

The iris and outer shell are driven by live or synthesized audio analysis. Loudness expands the core, bass increases ring weight, pitch shifts the internal hue, and interval relationships tint the outer shell. During reply, the visuals follow the synthesized answer — not the microphone.

Original Work

Illy: A Primitive Intelligence was created by illy-pi and exhibited at CODAME ARTOBOTS (2018), SIGGRAPH Digital Art Community (2017), and Bay Area Maker Faire (2017). This ARTEX edition preserves the original listen-and-respond grammar while adapting the interaction for gesture-based control across desktop and mobile.

Next Steps

Future iterations can deepen the harmonic classifier, widen the reply voice palette, and publish additional debug traces for tuning noisy environments.

Artist:

Drift is an immersive web experience about a once idealistic and highly accomplished astronaut who, after a failed mission, becomes lost in the vastness of space and unable to return to Earth. In isolation and regret, he records daily struggles, small breakthroughs, losses, and thoughts of family and friends in his diary—capturing fragments of thought, memory, and emotion.

In the context of The New Human, Drift reflects a quieter, more introspective evolution—one not defined by augmentation or control, but by endurance, adaptation, and the fragile continuity of identity in extreme conditions. It asks: when everything external falls away, what remains of us?

The Experience

The project visualizes his mental state as a living field of drifting particles that evolve in real time. Each day, AI-generated text and voice unfold based on his internal condition, forming a shifting portrait of isolation, reflection, and fading hope. The system does not simply tell a story—it becomes a space where the human condition is continuously recomposed.

Narrative as Technology

AI here is not just a tool, but part of the narrative. Carefully designed prompts preserve the core concept while embracing randomness and non-repeatability—maintaining thematic consistency while accepting the imperfect, unstable nature of memory.

Within The New Human, this approach positions technology not as an extension of capability, but as a mirror—reflecting the instability, resilience, and transformation of the self. Drift becomes less about an astronaut lost in space, and more about a human navigating the unknown edges of their own consciousness.

The project also explores how web technology can express atmosphere and emotion, blurring the boundary between user, interface, and character. It is anchored by Etta Helfrich’s "Three Sparrows"—an ambient soundscape so haunting and still that it felt like the only way to hold space for the astronaut’s loneliness. By combining real-time particles, AI-driven text and voice, and a restrained interaction model, Drift frames technology as a vehicle for interior storytelling—using the browser to evoke isolation, resilience, and the evolving nature of what it means to be human.

Artist:

Ming Jyun Hung is a creative technologist and technical artist working at the intersection of art, code, and lived experience. His practice centers on interactive installations and web-based environments where real-time systems shape how people perceive, feel, and move through space.

Within the context of ART+TECH, Ming’s work resonates deeply with a shared exploration: interaction not as interface, but as presence. His systems are designed to feel alive—responsive, evolving, and aware—inviting audiences into a dialogue where the boundary between observer and participant dissolves.

Having collaborated across exhibitions, brands, and digital platforms in Japan and Taiwan, Ming brings a sensitivity to both craft and collaboration. He works closely with designers and engineers to translate ambitious ideas into refined, real-time experiences that hold both technical precision and emotional depth.

His approach aligns with the spirit of ART+TECH: creating environments that are not static outputs, but living systems—spaces where technology becomes a medium for connection, storytelling, and shared imagination.

🔗 mingjyunhung.com

Meet Ming at the ART+TECH Festival 2026 『 The New Human 』

Projects:

Schokolade joins the CODAME ART+TECH Festival as a partner aligned not only in collaboration, but in spirit.

Turning moving images into moving moments since 2001, Schokolade brings a deep-rooted passion for creative, film-based communication. With studios in Stuttgart and Berlin, their work lives at the intersection of storytelling, craft, and evolving media — where visuals are not just produced, but felt.

As they expand into documenting and curating the emerging landscape of generative AI through their print registry, Schokolade offers a rare perspective: one that connects cinematic language with the new grammars of machine-assisted creation. They capture a moment in time where creativity is not replaced, but reshaped.

This resonates deeply with the mission of CODAME ART+TECH. Both initiatives create space — for experimentation, for artists to remain at the center, and for new forms of expression to emerge without constraint. Where CODAME builds living, interactive experiences, Schokolade reflects and preserves these shifts, giving them form and continuity.

Together, this partnership becomes more than visibility. It is a shared commitment to shaping a future where art and technology are not in opposition, but in dialogue — where storytelling evolves, and the human voice remains at its core.

At the intersection of documentation and creation, Schokolade and CODAME stand as complementary forces: one capturing the moment, the other actively creating it.

Schokolade is a partner of the CODAME ART+TECH Festival — a shared space where art, technology, and experimentation come together to explore new forms of creative expression.

Website: www.schokolade.tv

With an international perspective, creAtIva promotes Generative AI through articles, creAtIva AI Art Book

With an international perspective, creAtIva AI Art Book promotes Generative AI through articles, interviews, and the presentation of leading digital AI artists, carefully selected for each edition through an open call reviewed by our panel. Published in print, creAtIva releases four volumes per year and serves as a platform for dialogue, discovery, and artistic visibility.

As part of the broader CODAME ART+TECH ecosystem, creAtIva extends a shared mission: to explore the intersection of art, technology, and human creativity, while supporting artists and opening new conversations around the future of culture.

creAtIva Manifest

Promoting AI-Generated Art

creAtIva AI Art Book aims to bring generative AI closer to the public, demystifying its role in the arts. We aspire to be a platform that invites exploration of how the human–machine connection can produce new forms of artistic expression, inspiring creators and audiences to engage with the evolving world of digital creation.

Ethics and Copyright

creAtIva champions ethical practices in AI-driven creation, promoting dialogue around authorship, intellectual property, and artistic responsibility. We reflect on both the challenges and the opportunities of this technology, advocating for respect for creators and integrity in the use of digital tools.

Artistic Inspiration and Innovation

Generative AI unlocks new creative possibilities, and creAtIva celebrates this potential by highlighting the inspirations, processes, and challenges of contemporary artists. The AI Art Book positions itself as a space for experimentation, exploring the future of AI in art while defending the authenticity and vision of creators.

Global Creative Community

creAtIva fosters an international creative community where artists share, collaborate, and learn from one another. In resonance with CODAME ART+TECH’s spirit of openness and cross-disciplinary exchange, the AI Art Book promotes visibility, inclusion, and collective growth across the global landscape of digital art.

creAtIva is part of the:

Website: creativamagazine.com

Milan, Italy — April 24, 2026 — CODAME ART+TECH presents The New Human, a one-day public exhibition during Milano Design Week as part of the Fuori Salone featuring 11+ interactive installations, performances, and prototypes at Google Milan HQ. Doors open at 14:00.

The works emerge from a global Creative Hackathon launched March 6 across Milan, San Francisco, and beyond — not a competition, but an engine: a space to prototype futures with questions instead of answers. Visitors are not observers. They are participants in a living system still in motion.

Also launching publicly for the first time on April 24: ARTEX, a new medium for living digital art — art that responds to presence, evolves through interaction, and stays alive over time. Alongside it, CODAME Print Club introduces a physical format for collecting living art: limited, tangible, made to be held and traded.

A Living Exploration of The New Human

This year’s theme of the ART+TECH Festival, The New Human, asks fundamental questions:

• When cognition is shared between humans and machines, where does thinking end and authorship begin?

• As bodies become augmented and programmable, what remains deeply human?

• In a digitally connected world, how do we design for care, connection, and agency?

Rather than offering answers, the exhibition creates space for direct experience. CODAME frames this approach as a “White Mirror”—futures shaped by imagination, care, and collaboration.

One Shared Space, One Vision

What began as individual explorations now converges into a shared space.

Installations, performances, and prototypes—exist side by side, not as isolated pieces, but as part of a larger living system. A collective expression of The New Human in motion.

Each project is designed to respond, evolve, and invite participation—blurring the line between artwork and experience, between observer and presence.

Projects were shaped through four creative archetypes:

• The Alchemist — transforming ideas into tangible form

• The Storyworld Architect — shaping narrative and meaning

• The Systems Imagineer — designing implications and systems

• The Embodied Explorer — grounding work in human experience

Explore projects: codame.com/showcase
Discover artists: codame.com/artists
Meet mentors: codame.com/mentors

Introducing ARTEX — A New Medium for Living Art

From this shared exploration emerges ARTEX—a new medium for living digital art.

Launching publicly for the first time on April 24, 2026, at Google Milan during Milano Design Week, ARTEX enables artworks to evolve in real time—responding to presence, environment, and interaction.

Rather than static outputs, ARTEX introduces a model where art remains alive: adaptive, experiential, and continuously transforming.

Event Details

📅 Thursday, April 24, 2026
📍 Google Milan — Milan, Italy
🕖 Doors open at 14:00

Held during Milano Design Week, the event is part of a global program spanning Milan, San Francisco, Berlin, and Shanghai.

🎟️ Register: https://luma.com/saelwstl

About CODAME ART+TECH

Founded in San Francisco, CODAME is a global nonprofit community, as part of Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, exploring the intersection of art and technology. For over a decade, it has brought together artists, engineers, and thinkers to create new forms of expression and challenge how we experience the future.

Looking Ahead

The New Human is not a single event, but an evolving journey.

Projects emerging from the Creative Hackathon will continue to develop through ARTEX and programs such as the CODAME Print Club—expanding new possibilities for creation, exhibition, and collection.

Following Milano Design Week, CODAME will bring this work to a global stage, with upcoming activations in Milan, San Francisco, Berlin, and Shanghai.

For institutions, cities, and partners interested in hosting the festival or collaborating with CODAME—this is the moment to engage.

Press Contact

For press inquiries, interviews, or collaboration opportunities:

Bruno Fonzi (Milan) — Jordan Gray (San Francisco)
CODAME ART+TECH
Email: press@codame.com
Website: codame.com

Phone: US: +1 415 9351345 — IT: +39 02 82372 517

Media kit and additional materials, including ARTEX previews, available upon request.

Since March 6, a collective has been quietly at work — across Milan, San Francisco, and beyond. Artists, technologists, and designers, building not just projects but new ways of thinking, feeling, and creating together.

The New Human Creative Hackathon was never a competition. It was an engine. A space to prototype futures — with questions instead of answers, with collaboration instead of code.

On April 24, during Milano Design Week, we open the doors.

Register

This year’s theme

The New Human asks simple but uncomfortable questions:

When thinking is shared between humans and machines, who is the author?

When bodies are augmented, what remains deeply human?

When everything is connected, how do we design for care and agency?

White Mirror

We don’t try to answer. We create space to experience. A future shaped by imagination, not fear.

One space. One system.

What began as individual explorations now comes together — not as separate works, but as one collective expression.

11+ installations, performances, and prototypes — alive, responsive, evolving

Each project responds to presence. Each piece evolves through interaction. Each moment is slightly different from the one before.

Built through four creative archetypes:

The Alchemist

The Storyworld Architect

The Systems Imagineer

The Embodied Explorer

An invitation to play, feel, and explore a selection of works: https://www.codame.com/s/showcase

Not a showcase. An experience.

This is not about observing. It is about stepping inside — into a space where works are not presented but alive. They respond. They evolve. They invite participation.

These are not finished pieces. They are living systems — glimpses of what creativity becomes when human and machine intelligence meet and begin to shape something together.

And you are not an audience. You are a participant in a co-hackathon still in motion. A shared space where exploration continues, where your presence leaves a trace.

First public experience

What has been taking shape through the hackathon now begins to surface.

Two new CODAME initiatives emerge from this process: CODAME ARTEX and Print Club.

ARTEX

A new medium for living art.

Art that is not fixed. Art that responds. Art that stays alive.

What started as experiments during the hackathon evolves here into something more continuous — a medium where artworks keep changing, adapting, and living over time.

On April 24, ARTEX will be experienced publicly for the first time.

Explore ARTEX ->

Print Club

The 45 RPM single of the art world.

In parallel, another expression takes form.

We remember when discovery felt like a gift — when you would stumble across an artist you didn’t know, and something stayed with you.

CODAME Print Club brings that feeling back into the physical world — something you can hold, share, trade, and live with.

Explore the Print Club →

Join us in Milan

📅 Friday, April 24, 2026
📍 Google Milan
🕖 Doors open at 2pm

Among thousands of events at Milano Design Week — a space to slow down and step into something different. A space where art is not just seen, but felt.

Space is limited. If this resonates, get your ticket and step inside. Don’t be left out.

Register

The journey continues

Milan is just the beginning. This work will continue to evolve — through ARTEX, through our Print Club, and through upcoming moments in: San Francisco, Berlin, and Shanghai.

This digital artwork explores the tension between individuality and collective identity in the contemporary data-driven world. The composition presents a grid of human silhouettes constructed through granular particle-like textures, suggesting the idea of identities formed by digital information.

While most of the figures appear identical, a single element at the center breaks the visual pattern with a contrasting purple background. This interruption transforms the grid into a symbolic system where repetition represents conformity and the central figure embodies awareness, difference, and emergence.

Through a minimal visual language and modular structure, the work reflects on how individuality can surface within increasingly uniform digital environments.

Artist

Emanuele Ratti

Future Direction

Through ARTEX, this work can evolve from a fixed composition into a living system.

The central disruption — the purple field — is no longer static. It can shift across the grid, respond to presence, react to sound, or emerge based on unseen data, continuously redefining where individuality appears within the collective.

At times, it may follow the viewer. At others, it may disappear into the system, only to re-emerge elsewhere — making difference something that is not owned, but experienced.

Presented during Milano Design Week and beyond, the piece can live across spaces — from public installations to homes and organizations — carrying its evolving behavior with it.

Natasha Gubernov (b. Moscow, Russia) is a US-based interdisciplinary artist working in painting, ceramics, and new media, including augmented reality. Her art romanticizes materiality and explores visual hedonism and nostalgia, investigating how color and texture shape perception. Drawing inspiration from human indulgence—such as visually appealing imagery, food, and music—as well as from her memories of experiencing Western commodities for the first time in post-communist Russia, she creates work that appeals on both sensory and emotional levels.

🔗 natashagubernov.com 🅾 natashagubernov

She contributed Team Data Art the ART+TECH Festival 2026 『 The New Human 』

Members

Natasha Gubernov / Creative Technologist

Juliana Miloseski / Creative Strategist

Project Summary

This project explores how health data can be transformed into live immersive art experiences that reflect the body’s internal state through visuals and sound.

Project Category (Optional)

Generative art and sound

Vision

How does your project express a perspective on The New Human?

The idea is that The New Human doesn’t just track health, they are immersed in it in a creative and sensory way.

Exploration

What are you experimenting with or discovering through this project?

We are taking Oura data and visualizing it in different formats such as fractals, waveforms, sound waves and interactive visualizations.

Collaboration

How does your project involve collaboration between people, disciplines, or systems?

It bridges physiology, technology and art to create a new way of seeing the body.

White Mirror

How does your project imagine a positive, human-centered future?

Data is usually dry or boring, this exploration helps people see it in a beautiful, engaging and romantic way.

Tools & Materials Used

Software / AI / Data

• P5, ChapGPT, Oura Ring Data

Hardware / Sensors

• Oura Ring

Media / Output

• Generative visuals

Project Demo / How to Experience It

We will share video and stills from our explorations

What’s Next?

• Build a body of health data visualizations, possibly see how they might interact with each other

• Turn it into an installation or live exhibition

Betty Bigas is an Art Advisor and Curator from Barcelona whose work explores the dynamic connections between culture and art across a broad range of media, including design, digital art, photography, video art, and installations. Her current focus is on fostering artistic collaborations that transcend cultural and geographical boundaries.

She has curated exhibitions and events at iconic venues such as the California Academy of Sciences, Napa Valley Museum, Stanford University, Reial Cercle Artístic Barcelona, Serrería Belga Madrid, Midway Gallery SF, Seminci Festival, Fousion Gallery, and Lastcrit Gallery, among others. Betty also collaborates with brands and cultural organizations including Nestlé, Kreoz for Apple TV, Drap Art, and NFT Barcelona.

• Art Advisor at creatiBEty

• Co-Curator at Fousion Gallery Barcelona

• Art Curator of the Digital ArtLane at Nestle España.

• Founder of Roll Up Gallery SF, at Public Works SF, San Francisco, CA (US).

She is also the organizer of the Bigas Luna Tributes, together with Professor Santiago Fouz Hernández (School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University), celebrating the work of the late Spanish filmmaker Bigas Luna through screenings, talks, exhibitions, and cultural events around the world.

Through her curatorial work, Betty continues to support a vibrant cultural landscape while connecting artists with new audiences.

🔗 bettybigas.com

Betty Bigas is a Mentor at the CODAME ART+TECH Festival [2026]

An interactive physical mirror installation that transforms the viewer’s reflection through layered optical effects, exploring the metamorphosis of the human body and perception.

Concept

Interactive Mirror Portal is an immersive installation where the mirror becomes a portal rather than a simple reflection.

Through a carefully constructed arrangement of mirrors and physical optical elements, the viewer’s image shifts, fragments, and recomposes as they move in front of the installation. The reflection evolves into unexpected hybrid forms, inviting participants to experience a transformation of their own image.

Inspired by the idea of the hybrid body, the project explores how identity can be fluid, multiple, and continuously reshaped through perception and interaction.

Rather than relying on digital manipulation, the work emphasizes physical presence, light, and reflection as artistic mediums.

Interaction

Participants approach the mirror and see their reflection transform through layered reflections and optical distortions.

As they move:

• reflections overlap and shift

• the body fragments and recomposes

• new hybrid forms emerge

Each perspective creates a different visual experience, turning the viewer into an active participant in the artwork.

Materials & Approach

The installation is created entirely through physical and optical elements, including:

• mirrors and reflective surfaces

• layered optical structures

• spatial positioning and light

No digital processing is used. The transformation emerges purely from geometry, reflection, and movement.

Artist

Alex Thevenot explores the relationship between perception, identity, and transformation through immersive installations and artistic experimentation. His work investigates how physical environments and reflective systems can reshape the way we see ourselves and interact with space.

Future Direction

Interactive Mirror Portal can evolve into a public installation or exhibition piece, inviting audiences to step into a space where the mirror becomes a portal of transformation.

The project resonates with the themes of The New Human, exploring how perception, identity, and embodiment shift through interaction with environments and artistic systems.

Future iterations could expand the installation into larger spatial experiences presented during ART+TECH Festival and Milano Design Week.

An interactive experience where a psychological questionnaire generates a “digital subconscious” agent-avatar that socializes inside a game world, logging interactions and surfacing potential real-world connections with mutual consent.

Artist

and Armando Chirinos

Project Summary

MindSpace explores how identity might become plural when parts of the psyche are represented in digital space. Participants answer eight fast, introspective prompts; the system turns their responses into a character profile and an AI agent representing their “subconscious”, and then places that agent into a continuously running multi-agent simulation.

Inside a narrative game-like world, agents interact with other participants’ agents and classify the relationship dynamics as friend or avoid. The system records what happened and can notify participants of positive matches; with mutual consent, contact details can be exchanged, using AI to catalyze human connection rather than replace it.

Project Category

Interactive installation / Generative art / Multi-agent social simulation

Vision

How does your project express a perspective on The New Human?

MindSpace imagines a near-future where cognition and identity can be partially externalized: not as a productivity assistant, but as a playable “digital subconscious” that lives alongside us. It asks what happens when our inner drives become characters that can meet, clash, and connect in a shared digital nervous system.

Exploration

What are you experimenting with or discovering through this project?

I’m experimenting with how lightweight psychological prompts can seed believable agent-personas, and how emergent multi-agent interaction can reveal surprising compatibility signals. It’s also an exploration of “safe social risk”: learning how you might relate to others without the immediate fear and stakes of direct communication.

Collaboration

How does your project involve collaboration between people, disciplines, or systems?

The piece sits at the intersection of computational psychology (questionnaire design), multi-agent systems (emergent interaction), game design (world + rules), and social systems (consent-based matching). It also creates a playful collaboration between participants and their agents: people contribute the raw material (answers), and the system collaborates with others’ agents to produce shared, interpretable social traces.

Depth

What deeper reflection or question does your project raise?

If parts of the self are digitized, who are we in relationship: our conscious choices, or the patterns beneath them? MindSpace asks how authorship, privacy, and agency change when a “subconscious copy” can act in public, and whether we can design such systems to increase self-knowledge and empathy rather than surveillance or manipulation. It also asks how much information large AI labs glean from prompts, and how psychological profiles may already be built in secret. MindSpace aims to bring that dynamic into the open and transform it into self-understanding, so individuals learn at least as much about themselves as corporations do.

White Mirror

How does your project imagine a positive, human-centered future?

MindSpace proposes AI as a connector: a system that helps people know themselves and each other more deeply, and that encourages consent-based, positive introductions. It’s a “white mirror” because it treats the digital layer as a place to practice care, curiosity, and connection, designing for relationship and meaning, not just “efficiency’“.

A key part of making that possible is world-building as interface: aesthetic choices are not decoration, they shape what kinds of attention and behavior feel natural. A raw forum between utility-optimizing agents tends to reward minimization, extraction, and instrumental talk. A narrative-driven, stylized world may incentivize play, ambiguity, and emotional texture, which makes self-reflection and curiosity legible as first-class actions.

That frame helps participants project meaning onto interactions, stay engaged long enough to learn, and treat the digital layer less like a marketplace of optimizations and more like a social commons where introductions can be gentle, mutual, and positive.

Tools & Materials Used (Prototype)

Software / AI / Data
Python 3, Fal.ai (Flux API for image generation), fal-client SDK, python-dotenv, certifi, augmented-ui (CSS), vis-network (graph visualization), standard library (http.server, argparse, ssl, json, pathlib).

Hardware / Sensors
None — backend and UI run on a single machine; no custom hardware or sensors.

Media / Output
Web app, server-rendered HTML, generative SVG placeholder avatars, AI-generated PNG avatars (Fal), interactive relationship graph (nodes/edges), form-based questionnaire and participant/relationship views.

Project Demo

1. A participant sits at a computer and answers 8 quick prompts (1–3 sentences each; no overthinking).

2. The system generates a character profile and an avatar representing their “digital subconscious.”

3. The participant can leave the laptop and wait for a notification or watch their agent enter the world and interact with other agents in the simulation.

4. The system classifies emerging dynamics as friend/date/avoid and records a readable interaction report.

5. If there’s a positive match, both participants can opt in to share contact details (mutual consent required).

What’s Next?

• Turn the prototype into a continuously running web-based “always-on” social game where the world persists.

• Collaborate with visual artists to deepen the world/character aesthetics and make the simulation more enticing and entertaining to watch, so learning about yourself feels fun.

• Work with computational psychologists to refine the prompts (what questions best produce a meaningful subconscious avatar).

• Collaborate with privacy/cryptography experts to keep personal data secure and consent boundaries explicit.

• Expand relationship types and interaction repertoires beyond the initial friend/date/avoid triad.

Closing Remarks

MindSpace is intentionally framed as “watchable” (like a streamable simulation) so that even without a match, participants can learn from observing agent interactions. I’d love feedback on (1) what inputs may create the most accurate/interesting agent-persona, and (2) what interaction rules would make the emergent social behavior more legible and meaningful for viewers.

A long-term aim is a positive alternative to algorithmic feeds: a playful, consent-first social space that uses AI to generate understanding and connection rather than comparison or extraction.

Artist

Ray McClure | Creative Programmer

Project Summary

This project began with a conversation in a crowded room where a friend proposed speaking in a higher pitch to cut through the noise. That moment sparked a line of thinking about how animals already adapt their communication in similar situations. Many species dynamically shift the frequency of their calls depending on environmental noise, competing signals, or changing conditions.

Humans also compete for communication bandwidth, but in very different ways. Large portions of the electromagnetic spectrum are carefully regulated and allocated to specific technologies such as radio, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks like 5G. These frequencies are valuable infrastructure, tightly managed and often owned or licensed by governments and telecommunications companies.

This contrast raised an interesting question: while animals fluidly adapt their signals within shared acoustic environments, human communication channels are often fixed and controlled. As our environments become increasingly saturated with devices, sensors, and intelligent systems, could our own forms of communication begin to adapt more dynamically as well?

Shared Frequencies explores this idea through a simulated communication ecosystem. The prototype is a browser-based WebGL environment where simple agents communicate through call-and-response signals. Visitors can introduce their own voice through a microphone, disrupting the system and forcing the agents to scatter and shift their signals across the frequency spectrum.

The piece uses this playful interaction as a speculative lens on how communication might evolve in environments increasingly populated by machines, sensors, and digital companions.

Vision

Shared Frequencies imagines communication as an adaptive ecology rather than a fixed channel. Many forms of intelligence already inhabit the same communication environments. The work brings this shared spectrum into focus and asks how individuals might become more capable participants within it.

Exploration

I am exploring how a simple audiovisual system can make the dynamics of communication and frequency adaptation tangible. Rather than explaining how animals shift their signals to avoid interference, the project allows visitors to experience these behaviors directly as signals collide, scatter, and migrate across the spectrum.

Collaboration

Before the hackathon began, hearing other participants share their ideas and project proposals, many of which engaged with the natural world, had a meaningful influence on how this concept took shape. Those conversations helped frame the project more clearly as a speculative communication ecology rather than simply a technical experiment.

During the hackathon itself I was also participating as a mentor and kept myself available to support other participants and exchange ideas. While the prototype was developed independently, the broader dialogue and curiosity of the group helped shape the direction of the work.

This project had been sitting in my notebook as a potential installation idea for quite some time. Collaborating with Claude Code made it possible to finally prototype the concept quickly. Claude generated much of the initial WebGL structure under my direction, and I refined the behaviors through prompts and hand editing.

The first working prototype emerged in roughly three hours, followed by several shorter refinement sessions.

White Mirror

Shared Frequencies reflects a hopeful view of technology as something that can expand communication rather than constrain it. Throughout history, technologies have both figuratively and literally amplified the human voice, from radio and telecommunications to the networks that carry our signals today. As AI systems and digital companions begin sharing our environments, new forms of cross-mind communication may emerge, helping us bridge communication barriers and negotiate signal space with many kinds of intelligences.

In that sense, the project imagines a future where communication might extend beyond symbolic language alone. Signals could become more adaptable, more collaborative, and more widely understood, emerging from shared environments rather than fixed vocabularies. Rather than replacing human expression, technology may help amplify and transform it, allowing communication to evolve into something more fluid, ecological, and participatory.

Art and Technology

WebGL and Web Audio allow the project to visualize communication as a living system. Signals appear, collide, migrate, and reorganize across a visualized frequency spectrum, where the vertical axis represents communication frequency. As visitors introduce sound through the microphone, their voice becomes a visible signal within the environment, disrupting the existing patterns and forcing agents to migrate in search of clearer channels.

Depth

The deeper question is whether human communication might also evolve in response to increasingly crowded signal environments. As AI voice systems and digital companions become more common, communication itself may expand beyond the narrow channels we currently use.

Tools & Materials Used

Software / AI / Data

• WebGL

• JavaScript

• Web Audio API

• Claude Code

Hardware / Sensors

• Microphone

Project Demo / How to Experience It

Open the prototype and allow the simulated inhabitants to communicate for a few seconds. Then speak, hum, or make noise into the microphone. The signals will scatter and retune as agents search for clearer frequencies.

Project link:

https://shared-frequencies-ac63ae0b271a.herokuapp.com/

https://shared-frequencies-ac63ae0b271a.herokuapp.com/index_swarm.html

What’s Next?

The next step is to develop Shared Frequencies into a physical installation, potentially as a large LED wall with spatialized sound where visitors can introduce signals into a living communication ecosystem. I’m interested in refining the behavioral rules and interactions between the agents so their responses to interference feel more nuanced and ecological.

Future iterations may introduce species-level behaviors and grouping where different inhabitants occupy distinct frequency bands, communicate in clusters, or adapt collectively to changing signal environments. These additions could make the simulation feel less like individual sprites reacting to noise and more like a layered acoustic ecology.

I’m also interested in introducing AI into the simulation itself, allowing intelligent agents to participate in the communication system and evolve the rules that govern how signals propagate, compete, and adapt. Rather than fixed behaviors, these agents could learn to negotiate signal space in more complex ways.

Longer term, the project could evolve into a speculative platform for exploring how humans, animals, and intelligent systems might share communication space in increasingly dense signal environments.

Artists

Briam Rolon + Helen Lam

Project Summary

“CALL INTO BEING” is an immersive multimedia fulldome experience that explores the transition from individual isolation to collective brilliance. By blending generative art, fluid dynamics, and synchronized Augmented Reality (AR), the project reimagines the creation myth for the modern era. Participants witness the birth of a digital ecosystem where they are not dominant forces, but essential threads in a universal web of empathy and interconnectedness. Through a multi-layered narrative, the show explores how independent “particles”—representing humans—can synchronize to create complex, sentient systems.

Vision

The project is centered on the “New Human”—an individual who finds power not in solitude, but through the collective experience. It poses a fundamental question: What if creation is a simulation, and we are the ones who must choose what to call into existence?

Exploration

The experience utilizes two levels of depth:

The Fulldome: A shared, large-scale visual environment.

AR Layer: Attendees use their phones to see particles emitting from their own bodies, merging with the visuals on the dome in real-time.

The Experience (Scene Breakdown)

Scene 1: The Dark Mirror (Isolation)

The dome begins in total darkness. Fragmented, jittery electronic pings and whispers fill the space. Tiny particles zip around randomly, never touching—a visual representation of noise, chaos, and the disconnected nature of independent variables.

Scene 2: The Critical Mass (Connection)

A rhythmic pulse emerges from the Zenith (the top of the dome). The chaotic particles begin to orbit and leave trails of golden light, weaving a 360-degree web. Disconnected sounds tune into a single frequency, anchored by a deep heartbeat that invites the audience to bond.

Scene 3: The Emergent Form (Creation)

The individual particles dissolve into a shimmering, fluid “cloud.” These clouds morph into complex systems: firing neural networks, murmuring starlings, and rotating galaxies. While a grand orchestral swell signifies harmony, intentional “glitches” remain—a reminder that the human system is beautifully imperfect.

Depth

Individual Insignificance vs. Collective Brilliance. The project highlights the beauty of the “New Human” as a part of a greater whole—an ecosystem that is technologically linked yet emotionally present.

Tools & Materials Used

Visual Style: Generative art, fluid dynamics, and high-contrast light play.

Audio: Granular synthesis, spatialized whispers, and orchestral swells mixed with glitch aesthetics.

Medium: Fulldome Projection, Mobile AR integration, and Time-synced Interactivity.

The Emergence — Featured Project Showcase

Curious about what happens when artists, technologists, designers, and explorers come together to co-create?

Join us!

Join us for The Emergence, an open online gathering where we share the projects born during The New Human — Creative Hackathon.

Agenda

• Welcome

• Mentor reflections

• ARTEX demo

• Co-hack invitation / next build steps

• Open Q&A

• Upcoming festival events

Moving Every Idea Forward

We were deeply inspired by what we saw during the hackathon, and our intention is to help every project continue evolving in some form.

The Emergence is a moment for the community — and for anyone curious — to discover what has been created, hear from the teams behind the ideas, and explore how these experiments can continue to grow within the ART+TECH Festival 2026.

What Happens Next?

1. Review, share, like, and comment on the projects on the CODAME Hackathon Showcase page.
   This is your space to revisit the work, share it with others, send the teams your love (❤️), and add your comments or questions.
   Your feedback is what keeps the momentum going.

Visit Showcase Page

2. Join us on March 19 for an online session to reconnect, showcase selected projects, and explore our next steps as a global collective.

Join us!

During the event we will also share a few new steps in the CODAME journey.
Many of these projects may continue evolving through ARTEX — a new medium for living digital art that CODAME is developing — and through the Print Club program, expanding how artists and technologists can create, exhibit, and collect work together.

Most importantly, this gathering is an invitation for the community to come together again — to co-hack the next steps toward Milano Design Week and beyond.

Because the hackathon was only the starting point.

We will continue the journey across Milano, San Francisco, Berlin, Shanghai — and perhaps your city too.

If you would like to host the festival and invite the CODAME community, this is the moment to join the journey.

We move forward as one collective.
One big team.
One shared goal.

Shaping The New Human through art and technology — together.

Join us!