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:

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:

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.

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

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.

An artistic experience exploring how human breath can become a certificate of authenticity and a medium for emotional resonance in the age of AI.

Team Members

Irina Popova — The Embodied Explorer

Uliana Triapichkina — The Storyworld Architect

Maria Popova —The Alchemist

Project Summary

This project explores how human breath can become a new artistic medium and a marker of human authenticity in a future shaped by AI and automation.

As artificial intelligence increasingly generates content, breath represents something uniquely human — a living rhythm connected to emotion and presence. By recording or synchronizing breathing patterns between artist and audience, the project creates an experience of emotional resonance and collective awareness.

Rather than presenting art as a static object, the project proposes art as a shared physiological experience where creator and audience temporarily become part of the same emotional system.

In an era of mass production and AI-generated content, the project also introduces the concept of a breath-based certificate of authenticity. During the creative process, the artist records their own breathing, which acts as a unique “signature” of the work. This breath signature not only validates the authorship of the piece but could become a technology for future development, providing a new way to ensure and verify the human authenticity of artistic creations.

Project Category

• Hybrid / Experimental

• Performance / Interactive Art

Hackathon Guideline Values

Vision

In a future where automation may replace most forms of labor, people may need new ways to express identity and authenticity. This project imagines breath, the most fundamental human rhythm, as a way to reconnect identity with lived experience rather than productivity.

Also, we will face an increasingly important question: how to tell human-made artifacts apart from AI-made? Breathing is an inherently human function that cannot be replicated by the machines, thus making it a perfect human medium of expression.

Exploration

The project explores whether breath can function as:

• a certificate of human authenticity in an AI-generated world
• a medium for emotional transmission
• a tool for synchronizing human experience

It experiments with how breathing rhythms can influence perception, emotion, and group connection.

Collaboration

In a future where people may become increasingly individualized and socially isolated, this project reintroduces the experience of collective presence.

The audience is not just observing the artwork but participating as witnesses. Through synchronized breathing, participants create a shared physiological field that influences the emotional state of the artist and the unfolding of the work.

Like beads on a string, each participant does not create the artwork alone, but together their synchronized presence shapes the living atmosphere in which the artwork emerges.

Art and Technology

Technology can record, visualize, or transmit breathing patterns using sensors and software.

However, the artistic core remains the living human breath itself — something technology can capture but not generate authentically.

The project explores how technology can amplify human presence rather than replace it.

Depth

The work raises a fundamental question:

What makes something truly human in a world where AI can imitate almost everything?

Breath may represent a form of authenticity connected to life, presence, and emotional experience that cannot be fully replicated by machines.

White Mirror

The project imagines a future where technology does not isolate people but helps them reconnect with their bodies and with each other.

Instead of replacing human creativity, AI could push us to rediscover the value of presence, empathy, and shared experience.

Breath becomes a simple but powerful bridge between people in an increasingly digital world.

Tools & Materials Used

List the main tools, technologies, or materials used in your project.

Software / AI / Data

• Generative visualization tools

• Breathing pattern analysis software

Hardware / Sensors

• Breathing sensor or microphone

• Optional heart rate sensors

• Computer or microcontroller

Media / Output

• Generative visualizations

• Live breathing data

• Interactive performance or installation

Other Tools or Materials

• Projection or screen

• Sound system

• Space for collective participation

Project Demo / How to Experience It

Participants experience the project through a short live demonstration.

The artist’s breathing is recorded or sensed in real time and translated into visual or sound patterns. The audience is invited to synchronize their breathing with the artist, creating a shared rhythm.

As breathing synchronizes, the visuals or sound environment evolves, reflecting the collective emotional state of the group.

What’s Next?

• creating a live performance format with audience participation
• developing a digital archive of breathing signatures as artistic “authenticity markers”
• collaborating with neuroscientists or psychologists studying emotional resonance

Anything Else You’d Like to Share

Is there anything else that would help people understand your project?

This could include:

• additional context or inspiration

• sketches, references, or links

• challenges you encountered

• questions you want feedback on

• ideas you didn’t have time to implement

• collaborators you’d like to connect with

Choose your real-world genetic enhancements, and our system generates a unique, 3D-printable artifact shaped by your biological choices.

”The New Human is a mosaic — assembled by choice, not by chance.”

Team Members

• Newton Winter — Concept / Biology

• Anton Kulaga — Engineering / Data

• Livia Zaharia — Design / Storytelling

• Markel Kori — Video / Storytelling

Project Summary

Upgrading human DNA isn’t sci-fi — it is already happening in adults today. In alternative jurisdictions like Prospera, medical tourists are actively receiving gene therapies for muscle growth (Follistatin) and blood vessel creation (VEGF). But what happens in 10 years as we unlock harder-to-implement targets to shape “The New Human”? Nature already has the code for extreme survival: shark longevity, tardigrade radiation shields, and axolotl regeneration. Materialized Enhancements turns this impending synthetic biology into participatory artwork.

Users select their desired “enhancement genes” through our intuitive UI built in Reflex. These selections, combined with a personal digital signature, act as the exact data inputs for a generative algorithm. The result is a single, unrepeatable 3D form — ready for 3D printing.

We built this as a highly extensible platform. We are actively inviting other artists to plug their own generative art models into our biological input engine. While we used Grasshopper for fast prototyping during the hackathon, our roadmap includes switching to fully open-source generative tools integrated directly with the deployed UI.

Project Category

Interactive installation / Data visualization / Generative art

The Hackathon Journey

This project was literally built on the move across over 1,500 kilometers. We pitched the concept during the first hour of the hackathon in Milan, caught a flight to Bucharest, and developed the Reflex code and Grasshopper logic on a train to Munich, where Livia is currently exhibiting her “Data as Art” work.

Vision

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

The project embodies the idea that the New Human is not engineered top-down, but chosen — freely, personally, from what 3.8 billion years of evolution has already prototyped across every branch of life on Earth. Enhancement is reframed not as a medical intervention but as a creative act of self-authorship.

Exploration

What are you experimenting with or discovering through this project?

We are experimenting with the boundary between speculative biology and participatory art: can a gene library become an expressive palette? What does it feel like to hold your biological choices in your hand as a physical object? The hackathon is itself an experiment in whether this question resonates with people when made tangible.

Collaboration

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

The project is a collaboration between humans and biological heritage — each source organism (tardigrade, axolotl, Greenland shark, mantis shrimp, immortal jellyfish…) contributes a puzzle piece to the human silhouette, making evolution itself a silent collaborator. The team also spans biology, engineering, and design.

Art and Technology

How do art and technology interact in your project?

A Reflex web app serves as the interface — the gene library is the data layer, generative algorithms translate selections into unique 3D forms, and the final artefact is the physical print. Technology makes the biology legible; art makes it personal and emotionally resonant.

Depth

What deeper reflection or question does your project raise?

The work raises the question of consent and authorship in enhancement: if you could choose your biology, what would that say about who you want to be? The totem is not a prediction — it is a declaration. It also asks: whose choices have already been encoded in us by evolution, and what does it mean to consciously continue that process?

White Mirror

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

Rather than fearing genetic enhancement, this project imagines a world where it is an expressive, democratic act — as personal as choosing what music to listen to or what words to tattoo on your skin. The positive future here is one where biological choice is informed, creative, and deeply human.

Tools & Materials Used

• Frontend UI: Reflex [GitHub Repo]

• Generative Form Prototype: Rhino / Grasshopper

• Future Generative Engine: Open-source generative models directly integrated with the UI

• Generative Video: Google Flux / Veo

• Data: Polars, reflex-mui-datagrid

• Gene library: 35 genes · 9 categories · ~25 source organisms (each with a real research paper)

• Organism silhouettes: PhyloPic (CC0 / CC BY)

Project Demo / How to Experience It

Visit the web app (or scan a QR code on site). Browse the Gene Library — 35 real genes from tardigrades, sharks, axolotls, mantis shrimp, and more. Pick the traits that feel right to you. Enter something personal to sign your composition. Generate your unique totem. On site, it is 3D-printed. Remotely, it is shared as a downloadable file.

What’s Next?

• Integrate fully open-source generative tools directly into the deployed UI (replacing Grasshopper prototype)

• Invite other artists to plug their own generative art models into the biological input engine

• Add the puzzle assembly view — showing how each source organism contributes a piece to the human silhouette

• Extend the gene library with more organisms and categories

• Explore AR as a presentation layer for the generated totem

• Deploy the web app publicly so anyone can compose their enhancement

The gene library is built on real published research — every entry links to a peer-reviewed paper. The organisms range from extremophile bacteria to extinct hominins (Denisovans).

The puzzle metaphor runs through the whole project: each organism is a puzzle piece, the human silhouette is assembled from non-human biological heritage, and your personal totem is the assembled result of your choices — a materialised version of your vision of yourself.

Source code: https://github.com/winternewt/materialized-enchancements

Team Members

Jon Somerscales — Storyworld Architect

Enrico “Mad“ Paiardi - Systems Imagineer

Project Category

Experimental collaborative web experience

Vision

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

The new human as an expanded, connected collection of interactions and micro-organisms.

Exploration

What are you experimenting with or discovering through this project?

Expanding human consciousness and collaborative potential. Non verbal communication. Human-coral system interaction.

Collaboration

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

Our team spans the Storyworld Architect, Alchemist and Systems Engineer roles.

Art and Technology

How do art and technology interact in your project?

We use body tracking to give the user the direct representative experience of being made of a particle system. We use the affordances of websockets to enable telepresence and collaborative participation between users.

Depth

What deeper reflection or question does your project raise?

How it feels to be expansive. How technology can enable different forms of collaboration and communication.

White Mirror

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

We explore digital technology as a tool for expansive connected thinking. How can we prototype new positive ways of shared connection and communication? How can digital interactions have a positive impact on the environment?

Tools & Materials Used

List the main tools, technologies, or materials used in your project.

Software / AI / Data

• HTML5, three.js, shaders, mediapipe, node.js, websockets, Claude

Media / Output

• Collaborative multi-user web app

Other Tools or Materials

• Smithsonian models

Project Demo / How to Experience It

Below is a video walk-through of our current prototype.

What’s Next?

• Finish merging the multi-user backend with the interactive frontend

• Test, refine and expand the behaviour in several exciting potential directions

• Optimise and improve the particle system edge-cases

• Align the project with the CODAME Print Club format

Team Members

Josette Seitz — XR Engineer — https://www.josetteseitz.com

Ian Wallace — Creative Technologist — https://www.instagram.com/ijkwxyz

Project Summary

“Temporal Manipulation of the Duomo” explores how human gestures can interact with large-scale spatial data. Using Gaussian splat scans of the Duomo captured with an XGRIDS PortalCam during both daytime and nighttime, the cathedral becomes an interactive digital artifact. With Ultraleap hand tracking, participants swipe through time, transitioning the Duomo between day and night with the movement of their hands. The project invites participants to physically shape how digital representations of real-world spaces are experienced. Users transition between these two states, revealing architecture as something that can be explored, manipulated, and experienced through the body.

Project Category (Optional)

· Interactive installation

· Data visualization

· 3D Media

Vision

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

A future where humans interact directly with spatial data through natural gestures comes into focus here. By swiping between day and night across a digital reconstruction of the Duomo, the body becomes an interface for navigating and shaping the memory of real-world places.

Exploration

What are you experimenting with or discovering through this project?

“Temporal Manipulation of the Duomo” investigates how large-scale cultural landmarks can be transformed into interactive digital artifacts. Through gesture-based interaction with Gaussian splat scans of the Duomo, it explores how spatial computing can allow people to physically navigate, manipulate, and reinterpret real-world environments captured as data.

Collaboration

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

This project is the result of collaboration between spatial capture, creative coding, and interaction design. Josette Seitz captured the Duomo di Milano using an XGRIDS PortalCam scanner and processed the Gaussian splat data, while Ian Wallace integrated the scans into TouchDesigner to create the interactive environment. Together with Ultraleap hand tracking, the system allows participants to interact with architectural data through gestures, blending physical scanning, real-time graphics, and human-computer interaction.

Art and Technology

How do art and technology interact in your project?

Advanced spatial capture and real-time interaction transform a historic landmark into an artistic medium. Gaussian splat scans of the Duomo, captured with an XGRIDS PortalCam and rendered in TouchDesigner, create a living digital representation of the cathedral. Ultraleap hand tracking allows viewers to physically interact with the data, turning technology into a tool for exploring architecture through gesture, light, and movement.

Depth

What deeper reflection or question does your project raise?

As places are increasingly captured and reconstructed as data, architecture begins to exist in both physical and digital form. Gesture-based interaction raises questions about how humans will experience cultural landmarks in the future—whether we will simply observe them, or actively shape how they are explored and remembered.

White Mirror

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

Spatial computing can bring people closer to places rather than distancing them. Interacting with a digital reconstruction of the Duomo through natural gestures imagines a future where technology deepens our connection to cultural landmarks and shared memory.

Software / AI / Data

· TouchDesigner

· Gaussian Splat (3D radiance field) processing

· Point cloud / spatial scan data from XGRIDS

· Real-time gesture interaction mapping

Hardware / Sensors

· XGRIDS PortalCam

· Ultraleap Leap Motion Controller

· Computer / GPU workstation for real-time rendering

Media / Output

· Interactive 3D Gaussian splat visualization

· Gesture-controlled spatial experience

· Real-time transition between daytime and nighttime scan states

· Interactive installation / digital art experience

Other Tools or Materials

· Duomo di Milano spatial scan dataset (captured on site in Milan)

· Collaboration between spatial capture and creative coding

Project Demo / How to Experience It

How should people experience or interact with your project?

Participants stand in front of a monitor and use hand gestures tracked by an Ultraleap Leap Motion controller to interact with a 3D Gaussian splat scan of the Duomo. Swiping their hand left or right transitions the cathedral between daytime and nighttime states in real time, allowing viewers to experience the architecture as an interactive field of spatial data.

What’s Next?

If you continued developing this project, what would be the next step?

The next step would be to develop the project into an installation presented in Milan, where locals could interact with a digital reconstruction of their iconic cathedral. By bringing the work back to the place where it was captured, the project could offer a new way for the community to engage with the Duomo through gestures and spatial computing.

Anything Else You’d Like to Share

Is there anything else that would help people understand your project?

As stated, the Duomo scans were captured on-site in Milan during both daytime and nighttime, inspiring the idea of allowing viewers to transition between two moments of the same place through gesture. Software like TouchDesigner integrates the spatial data to enable real-time interaction. The work explores how spatial scanning and gesture-based interfaces can create new ways of experiencing cultural landmarks as interactive digital environments and invites collaboration with artists and technologists working in spatial computing and interactive media.

Team

Zeo Zhang - Alchemist

Matteo Rederer - Storyworld Architect

Florian Rederer — Alchemist

Project Summary

This project opens a small window into Matteo’s imagination.

His ABC drawings are full of tiny stories, animals, and unexpected details. At first glance they may seem simple, almost childlike. But when you look closer, an entire world begins to appear.

Inspired by the spirit of the song “ABC” by the Jackson Five, the project explores a simple idea: sometimes the most meaningful things—love, imagination, curiosity—are also the most natural. As easy as A-B-C. As intuitive as 1-2-3.

A Journey Through Images

The experience invites visitors to move through three images.

When you zoom deeply into the first drawing, it transforms into a second world.
Looking closer again reveals a third.

And when you explore the third image closely enough, you return to the first.

This looping journey reflects something essential about The New Human:
that meaning often reveals itself only when we slow down, look closer, and allow ourselves to explore what lies beneath the surface.

It is a reminder that imagination is not something we leave behind as adults.
It is something we rediscover when we pay attention.

Interaction

Visitors can explore the drawing freely:

• Click and drag to move through the scene
• Scroll or move closer to zoom into details
• Double-click to enter hidden sections

Inside each section, elements from Matteo’s drawings appear as small interactive cut-outs. Visitors can move them, rearrange them, and play with them—almost as if they had stepped inside the artist’s sketchbook.

Artistic Process

Initially, the idea was to use AI to recreate Matteo’s drawings as fully spatial environments.

But during the process something important became clear:
the true magic was already there in the original sketches.

In a world where technology can generate hyper-realistic images in seconds, what remains rare is the raw imagination of a human mind.

Matteo’s drawings may look rough or simple.
But they carry something machines cannot reproduce: emotion, memory, and soul.

A Glimpse Toward 2036

In the world imagined by The New Human, technology helps reduce the weight of repetitive work and productivity pressure.

It gives us back something precious:
time to explore imagination, curiosity, and emotion.

A world where we remember how to look closely again.

Sentio, ergo sum.
I feel, therefore I am.

Come explore Matteo’s world: ABC Magni-fire
(And the camera on/off button is Matteo’s drawing of Zeo 😆)

Team

• Vanessa Cuevas — Product Designer

• Yogiti S.

• Kriti Shukla

Tools & Materials Used

Software / AI / Data

• MediaPipe (pose landmarker + face landmarker, on-device ML)

• JavaScript / WebGL / WebAssembly

• Vercel (deployment)

Hardware / Sensors

• Device camera (laptop or mobile)

  • No additional hardware required — runs entirely in the browser

Media / Output

• Real-time AR web experience

• Canvas-based overlay rendering

Other Tools or Materials

• ChatGPT (hero image generation)

• Claude Code (development assistant)

Project Summary

Project Category: Interactive installation

Most of social intelligence is invisible. We read signals unconsciously: crossed arms, a fading smile, restless movement.

EmpathAR makes those signals visible in real time, rendering a live Social Battery overlay directly over the people in your camera view. It doesn’t tell you what to feel. It tells you what’s already happening and helps you work through it in real time.

Vision

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

EmpathAR uses on-device AI to read posture, expression, and movement — translating the unconscious signals we’ve always exchanged into a visible layer of social intelligence. It asks not how AI can think for us, but how it can help us feel more deeply seen: turning invisible emotional states into shared awareness, and creating moments of genuine attunement between people in the same space.

Exploration

What are you experimenting with or discovering through this project?

Our team wanted to create an augmented reality that visually displays emotional body language so we can better understand each other’s needs.

Our goal was to try to understand how much of human connection can be inferred from body language alone, and whether surfacing that inference in real time changes how people relate to each other.

Art and Technology

How do art and technology interact in your project?

EmpathAR uses computer vision as a creative medium. The underlying technology — pose detection, face landmarking, real-time inference — is clinical by design. The art is in the translation: choosing which signals matter, what to name them, and how to render them in a way that creates empathy rather than surveillance.”

Project Demo / How to Experience It

Visit the live web experience at empath-ar.vercel.app Point your camera at one or more people and the system begins reading in real time.

What to look for: Each person in frame gets a persistent Social Battery label (Energized → Engaged → Present → Fading → Needs Space) driven by posture, expression, and movement. The overlay updates continuously and surfaces contextual tips for how to respond to each state.

• Desktop: Designed for one person or small group scenario: mount a laptop facing the crowd or the front row at a festival gate or get a live read of the room’s collective energy. Works equally well in interviews and meetings, where it surfaces how your own expression and posture might be landing in real time.

• Mobile: Built for 1:1 or small group contexts: hold your phone naturally and get an immediate social read of the person or people in front of you.

Challenges encountered:

• 2 out of 3 Team members left early

• Frown detection proved surprisingly difficult. MediaPipe’s blendshapes fire inconsistently across lighting conditions and face shapes, so we rebuilt the detection using raw geometric landmark measurements.

• Reducing jitter across pose, expression, and battery state required multiple layers of EMA smoothing (per-landmark, per-score, and per-position) before the overlay felt stable enough to be useful rather than distracting.

What we didn’t have time to implement:

• Audio detection and voice-to-text transcription for context-aware tips based on what’s actually being said in the room (on the roadmap as v1.3).

Testing and hardware:

• Currently testing on Oculus Quest 3 and Quest 2.

• Actively looking to connect with anyone who is willing to provide Meta smart glasses or Apple Vision Pro to explore what a glasses-native version of EmpathAR could look and feel like — if that’s you, please reach out!

Open questions for feedback:

• Where is the line between social awareness and surveillance

  • How should the UI reflect that tension?

• What emotional states matter most in your context: performance, meeting, conversation, crowd?

• Who else should this exist for? Accessibility wise, we’d like to support access social learning and inclusion for all.

What’s Next?

Near-future vision: The natural home for EmpathAR is Meta smart glasses. We are currently working to test in Oculus Quest 3 and Quest 2

Our dream, in the solarpunk world of 2036, is to have these integrated into AR contact lenses running EmpathAR as one layer of a broader social awareness stack: a world where emotional attunement isn’t a skill gap, but a shared infrastructure.

*see our full roadmap for future enhancements

Sonic Lens explores a simple question: what if sound could once again become a lens through which humans experience the world?

Inspired by bells—one of humanity’s oldest public sound technologies—the project transforms uploaded video into layered sonic and visual interpretations. Through modes such as place, tension, calm, memory, rhythm, and atmosphere, each video becomes a unique sensory translation.

The work is evolving both as a web-based application and as an interactive indoor / outdoor installation. Visitors can upload video through a QR code or activate autoplay content, allowing the system to generate a living soundscape alongside projected visual “lens” tracks that reshape how the original moment is perceived.

Collaboration:
Sonic Lens is shaped through collaboration across story, sensory design, system prototyping, and spatial installation thinking. It brings together different disciplines while also connecting multiple systems — uploaded video, sound translation, projection, interface flow, and audience interaction — into one shared experience. Collaboration is therefore not only part of the team structure, but also part of the work itself: image, code, sound, light, and public participation continuously inform one another.

Art and Technology:
In Sonic Lens, technology acts as the translation engine, while art shapes the emotional and spatial experience. Video input is transformed into sound, visual lens tracks, and installation output, while the frame, bells, light, and projection turn that process into something sculptural, atmospheric, and experiential. The project treats technology not as a hidden utility, but as a visible material that can be seen, heard, and felt.

Depth:
Sonic Lens asks what happens when humans stop treating sound as background and begin to read the world through it again. It reflects on perception, atmosphere, tension, memory, and the role of machines in helping us sense environments differently, not simply faster. At a deeper level, the project asks whether future technologies can make us more attentive, more embodied, and more connected to the richness of the world around us.

White Mirror:
Sonic Lens imagines a positive, human-centered future in which technology expands human sensitivity rather than reducing it. Instead of extracting attention, it turns everyday video into a reflective, participatory, and shared sensory experience that invites curiosity, accessibility, wonder, and presence. It proposes a future where digital systems help people listen more deeply to places, moods, and one another.

Tools and materials used:

Software / AI / Data:
Web-based application prototype
Video upload and playback flow
Visual analysis and lens-generation logic
Audio-mapping / sound translation system
QR-based interaction pathway

Hardware / Sensors:
Smartphone or camera video input
Embedded sound system / speakers inside bell-inspired structures
Projection system for wall or ground
LED lighting integrated into the installation
Laptop / screen for prototype control and demonstration

Media / Output:
Interactive installation
Web experience
Sound
Projected visual tracks / lenses
Demo video
Physical sculptural unit

Other tools / materials:
Clear acrylic, translucent or black optic finishes
Visible data wires with LED lighting
Bell-inspired sound vessels
Architectural frame inspired by historic bell structures
QR code access for audience participation

Project demo / how to experience it:
Sonic Lens can currently be experienced in three ways: through the presentation, through the live prototype, and through the demo video. In its installation form, visitors scan a QR code to upload a video or activate autoplay content, then experience how the system translates that source into sound, projected lens tracks, and an immersive spatial environment. During the presentation, reviewers can look at how one video becomes multiple sensory interpretations through sound, light, and visual translation.

Team:

• — Storyworld Architect

• @Srix — The Alchemist

• Bart Cuppens — Spatial experience / architectural support

Presentation: canva.com

Application: soniclensart.netlify.app

Every medium begins before it has a final form. It begins when a few people, often coming from different worlds, start sensing the same absence and are drawn toward the same possibility. Painters once imagined oil on canvas not simply as a technique, but as a way of holding light, matter, and time. Filmmakers imagined moving images before cinema had fully become itself. Digital artists, in their own way, imagined that code could become more than instruction — that it could become texture, rhythm, atmosphere, and expression.

ARTEX is the current working title for an emerging artistic exploration into how digital artworks might live, evolve, and remain present over time.

It is also an open invitation to artists, hackers, designers, and technologists who feel called to explore this language with us.

Join ARTEX

This exploration was initiated by , with early creative collaboration from Anna Sapelnikova, Giovanni Muzio (Kesson), Lorenzo Gecchelin, and Alessandro Merletti De Palo.

A Living Medium

For centuries, art has often arrived to us as something still. A painting, a sculpture, a photograph: each one holding a gesture, a vision, a moment suspended. There is something beautiful in that stillness. It allows us to return, to look again, and to discover that what does not move can still change within us.

And yet digital art introduced another condition. It opened extraordinary possibilities, but it also introduced a new fragility. Software ages. Devices disappear. Formats become unreadable. A work may continue to exist in theory, yet lose the very environment that allows it to live. That is why, beneath the excitement surrounding digital art, there is often a quieter question, especially from artists, collectors, and caretakers of culture: will this work still be here in twenty years? Will it still breathe in 2036? Will it remain accessible, visible, meaningful?

This exploration begins there, with that question, but it does not answer it defensively. It answers by imagining another possibility: that a digital artwork might not be treated only as a fragile file temporarily hosted by technology, but as part of a living medium designed to persist, adapt, and endure.

In this vision, the work is not trapped in a single static state. It can unfold slowly. It can respond to the light in a room, to the sound of a space, to the subtle presence of a person passing nearby. It does not need to become theatrical in order to feel alive. What matters is not spectacle, but presence — a quiet life within the artwork, faithful to the artist’s language, yet open to time.

Time and Digital Art

Time has always belonged to art, though not always in the same way. Sometimes time enters through decay, sometimes through memory, sometimes through ritual, repetition, or narrative. But in digital art, time often arrives with a particular tension: the work may be conceptually alive, while technically vulnerable. It depends on systems that are themselves impermanent.

Some artists have chosen to make that impermanence part of the work itself. In Enough by Daniele Sigalot, a digital counter slowly approaches zero, moving toward an ending inscribed within the piece. Its disappearance is not a flaw, nor a technical problem to be solved. It is part of the artwork’s poetic logic. Time, in this case, is not simply an external threat. It is the work’s language.

That remains a valid and powerful artistic choice. Some artworks are meant to disappear. Others may be meant to endure. Both possibilities should remain in the hands of the artist.

This exploration does not seek to erase impermanence. Rather, it opens another path. When an artist wants a digital work to remain present across decades — to continue evolving, responding, and living in the world over time — longevity too can become part of the artistic vision.

A First Artistic Medium

To begin exploring this idea, we started experimenting with modular visual surfaces — luminous forms able to sense aspects of the environment and respond to them.

Individually, they can host a single artwork. Together, they can form larger compositions, installations, or spatial environments. In this sense, the artwork is no longer confined to a frame in the traditional way. It can inhabit a wall, a corner, a room, even an architectural gesture.

What matters here is not only the technology, but the artistic possibility it opens. An artist can imagine a work unfolding across multiple surfaces, shifting through visual states, responding to environmental changes, moving through subtle narrative transitions, or acknowledging the presence of those who encounter it.

The intention is not to replace existing forms of art. It is to open another language: one in which digital art can become more spatial, more temporal, and more quietly alive.

What Kind of Art Could This Become?

This leads to a simple but important question: what kind of art could emerge from such a medium?

It would not be defined by a single style. It would not belong to one aesthetic. What defines it is not only how it looks at first glance, but how it behaves over time. Instead of remaining fixed, a work might shift gently with daylight in a room, breathe with ambient sound, move through emotional or narrative states, or subtly respond when someone approaches.

These changes need not be dramatic. In fact, the most interesting ones may be the least obvious — the kind of transformations that are felt before they are consciously noticed.

The ambition is not to make digital art louder. It is to make it more present. A painting made of light. A sculpture made of time. A work that shares space with us not as a screen demanding attention, but as a living composition unfolding slowly, almost like weather, almost like memory.

The Artist’s Studio

To make this possible, we created an early prototype system through which artists can begin transforming static works into living artworks. The intention is not to burden the artist with technical complexity, but to create a process that feels open, intuitive, and generative.

An artist can upload different states of a work, shape how it evolves over time, experiment with environmental signals, and preview how the piece behaves in space.

This matters because a new medium only becomes meaningful when artists can actually inhabit it. The goal is not to ask every creator to become an engineer. It is to offer artists a way of composing with duration, presence, and response, much as earlier artists learned to compose with pigment, lens, montage, or code.

If photography expanded the possibilities of painting rather than ending them, perhaps a living medium can expand the possibilities of digital art in a similar way.

This medium is still taking shape, and part of its meaning will come from the people who choose to explore it.

Artists, hackers, and collaborators are invited to help shape what this language can become.

Join ARTEX

Interaction

Interaction, in this context, should not be misunderstood as novelty or gimmick. This exploration is not interested in interactivity for its own sake. What matters is the possibility that an artwork might become sensitive to the conditions around it and, through that sensitivity, become more alive.

A work might react when someone approaches, perhaps with the smallest sign of acknowledgement — a blink, a shift, a pause. It might move through dawn, day, dusk, and night, not as a loop, but as a rhythm. It might change with the seasons, with light, with weather, with the sound of a room. It might even pass through narrative states, like a seed becoming plant, then flower, or emotional tones moving from calm to curiosity to excitement.

What matters is that these transitions feel organic rather than mechanical. The work should not feel like it is repeating a trick. It should feel as though it is inhabiting time.

White Mirror

So much of the cultural imagination around technology is shaped by anxiety. We are used to futures in which technology distances us from ourselves, from one another, and from the subtle things that make life meaningful. CODAME has often tried to hold space for another direction — a White Mirror direction — one in which technology can deepen our relationship with creativity, beauty, and human expression instead of flattening it.

This exploration belongs to that vision. It imagines a future in which artists retain ownership of their work, where artworks do not simply disappear because the supporting systems fail, and where technology expands artistic language rather than replacing it.

The image is simple, but it stays with us: a painting that breathes, a sculpture that notices you, art that lives with us not as an interruption, but as a companion.

From Hackathon to the World

Like many meaningful things, this did not begin as a finished system. It began as a spark. During the Creative Hackathon, in Milan and online across different geographies, artists, technologists, designers, and curious minds came together not just to build projects, but to prototype sensibilities, test ways of thinking, and imagine what kinds of cultural forms might become possible in the years ahead.

What emerged from that atmosphere feels less like a collection of finished works and more like a constellation of beginnings — ideas, gestures, and artistic signals that deserve time to keep unfolding.

In that spirit, CODAME has chosen to use ARTEX, as a current working title, as a shared vessel for the continuation of selected hackathon projects, wherever that feels meaningful and wherever artists wish to participate.

It is an invitation to keep building together — to continue hacking, co-hacking, and evolving these works toward Milano Design Week, future CODAME moments, and new encounters around the world.

Join ARTEX

Through this shared path, some of these works may continue evolving toward Milano Design Week, future CODAME moments, and cultural encounters in other cities around the world.

The hackathon was not the end of the work.

Perhaps that is also the deeper invitation inside this exploration:

to artists, hackers, technologists, and curious humans who want to help imagine what living digital art could become.

It was where another chapter began.

Through ARTEX, we continue to hack, co-hack, and imagine that future together.

Join ARTEX

Looking Toward 2036

When we speak about 2036, we are not trying to predict the future with precision. We are trying to cultivate a horizon. The future does not arrive all at once; it emerges through what we create together, through the values we embed in our tools, through the kinds of experiences we choose to design, and through the forms of culture we decide are worth carrying forward.

Looking toward 2036, this exploration invites us to imagine a world in which artworks evolve quietly in homes and public spaces, where artists compose living works rather than static images, where artworks in different cities influence one another across distance, and where collectors become not only owners, but caretakers of living cultural systems.

These are not fixed outcomes, nor a closed roadmap. They are signals. Hints. Openings. They suggest where a new artistic medium might lead if nurtured with care, imagination, and time.

And perhaps, underneath all of this, the same simple question remains:

What if art did not simply hang on the wall, but lived with us?

Join ARTEX

CODAME Print Club brings the tactile joy of vinyl collecting to digital art. We’re curating 7”×7” square artworks that you can hold, frame, and trade at meetups while discovering new artists monthly.

Think of it as the 45 RPM single of the art world: compact, collectible, and designed for trading and discovery.

Be Part of the Launch

Join the waitlist to be notified when monthly subscriptions and hosting kits are available

Join Subscription Waitlist

The Zeitgeist of Collectibles

In an era of doom scrolling and algorithmic feeds, there's a growing hunger for tangible connection.

We remember when social feeds felt like a gift — stumbling across an artist you’d never heard of, that spark of discovery you couldn’t manufacture. CODAME Print Club recreates that feeling in real space, with something you can hold, trade, and hang on your wall.

Art swap meetups are how we do it: crate digging through collections, trading pieces, meeting artists and collectors in person. It's record store browsing for the contemporary art era. Each 7"×7" print fits perfectly in vinyl frames and sleeves, sits well anywhere, and starts conversations. The format is designed for discovery: compact enough to collect dozens, meaningful enough that each one matters.

How It Works

For Collectors

Monthly subscribers receive curated 7”×7” prints from featured artists, printed on archival cardstock and delivered worldwide. The package includes an artist placard — a small card with the artist’s story and context for the work — so collectors can display their gallery at home or at work and spark inspiring conversations around the pieces.

Digital subscribers get wallpaper crops for display on screens.

All subscribers get monthly voting rights to help shape upcoming editions — a preview of curated candidates before the window closes. Free tier votes count, but the deeper your commitment, the more your voice shapes the culture. Digital subscribers carry more weight, physical subscribers the most.

For Artists

Selected artists receive a direct profit split from their featured edition. Your work reaches a global community of collectors who value art as physical objects worth trading and displaying.

🌍 Global Reach - Physical and digital distribution to collectors worldwide

💰 Profit Split - A direct cut of every edition you're featured in

🤝 Community Connection - Art swap meetups & direct engagement with collectors

Call for Artists

Submit your work to be part of the CODAME Print Club

Submit Your Art

Technical Specifications

We’re looking for digital-native work, generative art, and tech-themed pieces that translate beautifully to print.

Use our Affinity template (uses Jetbrains Mono) or adhere to the following specifications:

Canvas Size
4350 × 4350 pixels
(7.25” × 7.25” at 600 DPI)

File Format
TIFF or PNG (lossless)

Color Space
Adobe RGB (1998)

Bleed
0.125” (3mm) on all sides
— included in canvas size

Trim Size
7” × 7”
(final print size after trimming)

Safety Zone
Center 6.5” × 6.5”
(for essential design elements)

Design Tip: Your artwork should fill the entire 4350×4350px canvas. The print will be trimmed to exactly 7”×7”, so extend backgrounds and patterns to the canvas edges. Keep essential design elements (text, logos, focal points) within the center 6.5”×6.5” safety zone to ensure they aren’t obscured when mounted in frames.

Timeline

CODAME 2026 ART+TECH Festival [2026] The New Human

March 6–12, 2026

Submit your artist bio and practice/project concepts to be part of the CODAME 2026 ART+TECH Festival and join The New Human Creative Hackathon from Milan, San Francisco, or Online. Works created at the festival will become the first curated candidates for Print Club subscribers to vote on.

Waitlist & Early Access

April 2026

Subscriptions open. Founding members vote on the first curated edition. Limited founding member spots available.

First Drop

May 2026

First edition prints ship worldwide. Host Kits available. Art Swap Meetups begin around the globe.

Don’t Miss the Launch

Join Subscription Waitlist | Submit Your Art

Frequently Asked Questions

Where did this idea come from?

CODAME Print Club is inspired by the culture of 12” record flats collecting—promotional cardstock prints of album artwork that became collectible art objects independent of the vinyl itself. We were also influenced by The Secret 7” charity project, which has commissioned 700 unique 7-inch record sleeves from world-famous artists and raised over £900,000 through anonymous exhibitions and auctions.

Who retains the rights to the artwork?

Artists retain full copyright to their work. CODAME receives a non-exclusive license to distribute physical and digital editions through the Print Club platform.

Why 7 inches specifically?

The 7” format taps into the established infrastructure of vinyl record collecting—from protective sleeves to display frames. It’s the “golden mean” between accessibility and collectibility. Practically, it ships for a fraction of the cost of large posters, and fits on 98% of home printers worldwide (both US Letter and ISO A4) to encourage DIY participation at swaps.

What are Art Swap meetups?

In-person events where collectors and artists gather to trade prints, similar to vinyl record swap meets. Attendees bring their prints in protective sleeves and participate in “blind swaps” or curated trades. It’s about discovery, community, and the joy of crate digging through physical art.

Can I run my own Print Club Celebration?

Yes, it's one of the best ways to become known in your local art and tech community. Host a happy hour at your office, gather people at your home, or organize something bigger in a public space. The collectors who build the most meaningful collections are often the ones who bring people together around them. Our Host Kit has everything you need to run a smooth swap.

Host Kit Supply Recommendations

Can I print my own artwork and bring it to a swap even if I’m not selected?

Absolutely, we encourage it. The more art in the room, the richer the experience for everyone. Bringing your own work is also how you start to understand what the format is really about, and what it means to be selected.

Print on card stock, use our Affinity template so your art is full bleed after cropping to 7”, and use 45 RPM-size polyethylene sleeves for protection.

Is this open to international artists and collectors?

Yes, by default. CODAME Print Club is designed for global participation and our distribution model is optimized for international shipping.

Follow the journey: @codame #CODAMEPrintClub