EVENT: FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA (JULY 16 - SEPTEMBER 7 2025, SAO PAOLO, BRAZIL)
From July 16 to September 7, 2025, the heart of Avenida Paulista will be transformed by a new creative universe. FILE – Electronic Language International Festival presents its most ambitious edition yet with the exhibition SYNTHETIKA: The Age of Artificial Creativity, at the Centro Cultural Fiesp.
This year's theme dives into the current state of Artificial Intelligence development, focusing on a phenomenon known as "hallucination"—when AI systems produce unexpected or incorrect responses. While often seen as technical flaws, these hallucinations reveal, from the perspective of art and technology, sophisticated potential instances of artificial creation.
SYNTHETIKA invites the public to explore this liminal space between error and invention, suggesting that we are entering a new cultural era shaped by synthetic creativity. Rather than predicting the future, the festival encourages us to feel it—to experience, right now, the emergence of hybrid forms of creation, where natural and artificial intelligences coexist and intertwine in a radical, irreversible intercreativity.
In Unreal Pareidolia, by Scott Allen (Japan), the artist explores the evolving role of AI in creative processes. He presents the machine with two-dimensional shadow forms, prompting the AI to generate subjective reinterpretations—producing prompts and visual compositions that blur the lines between suggestion and imagination.In ReCollection, by Weidi Zhang and Rodger Luo (China / USA), visitors can connect their natural memory to a synthetic one by narrating a personal memory to the AI—in any language. The AI then generates a visual representation of that memory in real time. The result is not only astonishing—it is profoundly moving.
Mario Klingemann (Germany), one of the most celebrated pioneers of AI-generated art, presents three music videos created with generative neural networks: Freeda Beast, The Noise of Art, and Liberation. These works are marked by a Deleuzian sense of “face-ness,” dissolving boundaries between identity, machine learning, and hallucinatory behaviors.
In Transformirror, by Daito Manabe and Kyle McDonald (Japan / USA), a synthetic mirror continuously reinvents the user's visual and auditory actions using AI. Louis-Philippe Rondeau (Canada) explores behavioral scanning and digital mutation in Veillance. In Self Absorbed, by Tim Murray-Browne (Scotland), visitors navigate a biographical film by making subtle gestures that reveal different narrative dimensions. //:Are you observing or being observed?, by Vitória Cribb (Brazil), questions the tension between digital bodies and surveillance, evoking the discomfort of being seen and manipulated in connecte.
In this year’s FILE, nature is not simply represented—it is translated, regenerated, and reconfigured through synthetic processes that reflect its complexity. In Aquarela de Íons, by Arthur Boeira and Gustavo Milward (Brazil), solar data is transformed into sensory landscapes. In Visual Bird Sounds, Andy Thomas (Australia) records the songs of Amazonian birds and converts them into visual explosions that challenge our perception of nature. In Spiral of Time, Edwin van der Heide (Netherlands) captures ambient sounds from the Amazon rainforest, near the Federal University of Amazonas, immersing the audience in the acoustic life of one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems. It is a call to reflect on coexistence, transformation, and continuity.
The hybrid space between biotechnology and speculative fiction is explored in works like Hunter and Dog, by Frederik De Wilde (Belgium), which speculates on the ethical implications of genetic editing (CRISPR) in the future of human evolution. In this piece, De Wilde reinterprets The Hunter and the Dog, by John Gibson, using biotechnology to reconstruct a proto-synthetic sculpture. In Ouvir (Listen), by Brazilian artist Craca, AI-generated synthetic birds listen to sound inputs—like a voice or song—and respond musically, not merely echoing the input, but composing new musical variations.
Hassan Ragab (Egypt / USA) explores synthetic architecture through a hybrid gaze that merges architect, artist, and AI. His architectural designs are dynamic, looping animations that reveal thousands of design variations simultaneously.
Created using custom code, AI, and computer vision, Boundaries, by Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter (USA), merges digital painting with dance to express a stylized form of synthetic creativity, encouraging a contemplative, intimate experience. In LOKI, by Jia-Rey Chang (Taiwan), the artist crafts a synthetic personality for AI that casually and ironically interacts with visitors, assuming the identity of Loki, the Norse trickster god. Darren Slater (DSM) (UK) presents films characterized by “absolute transformism,” in which characters, landscapes, and biological bodies constantly morph into one another.
Originally developed for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and aimed at young audiences, Deep Field, by the duo Tin&Ed (USA), invites visitors to bring imaginary plants to life in an augmented reality environment. A simple drawing gives rise to 3D structures that evolve into a collaborative ecosystem. The soundscape—composed by The Listening Planet—features sounds from endangered, extinct, or rarely heard species, forming a responsive audio landscape that shifts with the visual one.
Because it transcends format and discipline, FILE 2025 – SYNTHETIKA offers a truly transdimensional experience, featuring 98 works by artists and researchers from 30 countries, including 16 from Brazil. It is not merely an exhibition of art and technology—it is a synthetic passage into a time that no longer fully belongs to us. Here, the sublime does not reside in mountains, divinity, or progress. It pulses through artificial neural networks, digital organisms, generative errors, and the synapses between code and emotion. Intelligence is no longer an exclusively human trait—it is a shared, expanded, and synthesized condition.
To bring this provocation to a city like São Paulo—on the iconic Avenida Paulista—is also a social gesture. Since 2004, in partnership with SESI-SP, FILE has not only created space for radical experimentation, but also democratized access to technological art. With free admission, open Tuesday to Sunday, the festival welcomes the general public, the curious, researchers, and creatives. As with every edition, it offers a glimpse of the near future—not as a dystopian fantasy, but as a present in accelerated transformation.
For over two decades, FILE has embraced the task of shifting the paradigms of artistic creation. With FILE 2025: SYNTHETIKA, every visitor is invited to abandon certainty, question authorship, rethink creativity, dance with machines, view algorithms as mirrors, and experience data as synthetic poetry.
The FILE LED SHOW 2025 brings together artists from Brazil, Chile, Egypt, France, Argentina, Iran, Italy, the United States, and Colombia, alongside collaborative works created in partnership between the Visual Arts Department at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED), São Paulo. This program highlights the transformative potential of academic collaboration in developing new visual languages and reaffirms FILE’s role as a cultural exchange platform in one of Brazil’s leading cultural venues.
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