Marylou Sharrock. Maison (Home), 2024–ongoing. In collaboration with Latvian ornithologists, data on Latvian birds will be used to create sound compositions that visitors will be able to interact with by changing the frequencies of the birds' songs. Photo: Zoé Thiburs

This year, the Resonances of Nature project is launched – a collaboration project by RIXC, Goethe Institut in Riga and the French Institute in Latvia. As part of the project, artists from Latvia, France and Germany will create new artworks aiming to make the fragility of our environment and natural surroundings tangible through multisensory offerings, particularly from the field of digital visual arts and sound art, and thus create a new approach to the issues of climate protection and sustainability for visitors. The project will promote cultural exchanges between Latvia, France and Germany, strengthening collaboration between artists and organisations in these countries, revealing different approaches to interdisciplinary climate change issues in art.

The project brings together artists from 3 countries who will collaborate in residencies and workshops, resulting in individual artworks. RIXC will give artists the opportunity to develop and exhibit artworks on the extended reality platform SensUs sensusart.rixc.org. Latvian artists Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits will use artificial intelligence (machine learning) algorithms to visualise the evolutionary processes of flowering plants in extended reality - how they are affected by rapid climate change. The new artwork “AI herbarium” will be a continuation of “Solarceptors” (2025), a new series of immersive artworks based on artistic research on flowers and plant intelligence, visualising the invisible processes in nature, how light affects the growth and flowering of plants.  In the sound installation “Maison” (Home) by the French artist Marylou Sharrock, a variety of frequencies and electronic sounds will reproduce Latvian bird songs, with which visitors will be able to interact by changing the frequencies of the bird songs.  German artist Adnan Softić will collaborate with Latvian sound artists from Riga and Liepaja, engaging them in a joint sound composition and performance “Klimaton – listening to the disappearing landscape”, using the artist's own “climate data” instrument, which uses data from the Arctic as sound sources.

The project will include art production and residencies, during which French and German artists will seek collaborations with local artists and ornithologists to create new, innovative and internationally collaborative works. The results of the project will be presented at the RIXC Art Science Festival Symposium, which this year will take place from October 16–18, 2025 in Riga, Latvia. The festival will include a 3-day symposium at the Art Academy of Latvia, featuring a performance with German artist Adnan Softić and Latvian sound artists, which will continue with the Klimaton workshop, sonifying data and discussing with the young artists about nature, climate change and sustainability.

Latvian artists Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits will participate in the evening programme of the symposium with a lecture on ‘Solarceptors’ - scientific and artistic research in extended reality and a demonstration - premiere of the new artificial intelligence artwork “AI herbarium”, created within this project.
The symposium will include the opening of the immersive sound installation “Maison” by the French artist Marylou Sharrock, which will be a one-day exhibition with a special programme, guided tours and talks with the artist. The artwork will then be exhibited at the French Institute in Latvia.

Adnan Softić. Klimaton – listening to the disappearing landscape, 2020–ongoing.

 
Adnan Softić. Klimaton – listening to the disappearing landscape, 2020–ongoing. "The KLIMATON ARCTIC≈2020 climate data instrument will be used to create sound compositions and performances together with Latvian artists.

In the RIXC residency, which takes place in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut in Riga, artist Adnan Softič will create a new sound composition and collaboration with Latvian artists, resulting in a performance that will take place in the RIXC Art and Science Festival 2025 symposium. 

In the performance “Klimaton – listening to the disappearing landscape”, the Arctic landscape appears as an autonomous voice that can be addressed and played back by the climate data instrument KLIMATON ARCTIC≈2020. In a performance with Latvian sound artists from Riga and Liepaja, who will create a unique symbiosis of sound, words and visual art, the artist will address climate change and today's pressing ecological issues.

The sound object KLIMATON ARCTIC≈ 2020 is based on a seminal event in scientific research: At the end of 2020, the research expedition MOSAiC (Alfred Wegener Institute) returned from its Arctic voyage, having spent more than a year collecting data with a kilometre-long network of measuring stations. It is the largest scientific data collection from the region ever and possibly also one of the last large-scale recording of a disappearing landscape that is considered by scientists to be "the key witness of climate change".

Together with a group of MOSAiC scientists, the composer Thies Mynther and a great technical team, the artist has developed a sound instrument that outputs the data from the Arctic as sound - creating a large scale sonified portrait of a disappearing landscape. The instrument is a hybrid between a sonification device and a music instrument - allowing an open approach to the data.

The data of different categories of landscape are played using human voices as the keynote, modulating them and creating a strange choral voice. The earth assimilates the human voice and makes it "speak the language of the earth" - a "geological turn", a reversed network of relationships in which the landscape is playing the human and not the other way round.

Adnan Softić. Klimaton – listening to the disappearing landscape, 2020–ongoing. "The KLIMATON ARCTIC≈2020 climate data instrument will be used to create sound compositions and performances together with Latvian artists. 

Adnan Softic (Germany) is a digital artist whose work blurs the boundaries between digital worlds and the physical environment. His work addresses the invisibility and communicative aspects of nature and offers a poetic and philosophical exploration of ecological issues. By utilising scientific data from polar research, his work makes it possible to experience climate-related changes in a world of sound.
https://softic.info/

Marylou Sharrock. Maison (Home), 2024–ongoing.

Marylou Sharrock. Maison (Home), 2024–ongoing. In collaboration with Latvian ornithologists, data on Latvian birds will be used to create sound compositions that visitors will be able to interact with by changing the frequencies of the birds' songs. Photo: Zoé Thiburs

During her residency at the French Institute in Latvia, the artist will create an art installation in collaboration with Latvian ornithologists. The installation will reveal how birds inhabit the world through their songs and how important it is for them to exist and interact in this fragile acoustic space.

The installation explores how birds inhabit the world through their songs and how vital it is for them to exist and interact within this fragile acoustic space.

Through the study of the sounds of the Misery marshes in Essonne (a sensitive natural area), the artist brings together a diversity of frequencies and electronic sound patterns that reproduce the songs of species found in the marshes: sedge warblers, tits, treecreepers, cisticolas, and more.

Oscillators, sequencers, filters… Every circuit in the installation is hand-soldered, allowing the audience to manipulate bird frequencies using various buttons and potentiometers. She has chosen to use obsolete yet repairable technologies, favoring analog electronic circuits over standardized digital devices. This approach ensures technical longevity while reflecting the fragility of the soundscapes she strives to preserve. Like the declining bird songs, these technologies carry the memory of a changing world, where repairing becomes an act of resistance against the erasure of life.

Maison studies the resemblance between electrical ecosystems and nature’s orchestras, as well as the similarities in their operational logic. The work also highlights an apparent paradox: considering technological tools – often responsible for the destruction of life – as potential means of regenerating a vanishing nature. The immersion within a house of artificial birds – creatures that barely exist in the real world – evokes a strong sense of melancholy and casts a distinctly dystopian shade over our present. At the same time, this experience reinforces the need to create poetic and sensitive refuges in a collapsing world.

Maison is an adaptable piece: she works in partnership with the League for the Protection of Birds to align the sound compositions with the nesting species specific to the regions hosting her work.

Marylou Sharrock (France) is an artist who works with electronic sound art. Her search for understanding the systems of nature takes place within the context of the disappearance of its sensory world. She finds in the electronic medium an enchanting power – one that stimulates each of our senses in an intensified way and guides us toward finer perceptions and interactions. Using technology as a primary intermediary in the service of studying biodiversity, her work aims to highlight the similarities between broken ecosystems and electronic interfaces, making it possible to artificially reconstruct and reactivate nature’s networks.
https://marylousharrock.com/

Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits (Latvia). “Solarceptors” and “AI Herbarium” (2025–ongoing)

Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. “AI Herbarium”, AI artwork in the Solarceptors series, 2025-ongoing. Training AI models: Jurģis Peters. (Sketches from experiments).

The first version of the Solarceptors artwork (2025-ongoing) by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits is currently on view at the Unter Pflanzen / Among Plants exhibition at the Sinclair-Haus Museum in Germany. Solarceptors is a research project that combines scientific perception and artistic imagination to visualise how flowering plants perceive and react to light. The immersive artwork reveals how flowering plants interact with light not only through photosynthesis, but also as part of a wider ecological and atmospheric system. Using 3D scans of lupins grown by the artists at different stages of development and environmental data from a previous experiment carried out by the artists at the Swiss Institute for Organic Agriculture (FiBL), the artwork will reveal that flowers are more than reproductive organs; they are sensitive light receptors that connect plants to their surroundings in time and space. The artwork reveals the unique spatial and temporal dimension of plants by proposing that flowers act as "solarceptors" - metaphorical "eyes" that follow the sun and synchronise the plant's circadian rhythms with the planet's cycles.

As part of the Resonances of Natures project, Solarceptors will be developed in a new direction, using artificial intelligence to create speculative visualisations (a series of animated images) about the impact of climate change on the evolution of flowering plants in the past and in the future.

The new artwork is part of the artists' exploration of plant intelligence, tracing the origin and evolution of flowering plants - what Charles Darwin (1879) once called an "abominable mystery", unable to explain either the rapid emergence of flowers or their explosive evolution - why so many different species, colours and shapes of flowering plants emerged at once, in a very short period of time.

Artificial intelligence (machine learning algorithms) will be trained to show the diversity of natural evolution and the diversity of flowers. The artists' vision will take viewers on a journey that begins 100 million years ago, when flowers began to multiply rapidly in an astonishing variety of shapes and colours, marking their own 'green big bang' evolution of life. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence will be used to generate images of 100 herbarium plants, visualising the explosive proliferation of lupins in the Andean highlands, which solve Darwin's mystery by showing that evolution can proceed much faster than previously thought.

The first part of the research, the Solarceptors extended reality installation has been developed as part of the Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant project of the Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW, funded by Swiss National Foundation

Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. “AI Herbarium”, AI artwork in the Solarceptors series, 2025-ongoing. Training AI models: Jurģis Peters. (Sketches from experiments).

Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are artists, founders of RIXC Center for New Media Culture (Riga), curators of RIXC Art Science Festival and editors-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal and book series Acoustic Space. Rasa is a professor at RTU Liepaja Academy, New Media Art Programme, Raitis is a professor at the Art Academy of Latvia, Visual Communication Department. From 2018-2021, they were lecturers at MIT Boston, and have lectured in Germany, Switzerland, USA, Canada and elsewhere.  Together as an artist duo, they create visionary and exploratory digital artworks and immersive experiences, collaborating with scientists to address environmental and climate issues and using data visualisation, extended reality and artificial intelligence technologies.

Their immersive artworks have been nominated twice for the Purvītis Prize 2019 (Microworld Oscillations, Purva Radio, 2018) and the Purvītis Prize 2021 (Atmospheric Forest, VR, 2020), as well as nominated for - International Public Arts Award - Eurasian region 2021, awarded (Ars Electronica 1998, Falling Walls - Science Breakthrough 2021) and shown widely, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Latvian National Museum of Art, the House of Electronic Art in Basel, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz and other venues, exhibitions and festivals in Europe, USA, Canada and Asia.
https://smitesmits.com/