Geological Sentience is a collaborative mixed-reality video installation exploring human, non-human, and geological entanglements through Venice’s aquatic ecosystem. Using multiple screens and projections, the installation will create a sensory environment where disparate visual channels intermingle, reflecting the properties of collective consciousness.
The project builds on research developed during my 2022 Arts Territory residency in Venice, where I investigated meaningful connections between human and non-human agents, inspired by writers like Stanisław Lem and Astrida Neimanis. A key influence is Lem’s Solaris, where a sentient ocean manifests "Phi-creatures" drawn from human unconsciousness. Similarly, in Geological Sentience, Venice becomes a sentient entity, its bacterial life weaving between luxury boutiques and crumbling foundations, embodying tensions between capitalist spectacle and ecological fragility. The work also references Rachel Armstrong’s protocells—synthetic, photosynthetic organisms designed to stabilize Venice’s foundations—posing provocative questions about technology, nature, and symbiosis.
Materially, the installation combines original and archival footage, 3D scans and CGI elements, including a speculative bacterial creature. A layered soundscape of field recordings and archival audio will immerse audiences in Venice’s sonic textures. Through a nonlinear, embodied experience, Geological Sentience invites reflection on posthuman agency, ecological vulnerability, and new modes of coexistence. The installation will unfold as a poetic inundation of planetary incantations—(wave)written along Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos exploring his notion of hydrojustice—immersed in an aqueous sound(e)scape created and performed by Konstantinos Damianakis.
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris also resonates with Konstantinos Damianakis’ latest audio essay, How Ocean Dreams (published in Seismograf, Copenhagen, 2025), which, is an attempt to listen between the scientific and cultural cosmologies that interfere in Jol Thoms’ Radio Amnion, which like the fictional ‘Solaris station’, is physically located on a scientific laboratory embedded in the other frontier of the human world: two and a half kilometers deep in the Pacific Ocean.
First Iteration of the project will be presented a s part of COLAB ‘26 at Trinity Laban in February 2026, this will be followed by subsequent iterations Athens and Wroclaw (details TBC).
The project builds on research developed during my 2022 Arts Territory residency in Venice, where I investigated meaningful connections between human and non-human agents, inspired by writers like Stanisław Lem and Astrida Neimanis. A key influence is Lem’s Solaris, where a sentient ocean manifests "Phi-creatures" drawn from human unconsciousness. Similarly, in Geological Sentience, Venice becomes a sentient entity, its bacterial life weaving between luxury boutiques and crumbling foundations, embodying tensions between capitalist spectacle and ecological fragility. The work also references Rachel Armstrong’s protocells—synthetic, photosynthetic organisms designed to stabilize Venice’s foundations—posing provocative questions about technology, nature, and symbiosis.
Materially, the installation combines original and archival footage, 3D scans and CGI elements, including a speculative bacterial creature. A layered soundscape of field recordings and archival audio will immerse audiences in Venice’s sonic textures. Through a nonlinear, embodied experience, Geological Sentience invites reflection on posthuman agency, ecological vulnerability, and new modes of coexistence. The installation will unfold as a poetic inundation of planetary incantations—(wave)written along Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos exploring his notion of hydrojustice—immersed in an aqueous sound(e)scape created and performed by Konstantinos Damianakis.
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris also resonates with Konstantinos Damianakis’ latest audio essay, How Ocean Dreams (published in Seismograf, Copenhagen, 2025), which, is an attempt to listen between the scientific and cultural cosmologies that interfere in Jol Thoms’ Radio Amnion, which like the fictional ‘Solaris station’, is physically located on a scientific laboratory embedded in the other frontier of the human world: two and a half kilometers deep in the Pacific Ocean.
First Iteration of the project will be presented a s part of COLAB ‘26 at Trinity Laban in February 2026, this will be followed by subsequent iterations Athens and Wroclaw (details TBC).
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