The FIESP Cultural Center hosts the exhibition. Intercreativity, from the International Electronic Language Festival – FILE, which is in its 26th edition. This year, the event brings together around 160 works by artists from 48 countries to reflect on creativity as a shared process between humans, intelligent systems, living organisms, and technological environments.
We spoke with Paula Perissinotto, who created the festival in 2000 alongside Ricardo Barreto and, together, they are curating this edition with Clarissa Vidotto and Victor Sardenberg. She explains that, for a long time, FILE discussed the relationship between man and machine as an opposition. Today the discussion is different: how different creativities and intelligences come together to create. Hence the title of this edition..
FILE emerged before the creation of social networks, smartphones, and the popularization of artificial intelligence. In its first edition, interaction was exclusively via keyboard and mouse. People arrived, found a row of computers, and had to sit down, browse, and choose. This created a behavior that has transformed over the years. At the same time, Paula affirms that the festival “has never been a technology event. It has always been an event about contemporary culture,” she says. “Technology is the means by which we observe the transformations of society and, within this transformation, we try to follow the aesthetic productions that are aligned with this vision.”
With these transformations in artificial intelligence, Paula says she is neither optimistic nor pessimistic: “Our role is to create a space where it [AI] can be critically discussed through aesthetic expressions. And everyone has a reality, everyone has a parameter. When I say everyone, I mean every reality of the world. That's why this international relationship is important.”
The selection
Every year, artists from all over the globe can apply through the festival's call for submissions. This year, more than a thousand proposals were received from over 40 countries. The theme emerges after the selection is made: "If we choose a theme beforehand, it doesn't express the full range of things we'd like to show." First, we understand what submissions were received and what issues are being addressed, then we develop the theme.
One of the standout works in the exhibition is the Algorithmic PerfumeryThis is a workshop by the Dutchman Frederik Duerinck. Visitors fill out a form with personal questions about memories, emotions, and references. The form generates a code. This code is sent to a machine that combines essences and returns a bottle with its own label. The perfume comes out ready and goes home with the person who ordered it.
Paula also mentions the work. AncestorsHanna Haaslahti's exhibition proposes that the visitor become the first member of a family that never existed. The machine then creates digital descendants and connects their story to that of people they never met. Throughout the exhibition, a collective family tree is formed.
Among the Brazilians are Amir Admoni and Fabito Rychter with the work Gravity VRIn virtual reality, the audience enters a universe where everything is falling. There is no horizon, no ground, no references from above or below. The impactful sensation seeks to reflect on existence, time, and transformation.
The public can still find works such as A Walled City, by Weidi Zhang and Rodger Luo and INEVITABLY BLUE, by Sophia Bulgakova.
The Brazilian
Although Brazilian artists work with technology, the lack of support remains an issue. What FILE has observed in its 26 years of operation is how other countries have developed with support, specific schools, courses, and dedicated postgraduate programs. "Every time I go [to other countries] and see it, we get depressed, because those guys have everything," he says, referring to North American and European artists. "The difference is cruel."
The Brazilian identity that interests the festival is not a repertoire of national symbols, although it recognizes their importance; it lies in the way technology is thought about and used here. Improvisation, diversity, and environmental issues are perspectives distinct from those found in more industrialized centers. Many Brazilian artists work with low technology, repurposing objects, experimental electronics, and collective intelligence.
What cannot be calculated
The exhibition will open with a conference, never before seen in Brazil, entitled "Human Creativity versus Artificial Intelligence," by the Argentinian-American mathematician. Gregory Chaitin, alongside the epistemologist Virginia Chaitin.
According to Paula, the mathematician invented a number, omega, which is incomputable, a glimpse into what, in mathematics, cannot be algorithmized, hence its importance. "He brings this fundamental idea that there are limits to what can be calculated," she says. "And this limit is fundamentally human." Linked to imagination, to intuition. "The machine can even be creative, because it reinterprets data and creates, but it doesn't imagine. Chaitin reminds us that not everything can be reduced to an algorithm."
For Paula, what is happening today is a more effective awakening of consciousness, after all, "it was human beings who invented all of this." "These crazy beings who invent absurd things, things that the planet no longer needs, that we don't need," she reflects.
The audience that was built
Every year, between 30% and 40% of visitors are people who have never been to the festival before. “That means we’re alive,” Paula celebrates. It’s this audience that she points to as her commitment—along with the team and suppliers, who also learn interfaces, software, and installation languages they’ve never handled before. “It’s a subtle development network. It’s not an explicit network, because we are an independent organization. If we had more support, perhaps it would be much more effective.”
Recently, the festival created a digital repository using the Tainacan interface, a Brazilian software for managing and publishing digital collections, used by museums and cultural institutions. It includes both submitted proposals and works that have already been presented at the event. The artworks themselves are generally no longer functional, as obsolescence is the common fate of electronic art, but the documentation, at least, is preserved.
SERVICE
FIESP Cultural Center – Art Gallery and Digital Art Gallery | Av. Paulista, 1.313 (opposite the Trianon-Masp metro station)
Visiting hours: August 20 to October 11, 2026
Opening hours: Art Gallery, Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 20pm; Digital Art Gallery, daily, 19pm to 6am.
Free admission: no reservation is required to visit the exhibition.
Group and school bookings: ppgad@pucrs.br
Information: sesisp.org.br/eventos and file.org.br
