Extra/Ordinary Senses

Extra/Ordinary Senses is a multi-sensory exhibition merging speculative art, neuroscience, and emerging technologies to propose new ways of experiencing reality. Through immersive installations and interactive works, visitors are invited to step into unfamiliar sensory dimensions that unsettle conventional understandings of perception.

The exhibition brings together works inspired by quantum physics, synaesthesia, and sensory augmentation, where movement, presence, and touch translate abstract concepts into immediate, embodied experiences.

By combining scientific inquiry with sensory and poetic experimentation, Extra/Ordinary Senses opens a space of discovery. It introduces playful thresholds, speculative interfaces, and new perceptual tools. It invites audiences to question what we take for granted as “reality” and to imagine how perception might evolve beyond the familiar.

Participating Projects

Hemathurgy by Ala Leresteux and Jeremy Leresteux is an immersive VR project inspired by posthumanism research. Artists explore how technology, myth, and biology can merge to expand the boundaries of human perception. Experience takes participants on a meditative journey into the inner landscapes of their microbiome. Beginning in front of a virtual painting, viewers cross a threshold into a surreal animated world where every element is interactive. Touching a cell may trigger a sound or a story. At the centre stands a mythic figure, drawn from the canvas and pulsing with life, inviting engagement, play, and reflection.

Κùμα by Anecoica Studio is an immersive audio-visual installation where generative music and visuals unfold in real time through an adaptive neuro-biological feedback loop. Brain activity is captured and transformed into evolving soundscapes and visual environments, turning participants’ consciousness into the creative engine of the work. By integrating neurofeedback with quantum computing algorithms and generative AI art, Kùµa bridges the boundary between human experience and machine intelligence, transforming cognitive states and emotion into living audio-visual worlds.

Life Parallels by Susana Igreja is a sensory video installation based on time-lapse microscopy of human cells. The work explores invisible parallels between cellular processes and human experiences — connection, communication, and transformation. Through looping projections of cells moving, connecting, communicating, and dividing, the installation reveals hidden patterns of interdependence and renewal. By making the microscopic visible, Life Parallels invites viewers to sense the unseen and reflect on the patterns that connect us all.

Sounding Canvas by Dora Motèque and Luciano Ciamarone is an interactive artwork series that transforms abstract geometric paintings into sensory spaces where touch generates evolving soundscapes. Using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the visual elements of each canvas are analyzed and translated into a musical score, which forms the basis of the composed music. Embedded sensors detect viewer interaction and invite a tactile, multisensory dialogue between human and artwork.

Traces of a Monologue by Protey Temen is an installation working with the idea of synesthetic thinking: provisional scientific models, transposed into a spatial composition, invite the viewer to read an example of scientific explanation as sound, rhythm, and tactile gesture. Ordinary fragments of the classical learning environment are dispersed across separate planes, assembled in layered groups, and stripped of their original linear precision. The very act of observing this fragmented explanation shifts the gaze toward a calm contemplation of the object: can the loss of exact formula still allow us to sense the approach of a solution?

Unfolding Presence by Hanna Borbola is a project taking inspiration from research on emotion–colour synaesthesia, a condition in which feelings are perceived through chromatic associations. Barbola explores how colours can embody the unseen presence of others, translating emotional resonance into visual form. The work unfolds in fluid gestures and layered atmospheres, suggesting perception as a field where energy, emotion, and colour converge. By grounding painterly expression in the study of cross-sensory phenomena, the piece invites viewers to reflect on the ways emotion might exceed language and be experienced as a visual, almost tangible presence.

Visible Residues by Suha Arda Soykan and Tolga Soykan. Exploring how we perceive and interpret the body, this work transforms high-resolution cellular imagery into layered visual compositions. Blending tactile forms, ecological metaphors, and somatic memory, it creates an immersive environment where scientific and artistic languages resonate, revealing the tension between what is measurable and what is felt.