Rooted in Code

The digital dimension has become an integral part of our everyday life: it is where we work, communicate, store memories, and construct our desires. Digital technologies do not simply extend reality; they grow into it, creating a special class of entities — digital objects that exist within networks of relations, depend on conditions of storage, access, and transformation, and form complex digital ecosystems. The online exhibition "Rooted in Code" invites us to imagine nature as a fully digital space where the boundaries between the organic and the artificial blur, and technologies become an extension of nature itself.

online

Art & Science Centre of ITMO University

Synchronization

The exhibition "Synchronization" is dedicated to the study of time as a personal, scientific, and technological phenomenon. In these works, time is viewed not as a single axis, but as a multitude of rhythms that coexist and interact with each other — human, natural, biological, and mechanical. The projects presented in the exhibition address different forms of perception and measurement of time: from physical and intuitive experience to algorithmic and biological models. Each work unfolds at its own pace, forming an individual route for the viewer and offering an experience of time as a process of participation. "Synchronization" asks the question: is it possible to harmonize the perception of time between people, nature, and technology? And what happens when these rhythms coexist?

Zifergauz Gallery,
Saint-Petersburg

Resonance

The exhibition "Realism of the Unseen" is a showcase of first-year students of the ITMO Art & Science Master’s program.
The works presented in the Art & Science Center were created by young artists as part of studios: bioart, biodesign and living materials; robotic and interactive art; digital worlds. The artists were not given a specific theme, but their works were united by a common message — to reveal the hidden.
In total, the exhibition featured more than 20 projects exploring the role of artificial intelligence, corporeality, the possibility of digital immortality, ways of interspecies communication and more.

Federal Research Center for Physical Chemistry and Mathematics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Chernogolovka

When trees were analog

The exhibition “When Trees Were Analog” reflects on the search for grounding in a world where technological acceleration makes the present fragile and the future uncertain. The show brings together 20 works by young artists from the Art & Science Master’s program at ITMO University, created at the intersection of bioart, biodesign, robotic and interactive art, and digital worlds. Drawing on the aesthetics of seemingly “safe” past decades and digital forms of nostalgia, the artists explore how algorithms govern memory and rewrite the past, while searching for new ways of co-existing with the world — from diaristic video essays and miniature “dream containers” to ironic “useless” inventions.

AIR Gallery, Art & Science Centre of ITMO University

Cosmoscow 2025

At the Cosmoscow fair, Khristina Ots curated a pavilion featuring data. relic — an interactive installation by the SPLACES studio and the 7.47 creative team, originally created for a joint exhibition by Yandex and the Tretyakov Gallery. Within the pavilion, visitors could see the documentation of the process and the sculpture itself. The data. relic project explores how individual responses and emotions of viewers shape a "data imprint" of their interaction with AI.

Timiryazev Centre, Moscow

iLight Singapore

At the i Light Singapore 2025 festival, Kristina Ots curated the Saulux project — an interactive light and sound installation by SPACES.STUDIO, in which wind and the touch of spectators are transformed into a play of light and sound. i Light Singapore is a major annual festival in the Marina Bay area and neighboring districts of Singapore, bringing together artists from around the world and focusing on eco-friendly light installations and the theme of sustainability.

Fountain Plaza, South Beach, Singapore

Humans and neural networks: who creates whom?

As part of the exhibition by the New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val and Yandex, "Humans and Neural Networks: Who Creates Whom?" — a joint art project where artists and developers explore how AI is transforming our perception and forms of creativity — Kristina Ots curated the data. relic project, created by the international art and science studio SPLACES.STUDIO.
The installation was conceived as an "artifact from the future." Visitors' answers to questions about the role of humans and artificial intelligence were processed by algorithms and used to carve shapes out of a block of travertine using a large sandblasting device that mimicked the natural erosion of stone by wind, water, and time. In this way, visitors' digital traces and their collective reflections were transformed into a material "data relic" reflecting contemporary ideas about the interaction between humans and neural networks.

New Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Plantoverse. Plant optics

In its anniversary year 2025, the World of Knowledge International Science Film Festival presented its first art & science exhibition, with one of its key projects being Plantoverse 2.0 — an installation about plant optics and the way plants perceive light, curated by Khristina Ots. Based on the scientific hypothesis that epidermal leaf cells function as optical lenses, artists and scientists translated these properties into a digital environment: a modular sculpture with embedded cameras allows visitors to see themselves and the surrounding world as if the image were passing through "plant lenses," while an algorithm transforms the video stream in real time according to the optical parameters of the cells. The project addresses the problem of plant blindness, inviting viewers to recognize plants as active participants in ecosystems and to reconsider the boundaries of their relationship with nature. Its location in the Moscow Planetarium is symbolic: here, optics links the study of the universe, technology, and the artistic interpretation of the biosphere, continuing the festival’s mission to popularize science through art.

Moscow Planetarium, Moscow