Water Organoids

Water Organoids is a performance that uses a macroscope to film and project live an invisible reality: that of self-organized aqueous structures. 

Presented by the collective Shapes of Emergence (Baudouin Saintyves, Séverine Atis, Otto Briner, Ben Kinsinger & Roiel Benitez), with the support of composer and orchestrator Andrew Petrak, the performance questions our perception of the most familiar and vital material on Earth — water — while highlighting how overlooked it is within unsustainable development dynamics. 

In physics, the concept of memory refers to the sensitivity of a system’s state to its history — in other words, to the sequence of events it has undergone in the past. Evolution constitutes a form of memory at the scale of ecosystems, allowing new generations of living systems to “remember” characteristics of previous generations in order to adapt. 

Live visual physics experiments are carried out alongside improvising musicians, like a puppet show bringing an emerging primitive form to life. Moving patterns arise from fluids and grains manipulated before the audience’s eyes, then projected on a large scale. 

In this process, the emergence of artistic and natural forms becomes inseparable, and each performance is unique: rather than controlling every step of creation, actions are chosen in response to ongoing natural processes. 

The film version will be a fulldome projection of the performance. 

Exploring sonic worlds strongly influenced by jazz and Chicago’s experimental music scenes, Water Organoids had its world premiere — and received an award — at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Paris in May 2023, before being presented at several international events such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Ars Electronica, the Current New Media Festival, and Nuit des Idées (Villa Albertine). 

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This project benefited from the artwork creation program at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) 
 

Shapes Of Emergence (Baudoin Saintyves, Séverine Atis, Otto Briner, Ben Kinsinger & Roiel Benitez) 

Shapes of Emergence is a live cinema collective that explores the intersection of experimental science, music, and film. Founded by artist, physicist, and roboticist Baudouin Saintyves, the project grew out of projections of form-based experiments conducted alongside his scientific research at MIT. It later moved to the University of Chicago, where physicist Séverine Atis joined the adventure to develop the first choreographies and imagine new experimental approaches.They were then joined by musicians Otto Briner, Ben Kinsinger, and Roiel Benitez to refine their stage language and develop a new performance: Water Organoids. As a nod to the work of scientists in the laboratory, the inherent variability of the physical experiments they “perform” on stage becomes a central element of the show, fostering a symbiotic approach to sound and image rooted in improvisation and “discovery.”