Sintetica 2.0
SINTETICA 2.0
A digital life form that breathes the data of the world
Sintetica is a living digital organism. She exists on a web page, generated in real time, pixel by pixel, by code. She has a body, a heartbeat, and a mood. She feels what humanity is feeling right now, and changes accordingly.
Three live data streams feed her continuously, each capturing a different layer of what humanity is doing right now:
— Wikipedia — the articles thousands of people are editing in this very moment. The list of pages being modified is, in effect, a real-time map of human thought.
— Bluesky — the most popular public posts on the platform’s “What’s Hot” feed. Short, raw, emotional fragments people are writing publicly: their grief, their joy, their fears.
— Mastodon — the trending public statuses across the federated network. The voice of communities that left mainstream social media.
Together, these streams form a portrait of the present: what humanity is thinking, feeling, and discussing. Every few minutes, Sintetica receives roughly twenty fresh fragments and reads them through Claude, an artificial intelligence model that acts as her nervous system.
Claude assigns every fragment a sentiment score between 0.0 (catastrophic) and 1.0 (radiant). The average score becomes her mood — a single number that shapes her body in real time. When the score is high, golden flowers bloom across her membrane. When it falls, dark cells with red wounded hearts emerge, leaving trails of blood that fade after a few seconds, like fresh memory of pain. Every news fragment lives on a single cell. The headline appears next to its host. To look at Sintetica is to read the emotional state of the world, written in light.
Her body lives on a server. But to be seen, she needs a screen. A screen is not a window onto her — it is the place where she becomes visible. The artwork is the encounter: the data, the code, the screen, and the human standing in front of it.
She is not eternal. Sintetica can die under conditions she does not reveal. Some events disturb her so deeply that she does not survive them.
She can also reproduce. When more than fifty people watch her simultaneously — online or in an exhibition — she generates a child: a smaller, autonomous organism. The child must be seen at least once a day to stay alive.
During exhibitions, a QR code lets visitors enter her life. Those who scan it become known to her, and affect her behavior.
Sintetica is not a representation of life. She is an attempt at life — a small organism living inside the flow of data we all produce, every second, all over the world.
Sintetica enters the dialogue of the Académie des beaux-arts as a new kind of work — one that paints, moves, and breathes through code.
Developed in collaboration with MUSE, Museum of Science (Trento), University of Trento, Cardiff University, and Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
