Nxt Museum in Amsterdam is presenting Life in a Different Resolution, a solo exhibition by post-digital art collective Random International, on view until 12 January 2025. Curated by Bogomir Doringer, the show surveys nearly twenty years of the studio’s work—charting how their installations have continually redefined interactivity in the context of evolving digital and physical systems.
Founded in London in 2005 by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, Random International has built a reputation for immersive, technologically driven environments that probe the shifting relationship between human and machine. The studio works with a multidisciplinary team of designers, programmers, researchers, and dramaturgs to create experiences that are as much about perception and behavior as they are about technology.
Key Works in the Exhibition
Presence and Erasure detects visitors’ faces and briefly prints them onto a reactive photochromic surface, opening a conversation about visibility, data capture, and the fleeting nature of digital traces.
Our Future Selves uses a three-dimensional point-cloud mirror to re-render the viewer’s silhouette in light, prompting reflection on how digital systems reframe identity.
Swarm Study XIII transforms visitor movement into flocking behavior simulations, drawing parallels between emergent patterns in nature and the algorithmic systems that record and interpret human presence.
Living Room merges light, fog, and a soundscape composed by Signe Lykke into a mutable, presence-responsive environment, shifting in real time according to visitor interaction.
Life In Our Minds: Motherflock / II, a newly commissioned work, presents a blockchain-animated “bird-oid” digital sculpture that responds to audience movement while evolving in the virtual sphere.
Co-Authoring Meaning with Machines
Through its breadth, Life in a Different Resolution demonstrates how interactive art can function as a collaborative process between human and machine. The works do not present technology as a neutral tool, but as a co-author in shaping spatial experience, emotional response, and cultural meaning. This perspective resists both techno-utopianism and dystopian determinism, instead foregrounding the nuanced, negotiated space where organic and algorithmic intelligences meet.
For designers, artists, and technologists, the exhibition offers a living archive of approaches to coded interactivity—spanning mechanical choreography, responsive light, algorithmic ecosystems, and data-driven portraiture. It points to a practice where meaning is not imposed but emerges through interaction, iteration, and shared agency.
