Projects
Syzygy
Syzygy
Syzygy is a speculative ecosystem where participants become both microorganism and world-builder, navigating the entanglement of agency, technology, and ecological consequence through interactive landscapes.
Syzygy is a speculative ecosystem—an evolving space where participants become both microorganism and world-builder, shaping landscapes through sound, touch, and movement. Here, the boundaries between self and environment blur, entangling audiences in a system that is both reactive and resistant.
Interaction unfolds across micro and macro scales, where choices ripple through shifting terrains, affecting the delicate balance of an ecosystem in flux. Using terraforming tools—both material and digital—participants allocate resources, alter environments, and negotiate the tensions which emerge from action or inaction.
At its core, Syzygy explores the entanglement of agency, technology, and ecological consequence. How do we navigate the systems we inherit—reshape them, disrupt them, or let them take their course? Through speculative storytelling and interactive design, Syzygy invites participants to experience fragility, dominance, and the indeterminate.
Experiment
£20,000
Aims of the Project
Syzygy explores how technological mediation shapes perception, bias, and engagement with complex systems. By placing participants within an evolving, interactive ecosystem, the project examines how tools—both material and digital—structure decision-making, influence agency, and shape ecological and technological relationships.
Functioning as a real-time negotiation of resources and environments, Syzygy invites audiences to terraform a speculative world, making choices that impact the growth, collapse, or transformation of responsive soundscapes, haptic sculptures, and AR layers. Through these interactions, the project interrogates how interfaces, digital augmentation, and embodied interaction alter our understanding of agency and consequence. By archiving audience interactions, the system reveals patterns in decision-making, emergent biases, and the ways technology structures our agencies choices.
Grounded in discourses on posthumanism, technofeminism, and speculative design, Syzygy work with immersive technology, participatory research, and interactive world-building, as a means to explore creative frameworks of understandings for human-machine relationships, ecological ethics, and techno-morality.
Meet the artist
Maria Sappho
Lead artist
she/her
Dr. Maria Sappho is a Nuyorican artist and researcher exploring techno-social communities, instrument-building, and AI in creative practice. Her work navigates diaspora, cultural memory, and postcolonial histories through posthuman feminist and techno-moral lenses.
As the 2025 Composer-in-Residence with the Bahué Duo (USA), her music has been commissioned, performed, and exhibited internationally at hcmf// (UK), AiiA Festival (CH), UNESCO Week of Sound, Fak’ugesi Festival (SA), and SXSW (USA).
A versatile performer, she has collaborated with the International Contemporary Ensemble, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Mogwai, and Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Huddersfield, and her work has earned the BBC Oram Award, MANE Award, and AiiA Best New Composition with AI Award.
