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NAVET

Selected Projects: NAVET Student Festival 2026

For the third time, NAVET, in collaboration with Tekniska - The National Museum of Science and Technology, organizes a one-day festival showcasing student projects within the crossing-areas between art, technology and design.

NAVET Student Festival 2026: Dream ex Machina

Drömlandet — “The Dreamland” is an exhibition at Tekniska  about how we can dream of new futures through and with technology. Spanning 200 years, it tells the story of a development shaped by vision, openness and the belief that the future can be built — and how innovation flourishes when people from different cultures meet, exchange ideas and solve problems together.

Taking this exhibition as inspiration, NAVET has picked the theme “Dream ex Machina” for the NAVET Student Festival 2026. This theme draws on “Deus ex Machina”, a narrative device in ancient Greek theater where a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely event.

Are humanity's technological dreams only filled with efficiency, optimization, and the automation of processes, including creative ones? What new forms of society and culture can we allow ourselves to dream?

What dreams can help solve our current complex problems, unanswered questions, environmental and societal issues, and contribute to a better world at large?

Dream ex machina proposes a critical and speculative lens on humanity's current and future condition. 

Save the date: 21 October 2026.

Mark your calendar: on October 21, 2026, their work will be presented in a one-day exhibition at Tekniska, with a full program still to be announced.

Here are the selected projects for this year's NAVET Student Festival, curated together with Tekniska:
 

All Movements Are Welcome

All Movements Are Welcome is an interactive installation that invites participants to move freely within a monitored space. Through real-time body tracking, AI analysis, text generation, and voice feedback, the system continuously interprets each movement and produces reasons why it might be restricted, prohibited, or considered problematic.

Drawing on political, social, ethical, behavioral, and security-related frameworks, the work explores how bodies become categorized, regulated, and governed through systems of observation and judgment. The more a participant moves, the more the system generates interpretations, revealing the often invisible mechanisms through which bodies are read, controlled, and normalized.

Pink and green sketch of hanging cloth tied into knots

If Not This, Then…

If Not This, Then… is a participatory installation made from fabric strips with fragments of language drawn from our present. Visitors are invited to move through the space and knot strips together by hand, gradually building a dense, entangled structure that grows with every visitor. 

The work explores collective sense-making treating current narratives as material to be handled, connected, and transformed. By physically knotting these fragments together, visitors reweave inherited narratives of growth and inevitability into something unfinished, and undecided. It does not propose alternatives rather creates a space in which the question of alternatives can be felt, rather than merely thought.

Design sketches of a deconstructed piano

PianoAutomata

“What are you seeking? Ask PianoAutomata.”

We live in an age longing for answers more than ever before. Search engines, language models, recommendation systems – all of them optimized to respond and resolve the question as efficiently as possible. But when a person types a question into the dark, what are they really expecting? The same thing, perhaps, as our ancient ancestors ask a spirit, modern people ask a therapist or looking for answers from a deck of tarot cards.

PianoAutomata is a ghost piano that offers no answer, but a chance inviting participants to question, and to listen to keys that move on their own from the other side. The machine has heard you. Whether it understood you is a question perhaps only can be answered by yourself.

This work re-examines my previous exploration with PianoAutomata, a dynamic sculpture made in 2023 at China Academy of Art, into a new inquiry – in an age we can easily get an answer, what does it mean to seek? The automated piano echoes ancient human impulse to feel that something, somewhere, is listening.

Blue image with a hanging structure reflecting light on surrounding walls

Reflective Field

Reflective Field explores light as an active agent shaping perception through a suspended reflective structure. Composed of a vertical assemblage of small elements that transform through changing light and viewpoint, the work generates shifting, fragmented images that multiply and distort its surroundings. In low light, it creates constellations; in daylight, it captures fleeting reflections of bodies and space.

Never stabilizing into a single image, the installation frames perception as an active, embodied process—an ongoing negotiation between light, material, space, and the moving body.

Geophone stuck in a snowy tree trunk

Sounds of the Soil

What if the forest could talk back? Sounds of the Soil is an interactive textile installation that imagines a future where the hidden communication of trees and mycelium networks becomes perceptible to human touch. Textile panels combining photography and hand embroidery invite exploration of the surface. Through interaction with the installation, naturalistic sounds and haptic feedback are triggered, allowing visitors to become for a moment part of the forest's conversation. The installation invites curiosity, slowness, and reflection on how technology might help us listen more attentively to the non-human world.

Screenshot of code in Max/MSP with a webcam window showing a person standing

Where We Meet in Resonance

Where We Meet in Resonance is a sonic interactive installation that sonifies interpersonal proximity and movement, using sound to shape how people relate to one another.

Sound acts as a behavioral reinforcer: as participants approach each other, harmonic structures emerge, subtly guiding them toward proximity. Rather than passively reflecting interaction, the system actively mediates it.

Through sound, the installation slows participants down and draws them toward each other, where words and speeches vanish, and we become as one.

Who Is My Robot Cleaning For?

When a robot cleans your kitchen, who is it really serving? This speculative design project proposes that in our pursuit of automation and maximum efficiency, we risk becoming tools of our own tools, excluded from the loop we built, optimised for an ideal of ourselves with no bacteria, no ambivalence, no need to change. The kitchen is the setting: a room that has always encoded who we are and what we consider worth doing. Through tangible future objects, visitors confront what we lose when efficiency finally wins. An inquiry into purpose, alienation, and the politics of the mundane.