The scale that the eye cannot reach

There is a simple question behind almost everything MAOTIK does, and it isn’t about technology. It’s about distance. How far must one be from something to finally see it? Too close and it becomes meaningless texture. Too far and it disappears into the whole. The French artist’s work lives on this ruler, and what he calls a work is usually the moment the ruler moves.

Mathieu Le Sourd has been signing as MAOTIK since he began building immersive environments, interactive installations, digital architectural sculptures and audiovisual performances. The description sounds technical, but the effect on the body is not. Whoever enters one of his rooms steps into a place that perceives its own presence and responds to it.

A pool, and then São Paulo

The Inner Life is the work that best encapsulates this method. It is an interactive installation where the audience neither presses a button nor wears equipment: the interaction is walking. The system tracks people’s movement in the space and, every two minutes, shifts perspective, simulating the magnification levels of a microscope lens. With each shift, the visuals change, the sound changes, and the way the space responds to the visitor’s steps changes.

The idea is for the visitor to traverse microscopic scales without moving, and for multiple people to undertake this journey simultaneously, with intersecting paths. The image and the soundtrack are generated in real time, not pre‑recorded video looping. Natural sounds and subtle rhythms adapt to what is being drawn on the wall at that moment.

The work was on view at Stará Tržnica in Bratislava from June to September 2022, and at the Kunsthalle in Košice, Slovakia, from June to September 2023. The Košice venue has a particularity that interests the work: it is a former public swimming pool converted into an art centre. A space designed to hold water now holds a simulation of microscopic life, and the architecture did half the work.

How do you learn to do this

Education explains part of the outcome. MAOTIK holds a degree in Digital Media Production from the London College of Communication in London and a master’s in Digital Arts from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He then moved to the other side of the classroom and taught interactive design, generative design and augmented and virtual reality environments at CODE University in Berlin.

What he brings from this path is not a tool, but an attitude. The programs he uses are made by him, custom‑made for each work, and the drawing happens in real time. The algorithm does not deliver a finished file: it improvises within rules, and the artist adjusts those rules as the work unfolds. It is closer to conducting than to rendering.

The body of work

Before the Inner Life came the Omnis, presented at the MIRA Festival: a 360-degree projection onto a 25‑meter circular screen, generated in real time, which invites the viewer to contemplate spatial perception together with the notion of time. It is the same question of scale, posed from the outside rather than from the inside.

More recently he signed the Signal Loop, an installation currently showing in Hungary as part of the Ligeti program, and the In This World, an immersive work of light, sound and moving image that explores how constant connection reshapes perception. In 2024 he presented the Beyond Echoes, created with sound artist Nikcolk Void, in a collaboration where the soundtrack does not illustrate the image but negotiates with it.

How an installation like this is made

The empty warehouse is the starting point. Before any image exists, there is a building with its own memory, its acoustics and its flaws, and it is upon this that the work is calibrated.

Then comes the layer of light, which does not decorate the architecture: it redesigns it. The lines follow the beams, the ducts and the stairs that were already there, and the building becomes the support of the work rather than its setting.

The list of venues where these works have been shown says a lot about the artist’s movement between circuits that rarely intersect. He has been at Mutek and Sónar, music and digital art festivals, as well as Art Basel, Frieze London and FIAC Paris, which are art fairs. He has also exhibited at Ars Electronica in Linz, the British Film Institute in London, Signal Festival in Prague, the Miraikan science museum in Tokyo, B39 in Seoul, Funkhaus in Berlin, the Bienal de Veneza, Fundação Serralves, CCCB and the Philharmonie de Paris.

He has already been here

There is a detail that Brazilian audiences usually don’t know: MAOTIK has already exhibited in Brazil, at Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro. The arrival of Inner Life in São Paulo is therefore not a debut in the country. It is a return, now with the work that best synthesizes what he has been pursuing from the beginning.

It is a work that demands something rare in digital art exhibitions: that the visitor walks. Without walking there is no work. The piece only exists while someone crosses the room, and disappears when the room empties.