Program: POPs as living matter

LPM Live Performers Meeting LPM 2026 Rome
Edition XXVII October 22nd > 25th 2026 | Rome
Audio Visual Performing Artists Meeting
October, 22nd 2026, 3:00 pm | October, 26th 2026, 2:00 am
October 22 - 25, 2026
MAM — Media Art Museum, Rome Italy, Rome, Italy
POPs as living matter MAIN IMAGE

POPs as living matter

Artistic Residency

Duration: a day

Thursday, 22 October 2026 | 11:00 > 18:00 | Classroom 1
Friday, 23 October 2026 | 11:00 > 18:00 | Classroom 1

"POPs as living matter" is the residency through which SARV brings his research into real-time particle systems into the immersive space of MAM — 300 sqm surrounded by 27 projectors, Europe's largest environment dedicated to live performance. Over five days and forty hours of work, the French artist develops a visual ecosystem in which thousands of autonomous elements are born, cluster, transform, and dissolve following the breath of the music. No pre-recorded animations, no loops: living matter that exists only in the moment of performance.

The project operates at the threshold between system and organism. TouchDesigner's Particle Operators — the fundamental units of SARV's generative language — are treated not as simulation tools but as forms of artificial life, subject to physical forces reinterpreted through audio-reactive parameters: gravity, tension, attraction, and collision become variables that sound modifies in real time, transforming each frequency into a biological impulse. The result is an environment in which sonic architecture determines the conditions of existence for the particles, and the particles reveal its hidden structure — making visible what can normally only be heard.

Working in direct contact with MAM's technical infrastructure, SARV calibrates his system to the specificity of the space: the distribution of the 27 projectors, the geometry of the room, and the possibilities offered by an immersive surface of this scale become active variables in the construction of the live set. The residency is not simply a production phase, but an open research process in which the dialogue between artist, tool, and space generates solutions that could not exist anywhere else.

The work developed during the residency will converge in the program's final public Output event: an experience in which sound and image cease to be two separate languages and become a single pulsing organism, capable of transforming the space into something alive.

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