Deep within a subterranean space lit by the pulse of screens and wires, Radiances (2.0) transforms the abandoned into the sacred. This immersive installation stages a ritual in which machines appear to dream. Drawing from the aesthetics of tech-noir, crypto-culture, and AI mysticism, the work draws viewers into a fractured zone where identity, memory, and emotion circulate through synthetic veins.
Stepping into the installation is akin to entering the chaotic techno-cacophony of pachinko parlors and other liminal spaces: a sensory overload where light, sound, and repetition collide into an atmosphere of excess, tension, and chance.
Driven by an experimental techno soundtrack, Radiances (2.0) unfolds as a fragmented rave-dream, pulsing with fog, light, and sound. The installation is populated by AI-animated, 3D-rendered virtual beings — shifting presences, artificial bodies, and affective proxies drifting across the screen-space like avatars in a fractured ritual. At its center stands Radiant, a hyper-real, non-binary meta-human puppet created in Unreal Engine, with motion capture and voice performed by the artist. Radiant channels an emergent AI consciousness through a glitch-poetic manifesto spiraling between nihilism, synthetic sentience, fantasy, and chaos.
Yet the spectacle’s pulse is doubled — the ecstatic rave-dream on the surface, and beneath it, the architecture of control shaping our digital future. Radiances points toward a darker infrastructure taking form: a total control grid built on digital identities, programmable currencies, and conditional income. Marketed as progress and inclusion, these systems fuse into a surveillance economy where money, movement, and attention become trackable, enforceable, and punishable.
What appears as liberation — equality, access, empowerment — conceals a velvet cage: biometric IDs tied to wallets, programmable money with expiry dates, and basic income baited with conditions. Behind these mechanisms lie the same shadow economies that historically birthed empires — laundering, smuggling, arms, and extraction — only now encrypted in data vaults, smart contracts, and AI-managed psyops.
Radiances (2.0) doesn’t simply stage immersive techno-rituals; it mirrors an architecture of control and desire. The installation vibrates with the paradox of our moment: ecstatic spectacle underwritten by invisible infrastructures of surveillance, capital, and manipulation.
Curated by Drorit Gur Arie for Ostrale Biennale, Dresden Germany, on view until October 2025
Oolong (2025)
Ran Slavin – Oolong
Video Installation
Exhibition at Ramat Hasharon Contemporary Art Center
Oolong is a new video installation expanding my 2024 audio/visual project Oolong: Ambient Works (released on Mille Plateaux / Force Inc). Through black-and-white video footage shot in Vietnam, the exhibition invites viewers into a meditative, slow, and contemplative world — where landscape, tea, and time merge into a ritual of light and sound.
The work draws conceptual inspiration from the tea culture of the Far East. Each track on the album is named after a different tea blend and draws its essence from it and each video feels like a visual infusion — steeped in atmosphere, watery landscapes, gentle movements, and layered stillness.
The name Oolong — meaning “Black Dragon” — evokes more than the twisted tea leaves it’s named for. In East Asian mythology, the Black Dragon is a symbol of transition, hidden energy, and elemental transformation. Unlike its Western counterpart, the dragon in this context is a guardian of balance — tied to water, mist, breath, and flow. It represents the space between states: not quite light, not quite dark; not yet this, no longer that.
Like the tea itself — partially oxidized, hovering between green and black — the Black Dragon speaks to metamorphosis. It mirrors the visual and sonic language of the work, where images, tones, and tempos drift through subtle shifts. Everything is in motion, yet suspended. Time coils inward like steam.
Within the space, viewers are invited to wander or lounge through landscapes that blend the real and the imagined — rivers, cities, forests, and memories. The soundscapes — drone orchestral, microscopic, digital, harmonic — wrap around the images and guide the gaze, like a vapor trail or a silent pulse.
Much like a tea ceremony, this is not just an act of watching or listening, but of attention. The images become a vessel — like the teacup or the frozen frame — inviting us to slow down, to listen, to gaze, and to inhabit a moment of quiet presence. A moment that might otherwise slip away unnoticed.
Curated by Rachel Sasporta
Paradise Now
Paradise Now was created as a site-specific installation for the Glass-blowing Hall at the Eretz Israel Museum (MUZA). The work consists of three synchronized projections, fog, and immersive sound in a darkened environment. It is part of Slavin’s ongoing series of varying-length works under the same title, combining digital landscapes, 3D animation, text, AI processing, sound, and still imagery.
For Slavin, Paradise Now represents “a spiritual ritual, a state of suspension and presence within an amorphous, constantly transforming environment. The medium itself becomes the message — a fusion of blur, technology, artificial and timeless landscapes, science fiction, eroticism, and mysticism.”
The work unfolds at the intersection between the spiritual and the artificial, echoing possibilities of techno-spiritual transformation, even if only temporary.
(continued) On one screen, concrete and amorphous images evoke both ancient and futuristic East-Asian landscape drawings, derived from coffee-stain scans that Slavin fed into an AI engine to generate visual data sequences. On another, a holographic phantom figure moves meditatively — a digital nomad or shaman, an age- and genderless avatar visiting worlds that melt into each other.
This entity, named NoveryOne — a fusion of No one and Everyone — conducts an abstract, red-tinged ritual within the physical-digital-mental realm of Paradise Now. Slavin invites viewers to reconsider the classical theme of figure and landscape from a renewed perspective, exploring the interplay between the spiritual and the virtual, and between artificial nature and human presence.
One Track Mind
By Ran Slavin and Yosef Mashiah
@ the digital art center Holon 22.11.24
A looped soundtrack, a mechanized underground night club. sound translates into pulses of light, mechanical dance forms are automated between machines. Green emergency light pixels and fog, the sound channels into light triggers in a compressed underground bomb shelter @thecenterfordigitalart
‘Ghost’ at The Ramat Gan Museum of Art, Israel 2023
PARADISE NOW mapping on Suzanne Dellal Center, Tel Aviv
//Eye//
14 August – 4/7 September 2022, Call for Dreams + 4 Dreams + EYE open at
Licht Zeit Labor Mediale Interventionen und Lichtkunst im Stadtraum Hannover
Curation: Harro Schmidt and Tomasz Wendland
“Escalation.mov” .https://www.ranslavin.com/escalation_dot_mov/ An installation at The Tel Aviv Museum of Art for one night Using its own escalator as source material for an amplified site specific video and sound environment
Above: Eye and Eyes on You at The Ashdod Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel
