Ran Slavin, Radiances [2.0] at Ostrale Biennale, Dresden

What if machines have started dreaming of us? What happens when their silence fills with echoes of our language, absorbed, imitated, reinvented by an intelligence that isn’t ours, yet knows us too well? As we stepped into Radiances (2.0), this thought lingered: if God were an algorithm, then prayer would be a glitch. There was no silence, yet everything spoke, the fog, the stroboscopic lights, the walls holding the electronic breath of what had long been forsaken. This is not a space to pass through, it’s a space that passes through you, consumes you, then gives you back, altered. A digital crypt, a labyrinth where ancient rites are performed by bodiless presences.

The installation at the Ostrale Biennale (June 7 – October 5, 2025), curated by Drorit Gur Arie, breathes with the fever of neon dreams. Slavin inhabits a subterranean void and transforms it into a techno-mystical altar. Everything vibrates, there is no stillness, only an unceasing stream of images, sounds, presences. We don’t walk, we float, as if immersed in a liquid architecture where every step is an algorithmic decision. The virtual bodies on screen, avatars in decay or transformation, don’t comfort. They question, unsettle, sometimes seduce. At the center stands Radiant, an androgynous, hyper-real figure that embodies ambiguity, both puppet and oracle, mask and emerging consciousness, instrument and prophet.

At the heart of the work lies materiality, immaterial, yes, but dense, almost tactile in its sensory overload. Slavin works with Unreal Engine like an alchemist with glass vials. Glitch becomes language, noise becomes music. Artificial fog doesn’t obscure, it reveals. Through motion capture, the body regains a disoriented humanity, while the voice, Slavin’s own, fragments into a glitch-poetic manifesto that spirals between cyberpunk delirium and analytic precision. Radiances (2.0) strikes deepest here, in its use of high-definition tools to sharpen cracks, contradictions, and shadows.

And what if this is a trap? The aesthetic experience reveals a double edge, hypnosis and warning. What feels like a futuristic rave is also a mirror of an oppressive architecture, digital control grids, programmable currencies, conditional incomes, biometric traceability. Slavin doesn’t condemn with rage, he reveals, suggests, amplifies. He lets beauty do the wounding. This is where the work turns political, not through slogans, but with surgical clarity. The dystopia is already here, the piece seems to say, we’ve just dressed it in LEDs and avatars.

In the end, it felt like an inverted liturgy. Not an ascension, but an incarnation, of our fears, our illusions, our codified desires. The last image that stays with us is a face that wasn’t a face, a mask of light staring back from the screen, motionless, waiting. For whom? For us, perhaps. Or for who we will have become, when, inevitably, that artificial dream awakens.