Butterfly: Glo-cal Effects of Data, Energy, and Industry: New Media, Performance, and Installation Art

In an era marked by the fevered pulse of digital acceleration—where energy flows and data streams coil tightly around the rhythms of daily life—Butterfly: Glo-cal Effects of Data, Energy, and Industry offers a compelling, polyphonic intervention into our technologically entangled world. Premiering at the 2025 Wasa Futures Festival, the exhibition assembles a constellation of artists and thinkers from Finland, Australia, Sweden, Latvia, Italy, Germany and the UK, whose works reverberate across disciplines, climates, and cultures. The exhibition is not simply a platform for new media art—it is a sensorial, philosophical, and affective provocation, asking what it means to feel, to think, and to live ecologically in a hyperconnected age. At its core, Butterfly grapples with the fused dynamics of digitalisation, environmental precarity, socio-cultural entanglements and industrial transformation. The selected works—ranging from interactive installations and AI-generated environments to textile-based digital hybrids and augmented performance—demonstrate that contemporary art can intervene in the intensifying ecological crisis not only as critique but as a way of knowing. The exhibition becomes a threshold between: worlds, states, the machinic and the organic. The exhibition’s title evokes the “butterfly effect”, a concept rooted in chaos theory and popularised by meteorologist Edward Lorenz to describe the nonlinear sensitivities of complex systems. A single flap of a butterfly’s wing, we are told, might shift the trajectory of a distant storm. In this context, Butterfly recodes the metaphor as both a warning and a possibility: an artistic strategy for understanding ecological fragility and a call to imagine how minor gestures—creative, ethical, technological—might precipitate large-scale change. Far from romantic, this conceptualisation foregrounds the asymmetries and extractive pressures of the glo-cal moment: where cloud computing leaves a carbon trace, and digital convenience is underwritten by geopolitical conflict, environmental degradation, and asymmetrical access to resources. These are the invisible architectures Butterfly reveals, inviting audiences to make visible the seams of the digital, to touch its heat.<p></p>