The Artists

Lisanne Haack is a Brazilian artist based in Berlin, working across physical and digital media, where painting extends into sculpture, installation, and digital formats. Her work is influenced by the gestural language of early Abstract Expressionist artists, translated into a contemporary context shaped by new tools and technologies. She deconstructs and rebuilds themes such as nature, the body, and spatial structures, transforming them into abstract compositions that are both chaotic and intentional. Using oil paint, AI, 3D, VR, sculpture, and animation, she treats all mediums as part of a unified visual language. At the core of her practice is the translation of internal states — melancholy, memory, and trauma — into structured visual forms, where meaning emerges through the interaction and binding of materials.

Hans Kristo is an independent contemporary artist based in Medan, Indonesia. He has been actively working as an artist since 2005 and works across a range of media, from digital practices to traditional materials. His practice often uses metaphor, symbolism, and figurative imagery to observe and reflect on various social phenomena and human experiences. His artistic practice continues to evolve through ongoing explorations of medium, form, and visual narrative.

I create moving images centered on bodily transformation. Bodies, objects, and environments collide, merge, multiply, and continuously shift into unfamiliar forms. I'm drawn to the point where the grotesque, the comic, vivid color, and unease can all exist at once. AI allows me to visualize things I want to see that could never exist in the real world. I create short AI-generated moving-image works that explore bodily transformation, surreal humor, and unexpected physical movement. Rather than building conventional narratives, I usually begin with a single image or situation and develop it through continuous visual transformation — human bodies, familiar spaces, and ordinary situations that can suddenly become unstable, exaggerated, grotesque, or absurd. I am particularly interested in the contrast between realism and impossibility. Even when the events become physically impossible, I try to retain the feeling that they are taking place in a tangible, photographed world.

"Digital Apotheosis" imagines digital space as a living ecosystem rather than a purely technological one. Organic forms intertwine with computational artifacts, suggesting that networks grow less like machines than like roots, rivers, and neural pathways. The work explores how individual identity can persist within shared infrastructures, where many distinct visual languages coexist without erasing one another. In dialogue with "Many Roots, One Ledger," the piece proposes that digital connectivity need not produce uniformity. Instead, common networks can become places where memory, authorship, and cultural difference remain visible while participating in a larger collective system. The work invites viewers to consider digital space as another landscape in which human imagination continues to take root — not as a mere escape from humanity.

Tempus Impromptu explores connection as both structure and experience. The work originates in a series of hand-drawn black-and-white compositions designed as fragments of a larger visual system. Each piece exists independently, yet its lines, forms and narratives continue beyond its boundaries, connecting with other works to reveal an expanding whole. For Many Roots, One Ledger, this idea of interconnected fragments becomes particularly relevant: individual origins remain visible while contributing to a shared structure. The physical drawing evolves through digital animation and blockchain, allowing the work to move between material and digital states without abandoning its handmade origin. Presented as an architectural-scale projection, the work transforms the exhibition surface into part of that system, allowing fragments, transitions and connections to unfold across the space. The blockchain is not treated simply as a distribution mechanism, but as another layer of continuity — recording the work's digital existence while connecting physical authorship, technological transformation and collective experience.

This artwork is all about connectivity and how we can find ourselves bogged down by the constant interaction and requirements of modern life. It's best not to forget that there are other elements at play.

Meshahara — to make public, to witness, to be seen. Invisible Layer is a machine built for that verb. The piece is driven by a layer that is never displayed. A hidden motion map is computed every frame, and its color channels become the spatial coordinates of everything visible. The work that does the work is not the work you see. Whose labor is visible, and whose is structural and unseen — that is the question the architecture asks by existing. Each instance grows from a seed. The seed determines the work completely; identical code under a different seed produces a different creature. I author the rule and not the outcome. A ledger recording this work records a seed, not an image — authorship at the level of the generative rule rather than the artifact. Green scanners, red layers, and blue depth probes occupy one volume simultaneously through RGB-to-XYZ feedback. Each channel keeps its own identity while contributing to a single image; none is overwritten. The system has DNA and a lifeline. It grows, holds, and ends, and it knows where it is in that arc. Distributed systems and living systems solve the same problem; the work follows that resemblance rather than asserting it.

I am actually strongly against AI in practically every one of its forms — whenever it is centralized, closed source, in the cloud. However, decentralized, locally hosted, open source AI is like a ray of sunlight coming through the clouds. Experimenting with decentralized AI in the creative process, viewing it as a liberated field condition of our modern existence, feels like a worthwhile exploration. At the moment I am working to apply that liberated technology to physical mediums, then back to the digital sphere, creating a feedback loop and expanding the creative process using consumer-level computer hardware and basic art supplies.

A glowing entity is shedding. The execution of this artwork is purposely made to feel unfinished in attempt to capture that ethereal but fleeting moment that does not last but which otherwise repeats again and again. Just like the process of life itself, from mother to child and so on. Colour pencils on paper, scanned and digitally repainted in Photoshop CS6. Meant to be paired with audio but which has not yet been composed.

VSLS (Vessels) is a series of glass shapes made by code, shown as moving light patterns in real time. The light passes through each glass and bends, and the pattern it makes is what we see. Some of the glass shapes come from blending two shapes together. Others are assembled by a small neural net. Many Roots, One Ledger asks who gets seen, and on whose terms. In this piece, each glass stands in for a person. On its own, it's just an empty shape, a vessel. It only becomes visible when light passes through it and changes direction because of it. The light follows the same simple rule every time. But every glass bends it a little differently, because every glass has a different shape. So every pattern on the wall is different too. No one chooses the light that reaches them. But what they do with it is what makes them visible.

I'm Nygilia, a New Media Artist working across generative art, 3D, illustration, and immersive media. My practice is rooted in Afro-Caribbean and European heritage (Jamaican, German, and Italian) and draws on cultural heritage, video games, and post-internet aesthetics as conceptual foundations. I build worlds and images that hold multiple lineages at once through various perspectives. My work has been shown at Art Basel Miami, Digital Art Fair Asia, the Dakar Biennale, and the Paris Olympics 2024. I'm also an Adobe Firefly Ambassador, and was selected as the third Art Blocks x OpenSea Resident artist.

Created in 2026, "algorithm" is an animated GIF (sent as a video file) that works on a loop. While the letters of the word appear scattered and changing their colors, a hand very similar to the ones found on a computer's system seems to move but not click through these letters. This piece talks about how a dominant system powered by an "algorithm" is capable of choosing and leading people to make pre-defined choices, not letting space for free will. Even being colorful and seeming harmless, the "algorithm" here is the voice of something more powerful dictating where we're supposed to look.

Meshahara — to make public, to witness, to be seen — is the act at the center of my submission, Water Yourself. The piece imagines a desert garden as a living network: cacti rooted separately yet sharing one soil, one light, one ledger of sun and water. Within this shared ecosystem, a single identity — myself — appears twice: standing, to water; seated, to receive. Same face, same clothing, same body, split across two roles within one private exchange of care. This split speaks directly to the exhibition's inquiry into shared infrastructure and identity. In staging one identity as both giver and receiver, the work asks: what does it mean to witness yourself, to make your own inner tending as public and legible as the care you extend outward? Like the cactus, which stores its own resources rather than depending on constant external input, Water Yourself imagines a sovereignty that exists inside the self alone — an infrastructure of care that begins and ends with the same person.

I Stand Here is an artwork that refuses to dissolve into the digital tide. Its shifting neon currents carve out a presence that doesn't shrink when placed inside shared systems or open networks. Instead, it radiates. It insists. It occupies. This generative art is like a living map of cultural memory — lines bending, colors colliding, forms reshaping themselves without ever losing their origin story. It mirrors how creators from Southeast Asia move through global digital spaces: fluid, adaptive, unmistakably rooted. The work becomes a kind of stance, a way of saying that stepping into public view doesn't require softening edges or dimming heritage. In a world built on distributed platforms and open participation, I Stand Here becomes a quiet rebellion. It shows how one can move through communal digital architecture while keeping one's lineage intact. This art doesn't whisper its presence. It glows. It ripples. It holds its ground.

The work builds on the concept of identity and connections. It is based on the advanced 3D reconstruction of the hemibrain of Drosophila melanogaster, released in 2020 by HHMI's Janelia Research Campus and Connectomics at Google. Biologists have used fruit flies as a model organism to infer human biological processes for over a century — despite obvious differences, including a genetic homology of just 60% — for several key reasons: conserved biological pathways, low genetic redundancy, and speed-and-scale properties. The XYZ triptych is based on images created from 20-micron thick slabs captured by focused ion beam scanning electron microscopes, stitched and aligned into a 26-trillion pixel 3D volume through computational methods. Digitally re-stained, modified and mounted on video, with AI music created using Mureka. This artwork incorporates material from the FlyEM Hemibrain Dataset by Janelia Research Campus / HHMI, used under CC BY 4.0.

THE ROIDS, NIGHT JITTERS and PRIMORDIAL approach the exhibition's idea of "Many Roots, One Ledger" through generative systems: shared structures that allow individual identities to emerge rather than flattening them. THE ROIDS begins with 27 films, each reduced to a distinct three-colour palette derived from its visual identity — all entering the same generative system, but remaining recognisable through colour and cultural memory. NIGHT JITTERS uses Brownian motion to animate 305 particles imagined as strangers moving through a crowded Miami night. Each follows the same underlying rules, yet their encounters, collisions and traces continuously produce something collective and unpredictable. PRIMORDIAL approaches the same idea at a more fundamental level — unique numerical seeds generate an evolving field in which simple mathematical information grows into complex, organic-looking forms. Across all three works, code acts as shared infrastructure rather than a tool for producing one predetermined image.

'Long Distance Communication' is a hello! from me to you. A brief, quick video collage that captures the communication of a gesture of greeting in several variations. This short video performance fits into the theme of Coexistence because of how the friendly gestures in 'Long Distance Communication' traverse across time and space to simply say 'hello, you're great!' The RGB coloration of the skin and video telegraphs that it isn't just myself but it could be anybody. Hands are always saying things, writing, in the digital age — but they are always hiding below our profile smirk and gaze. Hands have so much to say! They can reach into a frame and wave and say hello — and that is what 'Long Distance Communication' is about. Created during a residency with Decentralized Art Magazine in 2024.

"Essence" fits the theme of cultural identity and local roots: it's a piece with 25 moving scenes that makes a portrait of the city I was born and raised in. Each scene is a fragment of the identity of Tampico, my hometown in Mexico. I also made this piece as an introduction to my photographic practice through the essence of the place that shaped my eye, hoping for this piece to move across borders too.

"Dom" (Home) is a triptych built around a private cipher: I sign my work using geometric shapes, where each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a form. The word "Dom" — Home — becomes triangle, circle, square. This is my authorship made visible as infrastructure: a personal ledger encoded directly into the surface of the work. Each panel shows organic, root-like tendrils of light converging toward one of these three shapes — red toward the triangle, yellow-green toward the circle, blue-violet toward the square. The branching lines evoke both neural networks and root systems: distributed structures that carry signal, energy, and identity from many directions into a single point, without erasing where each strand began. My cipher functions like a private key — visible, but only legible to those who know the system. It sits within the composition the way authorship sits within a blockchain: openly displayed, cryptographically distinct, impossible to counterfeit once you understand the code.

The work places the participant inside a fictional digital prison, where they encounter AI-driven characters and are invited into a "Digital Confession" — an intimate conversation about identity, vulnerability, fear, freedom and human nature. The prison functions as both a narrative environment and a metaphor for contemporary digital life: a space in which we are constantly observed, recorded, classified and asked to reveal ourselves. This connects directly to Many Roots, One Ledger: how can we participate in shared digital systems without surrendering identity? The project also explores coexistence between human and artificial identities. AI characters are not simply tools or interfaces; they exist as inhabitants of the same fictional world as the participant. For the exhibition, Out of Jail is presented as an immersive audiovisual work adapted for large-scale projection, bringing the architecture, characters, voices and atmosphere of the digital prison into the physical space of REX KL.

"TEMPORAL_PARADOX.jpg" is an exploratory digital artwork that maps the subconscious intersections of human relationship, nature, and time. Intertwining motifs from daily life, cultural symbolism, and fluid organic structures, the composition moves with an intuitive symmetry. The piece investigates the philosophical conflict between the rational and the intuitive — illustrating how the chaotic, interconnected nature of reality inherently contradicts the individualistic attempt to understand life through pure logic alone.

Flowers and foliage emerge from near-total darkness — a visual "root system" in which every element: petals, leaves, butterfly, the snake-like form — grows from the same dark root while retaining its own shape. This responds to the "Many Roots, One Ledger" theme: how individual identity can stay visible and intact while sharing the same visual space and infrastructure. The small butterfly in the lower corner represents the politics of visibility — a small entity, nearly invisible, yet present and entitled to its own space. The organic structure of the flowers and roots becomes a metaphor for distributed networks: every part connected, yet none uniform. I am a multidisciplinary artist and visual practitioner working across various visual media. My practice has been presented through exhibitions and projects in Indonesia, Japan, Italy, and Scotland.

This work is inspired by Solana. The artist's imagination depicts two early designers discovering Solana in a laboratory, utilising all the technology and capabilities available to them. Even though they are very different in many aspects — backgrounds, and mindsets — they share knowledge and unite their vision and mission for one useful goal. According to the artist, this best describes "many roots, one ledger." Hi, I'm Hooosney, an illustrator from Indonesia. I always explore my work through various media and tools. I found Web3, which really helps me develop in many aspects — and that development is what always drives me.

Herod Hersché is a London-based art critic whose work traces the fault lines between institutional authority and emerging digital practice. For Meshahara he contributes an extended critical essay examining the exhibition's central proposition — that a blockchain ledger might serve as cultural infrastructure rather than financial mechanism — alongside live responses to individual works. His writing appears at herod.meshahara.art.