The Power Plant and the Archive

The detail worth sitting with is diplomatic, not technical: a festival stage that hosts dozens of acts needs a video system that protects the stage's own character while giving every visiting artist a full-resolution home. Observatory's answer — one persistent canvas, mapped once, with guest content routed inside it — ran the full four days at Rothbury without a technical support call. Servers were supplied by Screenworks across three stages.

Saraceno's exhibitions arrive with unusual co-authors, and this one — open through 7 February 2027 — is co-commissioned with the eleven Indigenous communities of Red Atacama, Las Salinas Grandes, in northern Argentina. Curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer and Andrea Lissoni, it threads the Aerocene and Arachnophilia projects around a centerpiece environment, Towards the Sanctuary of Water (2026). One gallery, through mid-September, is open to visitors' dogs.

The decommissioned Inota thermal power plant, an hour from Budapest, opens its 6,000-square-metre turbine hall, heating room, and sixty-metre cooling towers to twenty light installations this August. The lineup runs from 1024 Architecture's Scanline to Maotik, Encor Studio, and Lukas Truniger & Bruce Yoder's Implausible Rainbows. The exhibition runs 13–24 August; the festival of sound and vision proper follows 27–30 August. Industrial architecture at this scale is the rarest kind of venue — most of it gets demolished before anyone thinks to light it.

Four years on view, and eleven days left. Dia Beacon's Larry Bell presentation — organized by curator Alexis Lowry with Zuna Maza — sets his small coated-glass cubes of the 1960s beside Standing Walls I (1968/2017) and Duo Nesting Boxes (2021), a diptych of layered green and blue glass conceived for Dia's daylight galleries. Bell's material is technically just glass and coating; what it does to light in that building is the argument for going in person.

For its twentieth anniversary, Santiago's Centro Cultural La Moneda handed its exhibition archive to an interactive system: visitors type a single word, and an AI maps it across two decades of exhibition photography, projecting real-time visual and sound landscapes that never repeat. Artistic direction is by Sergio Mora-Díaz, with production by 500 Nanómetros and technological development by Sinestesia. A five-screen mediation space shows how the pipeline works. Free entry, through 1 November.

Two Eno projects close in Parma on 2 August. SEED, made with writer Ece Temelkuran, is a generative sound installation seeded through the 8,000-square-metre gardens of the San Paolo monastery complex; a field recording will be pressed to a single vinyl copy for the city's Casa del Suono. Across the river, My Light Years fills the Crociera of the Ospedale Vecchio with the largest European survey of his light and video work, from 77 Million Paintings to Face to Face.