Wires, looms and code: a year of electric art

In March 2025 an electromagnetic field moved into the gallery. rör.el.ser, presented with the collective re|thread, staged a dialogue between two artworks: Being a Dove by Maria Euler and Hommage à Molnár by Roni Kaufman. Dancing magnets, colorful generative prints, 500 meters of electric wire in 90 loops, 14 images created from 544 lines of code.

Being a Dove runs 12 volts and 1 to 3 amps through that copper coil at 1 to 10 hertz. Some animals, such as the dove, can see electromagnetic fields and orient themselves by them; humans cannot. The sculpture invites you to stand close and try to feel the moving field anyway. Hommage à Molnár works the other side of the room and of the brain: a generative project in the spirit of algorithmic art pioneer Vera Molnár, written in JavaScript, where randomized parameters such as the color palette mean the code outputs a different image every run. During the exhibition we also hosted a live concert with Erik Natanael Gustafsson.

The dialogue continued in August 2025 with re:creation, subtitled Quantum forgeries and AI parodies, by Roni Kaufman and Maria Kling: old masters confronted with quantum teleportation and machine learning, originals meeting their copies and forgeries. By our own admission, the September finissage got tipsy.

In March 2026 Kaufman came back with Punchcards, connecting the binary logic of the loom with generative code by hand embroidering algorithmic patterns into tactile, colorful form. Three weeks later, Euler and re|thread closed the loop with Electrostatus: electrostatic experiments, transformators and electromagnetic fields recontextualised as art, physical phenomena and cognitive illusions probing how humans interact with the physical world, with each other and with our own brains. It even came with a dress code. Come in your finest synthetics or wools, we wrote, and be prepared to be shocking.