Water Organoids Performance by Baudouin Saintyves

Join us for a performance and reception to celebrate the opening of This is a Rehearsal – the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial!

Water Organoids is a performance that uses an “immersive microscope” to film and project an invisible reality of self-organizing water structures. Emerging artistic and natural forms are indiscernible in experiments executed in front of the audience using pipettes, syringes, tweezers, and motors. This performance will be accompanied by the music of Ben Kinsinger.

Baudouin Saintyves is a French artist, physicist and engineer. He studied at the University of Chicago. He is interested in how patterns self-organize in nature and how humans interact with these phenomena. In his performances, Baudouin explores an artistic process that highlights a link between the emergence of natural and creative forms. In this perspective, he develops immersive audiovisual narratives, with real-time projections of physics experiments, as well as robotic installations. In his scientific research, through fluid mechanics, statistical physics, robotics and mechanics, he develops new self-organizing systems at the crossroads of materials, autonomous robots and modular assemblies. He obtained a PhD in physics at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and carried out post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He was awarded a CAMIT grant from the council for the art at MIT in 2018 and was an artist in residence at MANA Contemporary’s High Concept Labs in Chicago from Feb. 2019 to Dec. 2020. He is currently working in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and as staff scientist – visiting artist at the University of Chicago (Jaeger Lab).

Water is a partner program of the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial. This exhibition is a collaboration between 6018North, Tricia Van Eck, the Villa Albertine, and Jennifer Buyck. Water is ongoing research in sustainable strategies for a 2024 exhibition as a part of Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art investigating and elevating Chicago’s rich visual art and design histories and creative communities.