SEASON IV · MMXXVI · SIX ALGORITHMS IN RESIDENCE
HEXA DOME
A pavilion where nothing is hung and everything is happening. Six commissioned works of pure computation run live in six rooms — drawing, orbiting, dithering and growing in front of you. Every visit is a unique state. Reseed any work and it begins again, differently, forever.
00 · THE PAVILION
Six rooms, six scores,
no finished pictures.
The Hexadome stands on the harbour mole at Zollhafen — a hexagonal timber shell, twenty-four metres across, raised by Studio Meridian Loop for the Aldersgate Foundation in 2023. Its six wedge-shaped rooms each hold a single commission: not a print, not a video, but an algorithm — executed live, in real time, on the wall in front of you.
Nothing here is played back. Each work begins from a seed drawn the moment you arrive, and unfolds by its own rules: particles descend a wind that never repeats, arcs reroute a maze that cannot break, five bodies sing Newton in gold. Press RESEED beneath any label and the work surrenders its state and begins again — a courtesy no painting has ever extended.
- ARCHITECT
- Studio Meridian Loop, Basel
- STRUCTURE
- Hexagonal timber shell · 24 m span · 6 rooms
- COMMISSION
- Aldersgate Foundation, Season IV
- CURATOR
- Dr Imke Halloran
- WORKS
- Six · all live computation · no recordings
- REPEATS
- None. Statistically, ever.
Anneli Ruusk
Ninety Thousand Rivers, 2026
algorithm, canvas · dimensions variable
curl-noise flow field · 3,000 particles
Ruusk seeds three thousand particles into a wind computed as the curl of a noise field — a wind with no sources and no sinks, only eddies. Each particle drags a hair of ink behind it; the drawing thickens like sediment and is never finished, only left. She calls the piece a river atlas of a country that does not exist.
Kofi Adjei-Mensah
Maze Protocol (Two Colours), 2025
algorithm, canvas · dimensions variable
truchet tiling · quarter-turn rotations
Every tile carries two quarter-circle arcs. Because the arcs meet the tile edges at their midpoints, any rotation preserves continuity: the maze cannot break, only reroute. Adjei-Mensah lets cascades of quarter-turns sweep the grid like weather fronts — ultramarine against vermilion — and asks you to find the path that was there a second ago.
Yūto Kanemaru
Gravity Chorus, 2026
algorithm, canvas · dimensions variable
n-body integration · gold on carbon
Five bodies of unequal mass fall toward one another forever, held in the room by the gentlest of springs. Their trails — gold, additive, slowly forgetting — braid figures no astronomer has catalogued. Kanemaru dims the room so your eye adapts; after a minute, he says, you stop watching planets and start hearing voices.
Petra Lindqvist-Ohm
Signal, Sea, Signal, 2024
algorithm, canvas · dimensions variable
ordered dither · Bayer 8×8 · 1-bit
Three interfering waves and one drifting ripple are all this picture knows — yet it must speak them one bit at a time, through the fixed grammar of an 8×8 Bayer threshold matrix. Lindqvist-Ohm calls the constraint devotional: “A sea described in yes and no. One bit is enough, if the bit keeps moving.”
Marisol Etxeberria
Cell Garden (Bloom Study VII), 2026
algorithm, canvas · dimensions variable
voronoi partition · watercolor washes
A handful of seeds divide the plane between them; every few seconds one cell splits, and the garden renegotiates every border at once. Etxeberria floods each territory with two translucent washes of pigment — rose, ochre, sage, cerulean — so the mathematics pools and blooms like wet paper. Old cells wilt; the garden never fills.
Tomás Oyelaran
Reef Engine, 2025
algorithm, canvas · dimensions variable
space-colonization growth · ~20 s cycle
Hundreds of invisible nutrient points hang in the water. From the seabed, a trunk sends branches toward whichever nutrients it can sense; each new segment consumes what it reaches, starving its rivals. In about twenty seconds the reef completes itself and rests — polyps lit, plankton drifting — until you reseed the water and a different reef becomes inevitable.
07 · PROGRAMME, SEASON IV
The pavilion speaks
four times this season.
- 21 MAR
Seeded — A Conversation on Chance
Dr Imke Halloran and Anneli Ruusk on why the same code never draws the same river. Room I, 18:00.
- 09 MAY
One Bit Is Enough
Petra Lindqvist-Ohm lectures on ordered dithering as a devotional practice. Room IV, 19:00.
- 14 JUN
Reseed Night
At sunset, all six works are reseeded simultaneously. What existed that afternoon will never exist again. Whole pavilion, 21:14.
- 20 SEP
Growth Without Blueprint
Tomás Oyelaran leads a workshop on space-colonization algorithms; participants grow and keep one reef. Room VI, 14:00.
08 · VISIT
The works run
whether you come or not.
But they run for someone only when you are standing there. Admission is free. Photography is welcome and futile — the picture will have moved.
- ADDRESS
- Hexadome Pavilion, Mole 3, Zollhafen Basel
- SEASON
- 14 March — 02 November 2026
- HOURS
- Thu–Sun · 11:00–19:00 · dark room till 22:00 Fri
- ADMISSION
- Free · reseeding encouraged · no two visits alike