Metadata — O Mundo Invisível
Immersive five-screen installation that transforms real São Paulo data into three-dimensional fluids, making the city appear as a habitable perceptual system.
- Number
- 010
- Editorial status
- Felipe-authored work
- Reading regime
- system / body / mechanism
- Status
- REALIZED
- Year
- 2023
- Location
- Centro Cultural FIESP, São Paulo
- Context
- instalação-sistema / dados urbanos
- Type
- INSTALACAO
- Technique / medium
- dados em tempo real + fluidos 3D + projeção
- Duration
- seis meses em cartaz
- System
- Immersive five-screen room with particle systems and 3D fluids
- Data
- Real-time urban data captured from online sources and translated into visual behavior
- Operation
- External vectors disturb the fluids, translating the city's pulse into visual behavior
- Time
- The system crosses real-time data with historical marks and retroactive data
- Question
- How can São Paulo be X-rayed?
Public connections that situate this work inside the archive before the narrative text.
In 2023, I conceived METADATA to reveal the invisible layers that organize São Paulo. Since Cachoeira in 2012, I’ve been interested in making visible what operates below perception — there it was the wind currents of downtown, here it’s the data flows that structure the city. I designed an immersive five-screen room where particle systems simulate three-dimensional fluids disturbed by external vectors. These vectors aren’t arbitrary — they’re real urban data captured from online sources and translated into visual behavior. The city appears as an organism in continuous flow.
Antonio Curti signed the curation and proposed a question that guided all development: how do you X-ray São Paulo? How do you reveal not just the pulse in real time, but also the historical marks — events, cultural transformations, retroactive data that shaped the present? We conceived a system that crosses these two temporal dimensions, creating a membrane between memory and event. The work doesn’t illustrate data, it materializes it. Each particle responds to what’s happening now and what has already happened. The visitor doesn’t observe a metrics panel — they inhabit the invisible dynamic that sustains the metropolis.
The installation was on display for six months at Centro Cultural FIESP, on Paulista Avenue, with free admission and audio guide. It was the first time I signed under AYA’s name — a decision I only recognized in 2026 as erasure of individual authorship. Today, I claim METADATA as my work, with Antonio’s curation and production by the AYA team. It’s not a correction, it’s belated recognition of what was always true.
In the archive, METADATA should be read less as a generic exhibition and more as a perception mechanism: a room where urban data, real time, and historical memory continuously disturb the image.
