The Mira Son digital art festival will open its 9th edition on November 5th with a larger, broader and more diverse program than in previous years. We enter an unknown and surprising field where disciplines coexist in a space designed for experimentation and innovation of the latest generation.

Robert Lippok & Lucas Gutierrez, “Non-face” (frame) (image via berlinerfestspiele.de)

For this festival, the concepts of 360º video art, immersive full-dome project, accelerated electronic music or light installation take on a holistic meaning that mixes and merges all the techniques to generate a new result, alien to the daily understanding of art and not suitable for classicists. The agenda is full of performances, conferences, screenings and lots of music.

Among the most outstanding contents, it is mandatory to talk about the cycle of screening in the MIRA Dome, a structure installed in the patio of the Fàbrica de Creació designed for 360º videos in which five selected pieces will on show. The staging is designed to offer an immersive experience that collapses the senses. For this reason, image and sound go hand in hand in these projects, many of them created thanks to the collaboration of visual artists with sound artists.

"Elektra" is a work that reflects on the passage of time and the relationship between past and present, with a piece produced by the Metahaven design studio and music by Kara-Lis Coverdale. On the other hand, the visual creator Lucas Gutiérrez has allied himself with the sound artist Robert Lippok for his work “Non-face”, where a sensory game between the credible and the hypothetical in our tangible reality is considered. A similar collaboration is that of "Realness", an artwork that invites to experiment with new ways of life other than human life, the result of the work of the digital artist Sandrine Deumier and the composer Myriam Bleau. Jordi Massó dares with a futuristic proposal, "Smartzombies", where our daily life is almost supplanted by technological gadgets. Finally, “Xpansion” stands out, a piece inspired by the constant expansion of the universe and some of the lastest astronomical concepts such as dark energy, created by the V.P.M. study, one of the winners of the Open Call of MIRA x Hangar.

Gabriela Prochazka, “Galaxy of Stars (Kiss Me)” (image via gabrielaprochazka.com)

We must also highlight the space dedicated to audiovisual installations, where digital art becomes the protagonist. Among the foreign guests is Audint (collective founded in 2008, with European artists) with his multisensory work "Obsidisorium" and Rick Farin (USA) with "Breach Act". In the national production are the students of Elisava with “Alice”, and the installation “Dualismo” of the artist Carlos Sáez, one of the greatest representatives of Spanish digital art who has already exhibited at the MoMA and the Whitney Museum in New York.

The festival promises innovation, lasers, DJs, electronic music, technological art, criticism of the social state, audiovisual symbiosis, and endless experiences where there is also space for reflection and exploration on the future of contemporary creation.

The work of Cedric Le Corf (Bühl, Germany, 1985) is situated in a territory of friction, where the archaic impulse of the sacred coexists with a critical sensibility characteristic of contemporary times. His practice is grounded in an anthropological understanding of the origin of art as a foundational gesture: the trace, the mark, the need to inscribe life in the face of the awareness of death.

The artist establishes a complex dialogue with the Spanish Baroque tradition, not through stylistic mimicry, but through the emotional and material intensity that permeates that aesthetic. The theatricality of light, the embodiment of tragedy, and the hybridity of the spiritual and the carnal are translated in his work into a formal exploration, where underlying geometry and embedded matter generate perceptual tension.

In Le Corf’s practice, the threshold between abstraction and figuration is not an opposition but a site of displacement. Spatial construction and color function as emotional tools that destabilize the familiar. An open methodology permeates this process, in which planning coexists with a deliberate loss of control. This allows the work to emerge as a space of silence, withdrawal, and return, where the artist confronts his own interiority.

The Fall. 2025. Oil on canvas.195 × 150 cm.

In your work, a tension can be perceived between devotion and dissidence. How do you negotiate the boundary between the sacred and the profane?

In my work, I feel the need to return to rock art, to the images I carry with me. From the moment prehistoric humans became aware of death, they felt the need to leave a trace—marking a red hand on the cave wall using a stencil, a symbol of vital blood. Paleolithic man, a hunter-gatherer, experienced a mystical feeling in the presence of the animal—a form of spiritual magic and rituals linked to creation. In this way, the cave becomes sacred through the abstract representation of death and life, procreation, the Venus figures… Thus, art is born. In my interpretation, art is sacred by essence, because it reveals humankind as a creator.

Between Dog and Wolf II. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.

Traces of the Spanish Baroque tradition can be seen in your work. What do you find in it that remains contemporary today?

Yes, elements of the Spanish Baroque tradition are present in my work. In the history of art, for example, I think of Arab-Andalusian mosaics, in which I find a geometry of forms that feels profoundly contemporary. In Spanish Baroque painting and sculpture, one recurring theme is tragedy: death and the sacred are intensely embodied, whether in religious or profane subjects, in artists such as Zurbarán, Ribera, El Greco, and also Velázquez. I am thinking, for example, of the remarkable equestrian painting of Isabel of France, with its geometry and nuanced portrait that illuminates the painting.

When I think about sculpture, the marvelous polychrome sculptures of Alonso Cano, Juan de Juni, or Pedro de Mena come to mind—works in which green eyes are inlaid, along with ivory teeth, horn fingernails, and eyelashes made of hair. All of this has undoubtedly influenced my sculptural practice, both in its morphological and equestrian dimensions. Personally, in my work I inlay porcelain elements into carved or painted wood.

Between Dog and Wolf I. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.

What interests you about that threshold between the recognizable and the abstract?

For me, any representation in painting or sculpture is abstract. What imposes itself is the architectural construction of space, its secret geometry, and the emotion produced by color. It is, in a way, a displacement of the real in order to reach that sensation.

The Anatomical Angel. 2013. Ash wood and porcelain. 90 × 15 × 160 cm.

Your work seems to move between silence, abandonment, and return. What draws you toward these intermediate spaces?

I believe it is by renouncing the imitation of external truth, by refusing to copy it, that I reach truth—whether in painting or in sculpture. It is as if I were looking at myself within my own subject in order to better discover my secret, perhaps.

Justa. 2019. Polychrome oak wood. 240 × 190 × 140 cm.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

It is true that, on occasions, I completely forget the main idea behind my painting and sculpture. Although I begin a work with very clear ideas—preliminary drawings and sketches, preparatory engravings, and a well-defined intention—I realize that, sometimes, that initial idea gets lost. It is not an accident. In some cases, it has to do with technical difficulties, but nowadays I also accept starting from a very specific idea and, when faced with sculpture, wood, or ceramics, having to work in a different way. I accept that.