EMOTIVE INTERFACE. The Films of Metahaven
![Metahaven, The Sprawl: Propaganda about Propaganda [La diseminación: propaganda sobre propaganda], 2015, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/interfaz_emotiva_0.jpeg.webp)
Metahaven, The Sprawl: Propaganda about Propaganda [La diseminación: propaganda sobre propaganda], 2015, película
The Museo Reina Sofía and the Márgenes International Film Festival in Madrid, here in its fifteenth edition, present this series devoted to the artist collective Metahaven. The programme is framed inside the working strand both institutions started in 2024, focusing on an exploration of contemporary audiovisual narratives, a hybridisation of languages and the moving image as a tool for practising critical gazes on the present. Emotive Interface. The Films of Metahaven comprises two sessions of screenings and a masterclass delivered by the collective, centring on the relationship between the internet, technology, time and the moving image. All sessions will be presented by the artists.
The work of Metahaven — Dutch artist duo Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden — encompasses graphic art, video, installations, writing and design around urgent issues related to governance, identity, power and transparency in the digital age. Thus, their practice stands at the crossroads of art, film and critical thought, as they employ visual language as a tool to explore the tensions between technology, politics and perception, their practice combining the rigour of the visual essay and a strong poetic component, where graphic design, digital animation and documentary material fuse into dense, emotionally ambiguous compositions that speak of post-digital romanticism through an allegorical formulation. The spotlight of this series shines brightly on some of Metahaven’s recent works, for instance The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) (2024), in which they examine language, poetry and digital time, and on The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) (2015), an essay which explores how the internet and social media have radically altered the relationship between truth, power and perception. Finally, the duo’s masterclass is set forth here as a survey of the main themes explored by both artists.
Collaboration
Embassy of the Netherlands in Spain
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and the Márgenes International Film Festival
Accessible activity
This activity has two spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility
Agenda
jueves 27 nov 2025 a las 19:00
Session 1. Metahaven. Home, The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) and Information Skies
— With a presentation by Metahaven
Metahaven. Home
Netherlands, 2014, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in English, 6' 12”
Metahaven. The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda)
Netherlands, 2015, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in English, Russian and Arab, with English subtitles, 70'
Metahaven. Information Skies
Netherlands, 2016, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in Hungarian, with English and Korean subtitles, 24'
This session gets under way with Home, one of the music videos the collective has made with Holly Herndon, a composer and soloist who explores the intersections between electronic music, AI and the human voice.
The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) is an audiovisual essay which explores the transformation of information and propaganda in the digital age. The film, straddling documentary, the visual arts and critical theory, analyses how propaganda is a decentralised and viral flow that infiltrates digital spaces, spreading via memes, videos, algorithms and shared emotions. Beginning at the origins of the Ukraine conflict, archive images, digital animations, internet interfaces and abstract landscapes create a hypnotic atmosphere that reproduces the net browsing experience and prompts the spectator to experience the confusion and ambiguity particular to the digital environment.
Information Skies continues the exploration of digital-age truth, perception and subjectivity, setting out a fragmented narrative in which a voice-over interweaves with images of natural landscapes, visual environments and digitised human faces, a composite that Metahaven uses to consider how we live in an “informational reality”, where emotions, beliefs and algorithms are all muddled.
viernes 28 nov 2025 a las 19:00
Session 2. Metahaven. Interference, Chaos Theory and The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)
— With a presentation by Metahaven
Metahaven. Interference
Netherlands, 2015, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in English, 4'
Metahaven. Chaos Theory
Netherlands, 2021–2024, digital archive, colour, sound, Hungarian, French, Basque and English, with English subtitles, 25’
Metahaven. The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)
Netherlands, 2024, digital archive, colour, sound, Dutch, English, and French, with English subtitles, 32'
This session starts with Interference, the second music video the collective made with composer and soloist Holly Herndon, exploring the intersections between electronic music, AI and the human voice.
Chaos Theory and The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) are both poetic and abstract allegories on the emotional states of technology. In Chaos Theory, the digressions of two characters, X and Y/Z, in the contemporary world lead to reflections on the emotional and cognitive frailty of the individual opposite the information overload and social and environmental crises characterising the present. Through a meditative atmosphere, digital landscapes, moving skies and blurred faces, the human experience seems to be measured by screens and data, but is still traversed by sensibility and the desire for connection.
The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) continues this existential introspection by examining how poetic language resists the instrumental logic of digital information. Based on a book of poetry by writer Eugene Ostashevsky (Leningrad, 1968), the video follows the protagonist, ONE, a descendent of refuse collector poets who discovers “the sonnets of feeling”, poems in which words, expressions, phrases and poetic conventions are uprooted and defamiliarized to transmit the experience of living on an alienating earth with a strange language. Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) explores feeling and belonging in a saturated media landscape.
sábado 29 nov 2025 a las 12:00
Session 3. Emotive Interface: A Masterclass by Metahaven and the screening of Capture
Metahaven. Capture
Netherlands, 2022, digital archive, colour, sound, Italian and French, with English subtitles, 40’
The final session begins with Capture, a fictional documentary on the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and on the limits between science, technology and forms of speculative knowledge, such as those found in the natural world.
The film screening is followed by a masterclass delivered by Metahaven on their artistic practice as a form of visual and political thought. Taking fragments of their works — The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda), Information Skies, Chaos Theory, The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) — they explore how images, data and emotions configure contemporary reality, and share their main frames of reference, which range from critical theory and contemporary poetry to graphic design, the essay film and digital culture. The session also shines a light on their working method, based on the combination of theoretical research, aesthetic experimentation and fragmentary narratives, to show past and future works.
jueves 08 ene 2026 a las 19:00
Session 3 (Second screening). Emotive Interface: A Masterclass by Metahaven and the screening of Capture
Metahaven. Capture
Netherlands, 2022, digital archive, colour, sound, Italian and French, with English subtitles, 40’
viernes 09 ene 2026 a las 19:00
Session 2 (Second screening). Metahaven. Interference, Chaos Theory and The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)
Metahaven. Interference
Netherlands, 2015, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in English, 4'
Metahaven. Chaos Theory
Netherlands, 2021–2024, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in Russian with English subtitles, 25’
Metahaven. The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)
Netherlands, 2024, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in English with English subtitles, 32'
viernes 10 ene 2025 a las 19:00
Session 1. (Second screening). Metahaven. Home, The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) and Information Skies
Metahaven. Home
Netherlands, 2014, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in English, 6' 12”
Metahaven. The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda)
Netherlands, 2015, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in English, Russian and Arab, with English subtitles, 70'
Metahaven. Information Skies
Netherlands, 2016, digital archive, colour, sound, original version in Hungarian, with English and Korean subtitles, 24'
Participants
Metahaven
is an Amsterdam-based artistic collective which was founded in 2007 by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden. Their work forms an approach to sensorial and intellectual experiences, whereby information becomes visual matter and viewers become immersed in a hypnotic flow of images, sounds and text. Their aesthetic, frequently characterised by chromatic saturation, floating typographies and digital textures, doesn’t seek to illustrate concepts, but rather to spark a reflection on the beauty and violence inherent in contemporary communication. The screen transforms in their work into a critical and meditative space, where the politics of information becomes an aesthetic experience. Metahaven have exhibited their work at MoMA PS1, ICA in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Guggenheim Bilbao and Matadero Madrid, among others, while their films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. Furthermore, they have produced designs for Wikileaks and Sealand, a sovereign State founded on an offshore platform in the North Sea.
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.