Now in its ninth edition, INTERVALS has established itself as a key player on the global media art circuit. Since 2017, the festival has reimagined Nizhny Novgorod as an open-air gallery, weaving large-scale audiovisual works into its architectural fabric and public spaces.

INTERVALS began as a one-off party in the underground club Sklad in Nizhny Novgorod, driven by a shared interest of its organisers in VJ culture and audiovisual experimentation. There were no plans to continue it, but Ksusha Chekhovskaya, inspired by her experience with Signal Festival and transmediale, proposed scaling it into a city-wide format. Together with dreamlaser, she initiated what would become one of the first projects of its kind in the region.

Assembled in just three months in 2017, the first edition took place in the semi-abandoned industrial site of Nizhpoliograf. It combined a media exhibition, educational events, and a music programme with visual staging - entirely self-funded and organised from the ground up. By 2019, the festival had expanded to three days and twelve locations across the city, introducing international artists and developing a strong production and curatorial approach. From the outset, the focus was on building a professional ecosystem - bringing artists to Nizhny Novgorod and creating the conditions for exchange. Much of the early development was a process of learning by doing, with organisational decisions made on the hoof - from coordinating events across numerous urban sites to explaining to local church representatives that an installation planned near the city’s main cathedral belonged to the realm of art rather than a disco.

As it has grown, INTERVALS has formalised into a multi-track festival. Alongside the city-wide exhibition of media installations, two key strands have emerged: Intervals Music, dedicated to AV performances, and Intervals Education, offering talks and workshops for artists and multimedia practitioners. According to Chekhovskaya “its experimental music programme, in particular, has reached a high level, compelling in its own right rather than serving merely as an extension of the multimedia programme.” By the mid 2020s, the festival scaled significantly, spanning nineteen locations and attracting over 450,000 visitors in 2025. Today, despite reaching maturity INTERVAL remains defined by its fluidity. As Chekhovskaya notes, the festival engages closely with the local scene and treats the city itself as a field of exploration. Rather than returning to fixed venues, it continuously reshapes its map, activating new sites from industrial structures to lesser-known architectural spaces.

In the words of Anna Gagarina, the festival’s curator each edition of the festival redefines itself through the selection of works, its overarching theme, and a visual language. This curent edition takes a more interdisciplinary turn, incorporating a broader range of analogue media. Launching its ninth edition amid a climate of global instability and conflict, the organisers have assembled a strong line-up of artists, including Quayola (Italy), Josep Poblet (Spain), Saeed Gebaan (Saudi Arabia), mammasONica (Italy), SKGPLUS (China), Dominic Kießling (Germany), Filip Roca (Spain), as well as PANTERRA, Sasha Kojjio, OUROBOROS, dreamlaser, re4ee, KBDUKE, Anton Morokov, and Denis Astakhov. It is notable that the INTERVALS does not directly follow the current wave of intense attention around AI often marked as much by anxiety as by fascination. Instead, many works in this edition explore a more understated condition of coexistence with technology, being seen and processed by it, though not framed in the overtly critical, surveillance-driven terms common in much contemporary practice. Rather, they trace a more nuanced reflection on how our sense of humanity is gradually being redefined in relation to machines and, in turn, what it means to be a living being at all. It also draws attention to the errors made by both machines and humans, positioning them not as failures but as generative forces, drivers of meaning, insight, and uniqness.

Rome-born, London-based Quayola is one of the most recognised figures in media art today. He uses machine vision to revisit key moments in art history, exploring the threshold between reality and fiction, the natural and the artificial, the historical and the contemporary. Central to his work is an interest in the continuity of artistic traditions and in the gesture of making itself, particularly within landscape painting and plein air practice. As he notes, “I have always been interested in works where not only the result is visible, but the process of creation itself - the gesture of the artist. In my case, that gesture is performed by a machine.”

In ‘Pointillisme: Provence’, Quayola swapped the plein air toolkit for LiDAR laser. He scanned the landscape to turn it into data, mapping its form and depth into dense three-dimensional models. The process was inherently unstable: as the laser struggled to capture nature’s complexity, glitches and distortions entered the scan, adding uniqueness to each image. These datasets were then processed through custom algorithms, translating spatial information back into two-dimensional moving images. For Quayola, working with data rather than conventional photographic or video media is fundamental. As he suggests, it is data not devices that increasingly shapes our ways of seeing; without engaging this layer, it is difficult to grasp how technology reshapes both perception and reality itself.

In his individual practice, Sasha Kojjio explores the intersections of language, technology, and human perception. For Kojjio, code operates as a language, and the algorithm as a structured statement—a set of rules governing the behaviour of elements, whether pixels on a screen, kinetic devices, or interactive systems. These systems inevitably inherit the constraints and biases of their underlying language, which he actively probes and reconfigures. By introducing mathematical functions inspired by natural processes, Kojjio creates a sense of pseudo-unpredictability, evoking the behaviour of living organisms while remaining grounded in the logic of code. His audiovisual installation ‘semantic failure’ seems to be woven from dense streams of text and proliferating logical connections. Systems of sorting and correlation are pushed to their limits: as data accumulates, familiar structures of meaning begin to collapse, slipping into a hypnotic state of visual excess. As our actions are increasingly translated into data, perception itself risks being ceded to machines. Yet, for Kojjio, genuine emotion and complex meaning remain irreducible to computation, emerging instead through process—through flashes of intuition and productive error. At INTERVALS, the artist presents a reworked version of the project. Here, the focus shifts more directly to the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, posing a central question: how much decision-making can be delegated to algorithms without eroding our own sense of agency and humanity.

A more traditional art audience may recognise ‘CHRONOMORPH’ by PANTERRA, presented at Cosmoscow Contemporary Art Fair 2025 in collaboration with the PERFORMA(R). The work draws on Richard Brautigan’s cult poem ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, which imagines the future as a utopian symbiosis of nature and technology: “a cybernetic meadow / where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony.”

This vision resonates with PANTERRA’s broader direction - cyberhumanism. Formed by Kira Borisova, Vica Stroy, and Pavel Nedostoev, the collective brings together digital environments, mythological thinking, and ritual structures to propose new modes of interaction between human and non-human agents.

Despite the visual intensity and moments of rupture that characterise their work, technology does not appear as a threat. Instead, it extends human experience, reflecting the fragmented and unstable condition of the present. This becomes especially tangible in their material vocabulary. ‘CHRONOMORPH’ exists as a charactermade of a mass of stage trusses, signature scrolling LED texts, various lighting fixtures, kilometres of wiring - what is usually concealed - are pushed to the foreground, even to excess. In revealing this “underside,” PANTERRA makes their creatures feel more human, or perhaps more legible to us. The wires begin to resemble veins: instead of blood, data flows through them, binding these hybrid bodies into something strangely intimate and recognisable.

Through his kinetic installation ‘Waveworm’, Dominic Kießling sets the stage for the wind to perform and define the work. Using little more than a ventilator and a vast expanse of fluid fabric, the piece assigns agency to an elemental force, allowing the environment itself to shape the visual outcome. A more enigmatic presence within the programme is a kinetic sculpture by Catalan artist Josep Poblet, developed on site in collaboration with a local team of engineers. Due to logistical constraints, the work is being produced outside the artist’s studio and has not been teased on socials yet. One of the festival’s defining formats is architectural mapping, that this year will be projected at the on the façade of the Mayak Academy.

In ‘la carte sans le territoire’, re4ee presents a kind of “thinking machine” that attempts to grasp what lies within the sensory world. The Barcelona-based duo ‘Desilence’ extracts the city’s “soul” in their new work SENSUM. Drawing on their signature visual language rooted in abstract painting, they transform data, temperature, noise, density, into visual material, rendering the urban environment as a digital organism that forms, tenses, and transforms through its friction with numerical inputs. Chinese studio SKGPLUS brings ‘Up, Down, Left, Right’, a reflection on how the future is constructed in the context of evolving technologies, while Italias mammasONica presents ‘3RROR’, using controlled glitches and instability to probe new modes of perception.

This trajectory culminates in Filip Roca’s ‘ASCENT’, presented on the Chkalov Staircase - a work that distils the festival’s conceptual thread, exploring the moment when a sign becomes a symbol, shifting the experience from visualisation towards sensation.

As Ivan Nefedkin, founder and creative director of radugadesign and Generative Gallery, notes, the media art field remains “relatively small and closely connected,” with artists meeting across festivals and geographies. In this context, the language of digital and media art has yet to crystallise into distinct local schools, remaining fundamentally global. While contexts differ, from large-scale, high-budget productions in China to more intimate, site-specific formats across Europe, Russian festivals such as the NUR Festival and INTERVALS occupy a position in-between, combining complex installations, multiple urban sites, and hybrid programmes with a strong conceptual framework.