Anima Mundi. A Visionary Impulse / Dotdotdot

A generative installation that listens to the living world and translates it into sound, light and image

Anima Mundi is a sound and visual installation that immerses visitors to the Organ Hall of the Istituto dei Ciechi di Milano in a sensory microcosm in constant evolution — that of the Anima Mundi, the Renaissance philosophical principle of nature as a single organism and unifying force.

Presented at the Milan Design Week 2026 it was the Dotdotdot’s interpretation of Geely’s vision of Technological Renaissance — a concept the installation extends and deepens: from placing people at the centre of design to an invitation to consider the whole cosmogony. People, nature, living and non-living beings become co-authors of a shared space, variables of the same generative system.

A living system in real time

The experience is constructed in real time from environmental data — the light of that day, the humidity of that moment, the atmospheric pressure — and from the movement of people through the space.

Sound design

At its core is sound design: a musical score composed by musicians but interpreted by a parametric algorithm across different registers and timbres, resonating through the hundreds of pipes of the hall’s nineteenth-century organ. Alongside it, images unfold across five large semi-transparent veils, arranged like Renaissance-inspired theatrical wings, each an allegory of a natural environment, in continuous transformation.

Where data becomes experience

What emerges is a generative and participatory work in which environment and artwork become indistinct, and visitors the living variables of a system in perpetual flux. Technology does not substitute the specificity of the place but it listens to it, reads it, and translates it.

In this, the organ stands as the perfect symbol of the work as a whole: an ancient, analogue instrument, born to contain the multiplicity of the world’s voices, which does so once again through a contemporary algorithm.

A living composition

Anima Mundi is thus a dialogue across centuries and languages – human and non-human, digital and acoustic – that generates a narrative that is site-specific, always different and always unique: a Technological Renaissance in which distinct voices together tell a story of harmony.