# Sonar+D Spotlights Robotic Art and AI Spirituality > Source: > Published: 2026-06-03 10:23:02.291790+00:00 # Sonar+D Spotlights Robotic Art and AI Spirituality Per designboom, **Sonar+D 2026** transformed Barcelona's **Llotja de Mar** into a program of installations and talks that foreground robotic performance, embodied AI personas, and ritualized interactions. Reported highlights include **Astral Twin** by **Volvox Labs**, a robotic arm that 'paints the air'; **From0** by Belgian studio **Superbe**, which interrogates language through sound and motion; and **A Voice from the Future** by **Qs Ventures 2147**, an abandoned phone booth reclaimed by vegetation that hosts an AI persona, according to designboom. The festival also ran a Digital Occultism strand that includes Lola Liñán Fernández's digital rosary booth and Liz Melchor's Fortune Robot, and designboom moderated a conversation with artist **Yehwan Song**, per the same report. Coverage frames the program as prioritizing playful, human-centric encounters over corporate-driven tech. ### What happened Per designboom, **Sonar+D 2026** repurposed Barcelona's **Llotja de Mar** into an exhibition and talk program that foregrounds robotic art, embodied AI personas, and ritualized interactions. Reported installations include **Astral Twin** by **Volvox Labs**, described by designboom as a monumental robotic arm that produces algorithmic brushstrokes in the neoclassical hall. Designboom also highlights **From0** by **Superbe**, **A Voice from the Future** by **Qs Ventures 2147**, and a Digital Occultism strand featuring works by Lola Liñán Fernández and Liz Melchor. Designboom organised a live conversation with artist **Yehwan Song** and its managing editor Claire Brodka, per the same coverage. Sonar's official site and ancillary reporting list the Expo+D program as extending throughout the venue and connecting talks, performances, and workshops. ### Editorial analysis - technical context Artists shown at the festival are using combinations of robotics, real-time generative systems, and AI-driven personas to stage encounters where agency is distributed between machine, architecture, and visitor. Industry-pattern observations: contemporary new-media festivals increasingly pair modular robotics and sensor-driven interactivity with generative audio/visual pipelines to create embodied experiences rather than screens-only presentations. For practitioners, these formats emphasise integration work-synchronising motion control, sensory inputs, and live data streams-rather than purely model-centric engineering. ### Context and significance Per Ars Electronica's STARTS materials, European arts-technology initiatives have produced sustained platforms for collaborations among artists, researchers, and engineers, framing creative practice as part of innovation ecosystems. Editorial analysis: For creative technologists, Sonar+D functions as a rapid prototyping and public-testing ground where speculative narratives about AI-from spiritualised interfaces to 'digital occultism'-are made tangible. These projects matter less as product launches and more as probes that surface social expectations, failure modes, and interaction patterns that later inform museum exhibits, commercial AR/VR experiences, and experimental HCI research. ### What to watch Observers should track whether the software and control toolchains used in these works are published or open-sourced, which venues and museums pick up touring shows, and how audience-facing design patterns (confessional booths, embodied phone-bot interactions) reappear in cultural or commercial settings. Industry context: monitoring artifact reuse and technical disclosures provides the clearest signal of how festival-scale experimentation influences tooling and practice beyond the festival circuit. ## Scoring Rationale Culturally significant for creative technologists and HCI practitioners, but limited direct technical novelty for mainstream ML/DS workflows. The story signals interaction patterns and integration challenges rather than new models or infrastructure. Practice interview problems based on real data 1,500+ SQL & Python problems across 15 industry datasets — the exact type of data you work with. [Try 250 free problems](/problems)